Once again, Santa Cruz is breathing smoke. On September 24, it was not possible to sing “Under the Purest Sky in America” with the usual emotion; once again, we had extremely bad air. You don’t need to be very clever to calculate that we are going to surpass the disastrous figure of 2019, when we mourned for more than 5 million hectares burned by forest fires.
– That the mayor of San Rafael, Jorge Vargas, burst into tears in the middle of an event for the anniversary is only a sign of the helplessness of so much mistreated soil, flora and fauna. The municipality has been declared a disaster for three months due to fires and for the entire year due to drought, but they have not seen an effective response from the national authorities.
-Currently, San Rafael is still on fire, one of the fires is in the San Rafael Municipal Protected Area, a biological corridor that connects the Chiquitano dry forest with the Pantanal. “Now that the Pantanal has burned, the animals are seeking refuge in this corridor, but if it continues to burn, where will they go?” Vargas asked, when we are approaching half a million hectares destroyed in his municipality.. We ask ourselves the same question.
