When the machines and men came to bury toxic sludge on a property near her house in the Mexican state of Tabasco, Lorenza Castro Castro at first thought it was a kind of fertile soil. Companies contracted by Mexico’s state-owned oil giant, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, had come with truckloads of black earth and set about ripping up the trees, pouring the sludge onto the ground and then covering it up. It was only once they had finished making mounds of earth and watering them that Castro Castro realized something was off. “We realized the soil was toxic because we could smell it,” she told a Mexican investigative team. “It was a fetid smell, a smell like iron. It was like with this smell, our throats started to hurt so much we couldn’t even sense the taste of food anymore.” That year, in 2019, the rainy season floods washed the contaminated soil from what they termed the “toxic cemetery” into her home and those of her neighbors. They claim that the sludge — a toxic waste product of oil refining — makes them and their children sick. Many have moved away. Castro Castro’s community is just one of many affected by this practice. Jose Manuel Arias Rodriguez, a member of the Saint Thomas Ecological Association, an organization that has been working on environmental protection activities in Tabasco for almost three decades, says it is common for Pemex to contract out their waste disposal to other companies that look for properties…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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