Rio Amarillo Airport Redux

La Prensa reported today that the Lobo Sosa administration is lobbying UNESCO to approve building an airport in the Rio Amarillo valley.

The article primarily reports statements by several Santa Rosa de Copan residents on why nothing is happening on either the construction of an airport or the construction of the road from Santa Rosa, through Concepción, to near Copan, long a priority of the businessmen of the region.

Here's what UNESCO had to say about the idea of constructing an airport at Rio Amarillo, and its possible impact on Copan, in their draft agenda for the recently concluded (June 19-29) 35th annual meeting in Paris (from pages 256-257 of the PDF).

The 2003 and 2005 joint World Heritage Centre / ICOMOS reactive monitoring missions to the property made several objections to the construction of the airport at the Rio Amarillo site, and identified alternative locations. In 2006 the World Heritage Centre congratulated the State Party for the decision to halt the construction of the airport at the Rio Amarillo area....

However in 2007, the State Party informed the Committee of plans to construct an alternate airport at the old air strip in the village of Concepción. The 2009 state of conservation report indicated that a final decision on the construction of an airport in La Concepción was still pending and that IHAH was reviewing the Environmental Impact Assessment to make an official statement. No further information was received on its decision. On 30 September 2010, the World Heritage Centre sent a letter to the Honduran Delegation indicating its concerns regarding the reconsideration of the construction of the airport at the Rio Amarillo site after reviewing information from the published press. The 2011 state of conservation report submitted by the State Party indicates that the Ministry of Tourism had cancelled the option of La Concepcion for financial reasons and that it is once again evaluating the Rio Amarillo option. It also reported that prior to making further decisions the IHAH will analyze by October 2011, an updated assessment of impact on cultural heritage and the Public Use Plan, which will include the potential impact of the airport, particularly as it relates to the visitor management programme.

The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies consider that sufficient information has been provided to the World Heritage Committee over the past 5 years, and Decisions of the World Heritage Committee have indicated clearly that the construction of an airport at Rio Amarillo, could have an adverse impact on the Outstanding Universal Value of the property.

In other words, nothing has changed; it's still a lousy idea that endangers the World Heritage Site of Copan.

In 2003 UNESCO said:

ICOMOS adds to this that the properties of Piedras Negras, Rio Blanco and Rio Amarillo must be protected due to their important scientific value for the overall understanding of the cultural system of Copan and its potential role as a state.

The information provided by the Lobo Sosa administration to UNESCO indicates that it is the prerogative of the Tourism Minister, Nelly Jerez, to choose the site for the airport. Despite claims to the contrary, this airport is primarily seen as something to drive tourism, not something vital to the overall economy of the region.

The report by the Lobo Sosa administration to UNESCO indicates that the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History is carrying out yet another analysis of the environmental and archaeological impact of a Rio Amarillo airport, this one due in October 2011.

That's what you do when you don't have the answer that you want: you commission a new study.

Not that there is any mystery about what the report due this coming fall is likely to say: in January this year Jerez stated the airport would be at Rio Amarillo, and that IHAH had already approved the site:

"We've already made the decision, we have already done the studies; we have already done the investigations; we have it all put together in the Institute of Anthropology."

UNESCO notes that a 2004 study by IHAH concluded that an airport at Rio Amarillo would endanger both Copan and the Rio Amarillo archaeological sites. Press reports of the time indicated that that conclusion cost archaeologist Carmen Julia Fajardo her job as head of investigations for IHAH. A second study carried out six months later by IHAH reversed the first, claiming that an airport at Rio Amarillo would be acceptable.

In June, the latest UNESCO report concluded:

5. Reiterates its concern that the site of Rio Amarillo is being considered for the construction of the airfield, in spite of previous World Heritage Committee decisions, yet acknowledges that additional information has been gathered and new studies have been produced after the 2005 reactive monitoring mission conducted by ICOMOS, which requires further analysis;

6. Accepts the State Party’s invitation for a joint World Heritage Centre/ICOMOS reactive monitoring mission in 2011 to assess the state of conservation of the property and particularly review all the information produced up to this date regarding the project of building an airfield in the site of Rio Amarillo, including environmental impact assessments, and a heritage impact assessment, in order to update the analysis for consideration and review by the World Heritage Committee;

So Jerez is waiting for a UNESCO visit and the new IHAH report.

If she really is waiting until October or later, the airport will not be built by the deadline of December, 2012, that she set for it to open.

As we've pointed out many times (here, here, and here) the La Concepción site would serve a larger population without the projected damage to historic sites.

If Jerez wants an airport built by December, 2012, it needs to start construction today, and be built at La Concepción.

Airport Misinformation

La Tribuna reported this morning that the Lobo Sosa government promises to build two airports in the Department of Copan, one at Rio Amarillo and one at La Concepción. Really? Is that even financial feasible? Who will fund it? We have our doubts about this story.

Tiempo, on the other hand, reported yesterday that the government will call a representative assembly of the municipalities of the Departments of Copan, Lempira, Ocotepeque, and Intibuca to decide where to build the airport. La Tribuna published an article yesterday that agreed in detail with what the Tiempo article reported.

Confused? Either La Tribuna is, or we are.

The story yesterday was prompted by a meeting between two of the presidential designates, Maria Antonieta Guillén and Victor Hugo Barníca, the Minister of Tourism, Nelly Jerez, and the Secretary of Public Works, Transport, and Housing, Miguel Pastor, and a delegation from Santa Rosa de Copan and La Concepción headed by Monseignor Luis Alfonso Santos, the Bishop of Santa Rosa de Copan. The Alcalde of La Concepción, José Tulio Sánchez told reporters that the land owners there were willing to donate 40 manzanas of land for the airport, saving the government about $5 million, the asking price for the land in Rio Amarillo, if it chooses to build the airport at La Concepción.

Yesterday Guillén was quoted as saying

"There are two options, one alternative is Rio Amarillo and the other is La Concepción; the smart decision of the President is not to exclude one or the other but to consider both possibilities in terms of analyzing the convenience of building either airport."

Yesterday the story was that the central government would not make the decision, the communities would make it.

Today the message La Tribuna reports is that Guillén told them that the government would build both airports to avoid a confrontation between the municipalities of the region. Except that it's not at all clear she said exactly that, since the rest of the article is full of phrases about weighing the benefits of each, and that those benefits would be discussed in a regional assembly by the 25 of March.

Guillén is cited as the source of another dubious piece of information in the La Tribuna article. She is reported to have stated it would cost over 400 million lempiras to construct the road from La Concepcion to Santa Rita to connect that airport with Copan Ruinas. Yet a year ago, an article from Hondudiario reposted in an Internet forum cited the cost of 24 kilometers of road as 116 million lempiras. Where did this inflated estimate of 400 million come from? Proceso Digital has an answer: they attribute that bit of information to Miguel Pastor and SOPTRAVI. Using the cost to produce a lane mile of roadway in individual states in the US, this estimate is roughly the same as it would be to construct a similar length road in Louisiana, using US prevailing wages and material prices. For Honduras it seems rather high.

We think today's La Tribuna article is wrong; its simply internally inconsistent and we think Miguel Pastor would do well to question that 400-500 million lempira estimate for the cost of constructing the road in light of the previous estimates around 25 percent of that cost.

Tourism or Development?

UNESCO is scheduled to deliver its third opinion on establishing an airport in Rio Amarillo, Honduras in June, but Nelly Jerez, the Tourism Minister, isn't going to wait for that opinion for guidance. She announced yesterday that the government would go ahead and fast track the construction of an airport at Rio Amarillo to be finished in 2012. We've outlined elsewhere some of the politics of this decision.

Jerez announced that the Institute of Anthropology has approved the move. Jerez stated unequivocally

"It will not cause any damage to the ruins of Copan. Therefore we'll go ahead and build the Copan airport."

Really? We've already pointed out that both UNESCO, and several previous incarnations of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH) believe the aircraft engine noise would, over time, damage Copan if the airport was built at Rio Amarillo, but Jerez isn't waiting for the UNESCO report in June. Maybe that's because the previous two UNESCO reports strongly advised against building an airport in Rio Amarillo.

Jerez's announcement comes amidst UNESCO re-evaluating Honduras's treatment of another world heritage site in Honduras, the Biosphere of the Platano River. UNESCO is concerned about environmental degradation within the biosphere. It also has questions about possible effects on the biosphere of three recently approved dam projects on the Rio Patuca, or at least, that's how the Honduran government is spinning it.

Why is Jerez rushing this through? To support Tourism's initiative to bring tourists to Copan for the Maya "end of the world celebration" in 2012. Jerez, quoted in today's Tiempo, said

"The [Maya] prophecies of Copan and the end of the Maya calendar in December 2012 are opening the doors so that Europe will come to our country."

She plans spectacles with concerts and other performances both inside and outside the archaeological park.

So what are the costs and benefits of this decision, because any decision involves trade offs.

The benefit of building an airport in the region are tangible. Right now it takes 4 hours to drive from San Pedro Sula, with the nearest airport, to Copan Ruinas, the town where the ruin is located. This means thousands of tourists who visit Honduras cannot make the trip. These tourists are mostly cruise ship passengers whose tour includes a stop at the Bay Islands and Puerto Cortés, usually for 24 hours or less.

The propsed airport is designed to host turbo-prop 50 passenger planes similar to those in use today between Roatan and the mainland. Cruise ships range from small (50 passengers) to enormous (4000+ passengers). Carnival Cruise lines ships, which call at Roatan, all hold 2000 to 4000 passengers. If 10% of the passengers choose an option to fly to this new airport and tour Copan, this would require 4-8 round trip flights between Roatan and Copan daily. By comparison, there are currently only 3 round trip flights daily between San Pedro Sula and Roatan, none of them non-stop. Add the San Pedro Sula (to support local tourists and those docking in Puerto Cortés) and Tegucigalpa airports into the mix and you need tens of round trip flights daily in and out of this new airport.

No one has explained where the the airplanes and staff necessary to fly in and out of the new airport will come from. If you build it, they will come? There's been no public explanation of how the government will handle concessions to fly there, nor where the operations budget for the airport will come from, or how it will be operated. Is private industry going to fill the gap? Where are the committments?

Cruise ships don't dock every day. What will these private airlines do the other days, when there aren't sufficient passengers to financially justify all these flights? Or does the Honduran government envision this working on a charter model, with the cruise lines chartering planes to fly to the new airport, in which case the question becomes, where will the planes come from, since they don't currently exist in the country? Who will set up and finance these charter companies?

You see the problem? The business case for how this will operate financially, to pay for the airport its operations, and that of the air service companies, has not been made or discussed.

These, then are the advantages: greater access to the ruins of Copan than exists now and tourism related development around it. What is Jerez giving up with this choice?

Jerez is making the decision to not develop the second largest Maya city in Honduras for tourism, ever. While the argument advanced in favor of the airport is that the runway itself will not destroy any ruins, that's a red herring; the main acropolis of the Rio Amarillo site is less than 100 meters from the planned runway. Have I mentioned these planes are loud? Tourists won't come to a place where deafening noise is part of the experience many times a day. It would be irresponsible to excavate and consolidate the ruins since they would certainly degrade over time from vibration and be subject to the corrosive fumes of airplane exhaust. The Rio Amarillo ruins won't be developed. Tourists will have no reason to spend additional time in the region. Honduras forfeits those additional tourist dollars.

The Rio Amarillo location only serves tourism development at Copan, not the wider economic development of the the department of Copan. So Jerez is focusing just on tourism at Copan, which is her purview, rather than the wider economic development of Honduras. She says she would support building the La Concepción airport only if there's enough money to be found after building the Rio Amarillo airport. Perhaps she should take a larger view? As we pointed out in our earlier post, the La Concepcion location can contribute to both the tourism development of Copan and the wider economic development of the same region for about the same cost.

Santa Rosa de Copan is a business center in Honduras. It is one of two centers of Honduras's world famous cigar industry. Many world-class cigars are either made in this part of Honduras or made from tobacco grown in this part of Honduras. Yet there is no way for its businessmen to interact easily with people outside of Honduras. Companies are forced to establish offices and warehouses in San Pedro Sula, with its local airport, and more reliable communications and electricity, rather than keeping their money and jobs in the region. This keeps development centralized, focused on the larger cities of Honduras rather than spread out; it exacerbates the differences between the cities and the rural areas of Honduras.

The advantage of the La Concepcion location for an airport is that serves equally well the development of tourism to the ruins of Copan, being only 29 km away, and the economic development of the whole Department of Copan. Its a much more sustainable economic model because airport passenger traffic is increased with demand from both tourists and businessmen. In turn, that demand provides a more sustainable model for regular air service to the region, reducing risk for the private businesses that choose to operate such service.

Jerez's announcement is the triumph of politics and short term gains over the long term development in Honduras, and the continued overemphasis on the Maya ruins of Copan as a driver of development in the region, as documented so eloquently by Dr. Dario Euraque, among others.

Jerez is advocating an unbelievably short-sighted decision that only serves the political and economic interests of those focused exclusively on Copan Ruinas.

An airport should be built in the region; just not the one at Rio Amarillo.

The Politics of an Airport

Nelly Jerez, Minister of Tourism, announced that the construction of an airport in the valley of Rio Amarillo, to provide access for tourists close to Copan, would be her priority this year. This reverses a decision made under the Zelaya administration to locate the airport at Concepcion, Copan.

This airport was first proposed in 2003 during the Maduro administration. At that time the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia opposed locating the airport in the Rio Amarillo valley.

The World Heritage committee of UNESCO studied the issue in 2003, and again in 2005. Its study, and decision, are both available at the UNESCO website here. They reference the Institute's report opposing the Rio Amarillo site, dated to 2004.

In 2003, ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, recommended closing the airstrip that up until then was located at La Estanzuela, less than 2 km from Copan ruins. Nonetheless, the government continued to allow it to function, with 187 flights recorded in 2004.

At the time, ICOMOS noted that Honduras should develop the ruins of Rio Amarillo for tourism, as it is the second-largest Classic Maya city in Honduras.

Finally, ICOMOS noted that the government maintained a helicopter landing strip within the Copan archaeological park, where 23 helicopters landed in 2004, something that raised their concern.

So in 2003, ICOMOS recommended that Honduras

1. establish a no fly zone over the core area of the Copan Ruins.

2. close the airstrip at La Estanzuela

3. reconsider the location for a replacement airstrip.

They were clear about their concerns and what was at risk:

ICOMOS adds to this that the properties of Piedras Negras, Rio Blanco and Rio Amarillo must be protected due to their important scientific value for the overall understanding of the the cultural system of Copan and its potential role as a state.

In 2005, the committee again

1. reiterated its call for establishing a no fly zone over the core part of Copan Ruins.

2. encouraged the government to reconsider its decision to locate an airport at Rio Amarillo

3. requested, should the government decide to ignore the relocation request, that it conduct an environmental assessment and develop a comprehensive Public Use Plan for the world heritage site of Copan and submit that plan to the committee for consultation.

4. requested the government update the committee with a progress report by 1 February, 2006.

The Río Amarillo airport plan was subsequently approved by the Maduro administration. SICA reported on July 11, 2005 that the BID approved financing for the airport at Rio Amarillo. Press reports linked the dismisal of archaeologist Carmen Julia Fajardo from her position as Head of Investigations of the Institute of Anthropology and History to her opposition to this plan.

In the election of 2005, of course, Manuel Zelaya Rosales was elected president, turning out the Partido Nacional and replacing it with a Liberal party administration when he assumed office in 2006.

Under Zelaya, the new government decided the airport should be built at La Concepcion, Copan, instead of the previously favored Rio Amarillo site. The advantage of the La Concepcion location is that it can both serve business development around Santa Rosa de Copan, while also providing access for international tourists to Copan Ruins.

In 2007, Zelaya promised an 18 month time frame for the construction of the airport. To make the Concepcion location work, Honduras would have to pave 8.75 km of road from Santa Rosa de Copan to the airport, and a further 29.5 km of road from the airport to Copan Ruins.

The airport itself was to be financed by the government of Taiwan, with funding contingent on Honduras building and paving the roadways. The Zelaya administration began the grading of the road from Santa Rosa to Concepcion, and then everything stopped. Nothing more happened.

Now Nelly Jerez, the Tourism Minister, wants to resurrect the Rio Amarillo location yet again.

It's still a bad idea. And it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that it is being revived under the first National Party government since Maduro left office.