Stalled talks, COVID-19 weigh on incomplete Guaymas-El Oro pipeline

Sempra Energy's Mexican subsidiary IEnova’s incomplete Guaymas-El Oro gas pipeline across Sonora state remains snared by indigenous opposition, as ongoing talks recently gave way to silence amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“For now, it's a precaution because of the healthcare risks,” Mayra Salas Gordoa, a human rights lawyer, told BNamericas. “However, they were also in the process of carrying out the justice plan,” she said. 

That plan, announced on March 7 and first proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador AMLO, offers a pathway to sooth opposition from parts of the Yaqui indigenous community to the 331km pipeline being built by IEnova. 

The company halted construction of the pipeline in 2017. In a quarterly conference call on April 23, IEnova CEO Tania Ortiz said that while the company had been working closely with Mexico’s interior ministry and public utility CFE, negotiations had recently fallen off. 

“The Yaqui community has isolated itself to protect itself from the pandemic. So, for the last several weeks the talks have been disrupted,” she said. 

Of the eight Yaqui communities who would be directly impacted by the pipeline – the Pótam, Vícam, Bácum, Tórim, Ráhum, Huiribis, Belén and Cócorit – seven have endorsed its completion, but one Yaqui community remains adamantly opposed, the Bácum. 

AMLO ENCOURAGING RESOLUTION

However, while the impasse has simmered for over three years, boiling over into armed conflict between for-and-against factions in 2016 and 2017, earlier this year AMLO began laying the groundwork for resolution. 

In January, he fully backed the claims of the Otomí people in northern Puebla state, whose opposition had held up final construction of TC Energy’s 178km pipeline to transport gas from Tuxpan to Tula. 

"Even if we have to pay, the gas pipeline will not go through the sacred hills," AMLO said. 

Analysts saw that as an important sign that the president would begin weighing in on the issue of indigenous opposition to other pipeline projects, the largest of which to be held up is IEnova’s Guaymas-El Oro. 

Then, on March 7, the justice plan was announced, identifying “24 natural territories and points” across a 235km2 area of Yaqui territory that should be protected from the pipeline. 

Gordoa said that the opposition, while stemming principally from the Bácum community, had remained consistent since the dispute arose.  

“In this case, the members of this indigenous community think that this megaproject could directly affect their culture, their language, religion, rituals and their relationship with the land, including farming areas and medicinal plants,” Gordoa said. 

For now, the path toward resolution remains clouded by the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the recent announcement by Mexico’s energy ministry to strengthen its role in the approval of clean energy projects. “One must consider the present uncertainty,” she said, which could alter IEnova’s investment outlook. 

But the justice plan remains the most significant change since at least 2018.  

“I think we could see the possibility of an agreement, derived from the justice plan,” Gordoa said, noting that they had already identified ancestral lands and precisely which communities would be affected, and negotiations with communities had been active. 

“That’s a positive sign,” she said, but cautioning, “We still must see what happens with the Bácum.”