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In depth

REPSA and the 2015 La Pasión river crisis

Dossier
Social license and prior consultation23-licencia-social.md
Domain
Social license and prior consultationlicencia-social
Room
Law/ley
Audited
Audited

In Sayaxché, Petén (a mostly Q'eqchi' population), the palm oil producer REPSA (Grupo Olmeca) became associated with the mass fish kill on the La Pasión river from 6 June 2015 (~160 km of river, at least 23 species, 12,000 people directly affected); a criminal court suspended its operations on 17 September 2015 and the next day the complainant Rigoberto Lima Choc was murdered, while company workers briefly kidnapped 3 leaders. The case became the region's reference point for 'ecocide' and is the antecedent of social scrutiny of the palm chain (see dossier 20).

The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.

Figures

Fish kill on the La Pasión riverMongabay
~160 km, ≥23 species, 12,000 affectedJun 2015
Court suspension of REPSAMongabay
17 Sep 20152015

Sources

Organizations named in the answer

  • Grupo OlmecaParent group of REPSA (oil palm, Sayaxché).Company case

Directory of organizations

Related records

This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.