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Revealed Jan 10, 2025 • 3 minute learn
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico’s new pure assets secretary has shelved an investigation into allegations of unlawful development in a protected space on the island’s southwest coast, sparking an outcry.
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The executive order printed late Thursday comes after Gov. Jenniffer Gonzalez, who was sworn in final week, known as the investigation that started underneath the earlier administration “political persecution.”
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The investigation focused alleged violators, together with Gonzalez’s in-laws, who’re accused of illegally chopping mangroves and increasing and transforming a platform or dock at their residence at La Parguera, which was designated a pure reserve in 1979 and is understood for its bioluminescent bay.
Gonzalez and her in-laws — Jose Vargas and Irma Llavona — have denied the accusations.
On Thursday, Gonzalez named Waldemar Quiles as Puerto Rico’s new pure assets secretary. The brand new governor stated that the investigation was a part of a “political course of” that occurred final 12 months earlier than her occasion’s primaries, during which she beat former Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, who was searching for a second time period. Pierluisi has beforehand denied that it was an alleged political assault.
Quiles’s first administrative order was to shelve the investigation and, amongst different issues, legalize the presence of properties in La Parguera through a payment that house owners should pay each 5 years.
“That’s unlawful,” stated Pedro Saade, a Puerto Rican legal professional and skilled in environmental legislation, who famous that there’s a required process to grant concessions on public area property.
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“How are you, as your first act, going to exempt from scratch and in a broad means, a complete line of unlawful makes use of of public area property?” Saade stated of the secretary’s transfer.
In a telephone interview, he stated that he apprehensive that the order would set a precedent and roll again protections for different areas in Puerto Rico because it struggles with a rising variety of unlawful developments.
On Friday, the president of the Sierra Membership’s Puerto Rico chapter, Hernaliz Vazquez known as on officers to rescind Quiles’s nomination as pure assets secretary and criticized his order.
“This motion is a direct affront towards environmental safety and justice,” Vazquez stated. “It’s unacceptable that the (pure assets) secretary … whose mission ought to be to safeguard our pure assets, makes use of his place to learn the governor’s in-laws.”
Vazquez added: “Retroactively legalizing constructions which have negatively impacted a protected nature reserve will not be solely irresponsible, it’s unlawful.”
The primary buildings had been in-built La Parguera across the Nineteen Sixties, with fishermen residing in ramshackle homes which have largely been changed by high-end properties that environmentalists say have to be eliminated.
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The investigation, which proposed a $25,000 penalty towards Gonzalez’s in-laws, was led by former pure assets secretary Anais Rodriguez. She informed WKAQ radio station final 12 months that the investigation towards Gonzalez’s in-laws ought to proceed underneath the brand new administration.
On Friday, Puerto Rico Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz wrote on Fb that the Senate will ask Quiles to elucidate his administrative order. He wrote that treatments to keep away from “selective prosecution” require “warning, transparency and firmness in order to keep away from falling into what may seem, be perceived or in impact be a selective profit or privilege.”
A spokesman for Puerto Rico’s Pure Assets Division didn’t return a message searching for remark.
In written statements offered to El Nuevo Dia newspaper on Friday, Quiles stated that his administrative order had been ready by the earlier administration and that it acknowledges the acquired rights of these with properties in La Parguera and establishes obligations with which they have to comply.
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