SATIIM and Forest Dept. at odds over park management

The government granted permission back in 2006 to U.S. Capital Energy to conduct seismic testing in the Sarstoon Temash National Park and the operations are well underway. But that decision has come under constant opposition from the Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management, SATIIM. SATIIM’s co-management agreement over the park expired in 2008 and for several months that N.G.O. operated without its renewal. In April there was a huge uproar when it became known that the agreement would not be renewed but SATIIM was subsequently authorized to continue managing the park. Its Executive Director Greg Ch’oc, however, says he is not happy about the negotiations with the Forest Department. While on another assignment, News Five’s Jose Sanchez spoke to Choc in Punta Gorda on Wednesday.

Greg Ch’oc, Executive Director, SATIIM
“The intent of government is not to have the kind of monitoring of the company’s activities that we expected the government would at least have us conduct.”

Jose Sanchez
“With the discussions for management, did they dictate to you or is there a sharing of responsibilities?”

Greg Ch’oc
“Last week we got a note from the Forest Department and in that note, it was basically telling us these are the conditions that will define the interim agreement. And it basically lists about ten to fifteen demands as I call them. It has no resemblance of the kind of partnership that I expected the Forest Department was moving towards as they have always mentioned. It has no semblance of any co-management agreement where the parties would share responsibility. So it is an attempt on the part of Forest Department, I think, to frustrate SATIIM. They have taken the position and in my mind from the correspondence that the Forest Department, particularly, Mr. Sabido and I have had, it seems that he has become an agent of U.S. Capital Energy. Because when we submitted the document to him, he said well “I cannot approve this, I cannot approve that. I cannot approve this. This can be reduced. Is this needed?” I felt as though these statements were coming from U.S. Capital Energy and not someone assigned by the people of this country to represent the people of this country.”

“The park is like forty-two thousand acres, huge area, it’s wetlands and U.S. Capitol had five teams, each having nine men working out there. They are like at least fifteen to twenty miles apart from each other and to
access those points requires transportation, requires skiffs, requires different sets of teams. We are not engaging as on a daily basis as we would like to because of the financial constraints because Forest insists that we accept the eight thousand dollars that they are requesting U.S. Capital to pay us for the seventy days that we are supposed to be out there, which is ridiculous. We are trying to use additional resources elsewhere. There are like five phases that we have to go through and each stage requires a different number of people. Our proposal was to reflect the number of activities that U.S. Capital would be doing in the park and our people would be equivalent with that.”

Jose Sanchez
“What stage are they in right now?”

Greg Ch’oc
“Right now I understand that they are in fact laying out dynamite, drilling inside the park to place the geo-phones to do the testing.”

News Five intends to get a reaction from the Forest Department in tomorrow’s newscast.