Costa Rica News – Monday is the long awaited day on which the trial of seven people, regarding the death of Jairo Mora in May 2013, will start. The court is reserved from the 27th of October to the 5th of December.
Mora was an environmental activist who worked to avoid predation of turtle nests. He is said to have been ambushed by masked people on the beach of Moin and suffocated with sand. His murder caused distress among the whole nation.
Mora has become a symbol of efforts needed to protect natural resources. There is a culture that thinks of turtle eggs as an aphrodisiac. In reality, they are not even any good health wise. There’s no protein, as they are mostly fat.
Currently, 80% of the eggs are being lost, threatening the continuation of the species. Mafia and drug cartels are involved in looting the nests which use the eggs as a form of currency for drugs.
When the death of Jairo Mora occurred during the previous Costa Rica government administration it was an opportunity for Costa Rica to deliver justice for a problem that continues to grow in Costa Rica; environmental destruction. However, most of us predicted because the elections for the Costa Rican presidency soon followed the murder, we would not expect any type of swift response.
The only way that these problems will be addressed in Costa Rica is to have people accountable for their actions and make the punishments for these crimes against the environment severe. For example if you are going to spend 5 years in prison for poaching sea turtle eggs or 10 years for shark finning you might think twice about it.
But as we all know accountability is a make believe word in many countries and money rules in most cases at the end of the day. Shark finning, turtle egg poaching just like drug running are high profit businesses that have a lot of money and power behind them.
We can only hope this trial will bring more awareness to the cause Jairo died for.
