From Alfonso Morales and Julie Miller:

I want to take a couple of minutes to let everyone know about some of the contacts that we have been making in Palenque over the last few weeks. The benefit of being in Palenque is that lots of people come through! (Now that I have finished the message, I apologize for the length, we have been busier than I had realized.)

We have been trying to interest reporters in the
story. So far we have contacted the following people.
I am including their email addresses (when we have
them) so that people can send them more information
when it is available. [Note: email addresses are left out of this posting]

Janet Schwartz based in San
Cristobal, writes for a number of Chiapas and Tabasco
papers and has contacts with a lot of U.S. papers

Naomi Austin works in the
history documentary production division of the BBC

Susan Ferriss, Mexico correspondant
for the Cox Newspapers (6 major newspapers in Georgia,
Texas, and Florida)

Ricardo Sandoval
Correspondant for the Dallas Morning News

Marty Nives Pioneer Productions.
He is currently producing a program for Discovery
Channel. He is very interested in coming back after
his current program and doing a program about the
Usumacinta and the proposed dams

Jorge Berry Televisa anchor man

We also sent the information to Ken Garrett (NGS
photographer) and he forwarded it to others in the NGS
organization.

We also had an NEH study tour through here and more
than one person expressed interest in hearing more
about the dam project. We have all of their email
addresses

On Sunday we met two women from Guatemala who are
deeply interested in fighting the dams. One of them,
Carla Molina, has an
ecotourism business and has contacts at various levels
of the Guatemalan government and elsewhere. She gave
us phone numbers and email addresses for the president
of the BID (Enrique Iglesias), a finance officer of
the BID (Marcelo Antinon), and two of the people
working on the PPP at the BID (Juanita
Salazar--tourism, and Jorge Sapozinkow--Energy). We
can send those phone numbers and email addresses to
anyone who is interested.

Other tidbits:

We received reliable information that a group of
engineers had been on the Usumacinta inspecting
potential dam sites and were giving quite detailed
information about water levels at specific points.
They also said that there would be a new road built
going to the Usumacinta from the highway to Frontera
Corozal. This road will be used during the
construction of the dams. They have started work on
this road already. Our source for all of this
information had been asked to keep it quiet by the
engineers.

Alfonso went to visit the local head of the Comision
Federal de Electricidad to ask him what he knew about
the dams. He said that yes there were dams planned but
that they would be low dams. When Alfonso asked how
low, he said that he would try and find out. He also
had some specific knowledge of some of the areas that
would be affected by the dams.

We were in Yaxchilan a couple of weeks ago and talked
to some people in Frontera Corozal. They are
interested in finding out more information, since they
will be dramatically affected by all of this. We were
also told there that one of the plans in the PPP is to
build a road directly to Yaxchilan -- which doesn't
make a whole lot of sense since a large part of
Yaxchilan will probably be under water!

The trip to Yaxchilan really stressed to us the
enormous loss that will be incurred by this project.
We saw a wider variety of animals, birds, and reptiles
than usual. Alfonso says that it is the first time in
25 years that he has seen scarlet macaws in the area
(we saw four macaws feeding in a tree near Str. 33).
We also saw both howler and spider monkeys, a
coatimundi, alligators, and lots of birds along the
river.

Julie and Alfonso