The Sunday Times - UK (2022-06-05)

22 V2 The Sunday Times June 5, 2022

WORLD NEWS

Nimbys and bird-lovers blow Germany’s clean energy campaign off course

The transformation to

clean energy has been slowed

to a crawl by botched

policies, nimbyism, conflicts

with conservationists over

birds and bats and cheap

Russian gas.

Last year not a single

offshore wind turbine was

connected to the grid. The

solar industry has been

ruined. Permits for onshore

wind installations slumped by

more than 80 per cent after a

change in the tendering rules

five years ago, costing up to

60,000 jobs. Bavaria, the

largest state by area,

approved a total of six new

wind turbines in 2021.

Onshore wind is the single

biggest source of electricity,

providing nearly a third of the

country’s requirements.

But until now less than

1 per cent of Germany’s area

has been allocated for

possible wind farms. Robert

Habeck, the Green Party

energy minister and vice-

chancellor, wants to more

than double this share.

The hard part will be

reforming planning rules so

labyrinthine and riddled with

openings for opponents of

wind power that it takes

seven years, on average, to

get approval. The obstacles

are legion, ranging from

military helicopter flight

paths to the national weather

forecaster’s radars, which are

apparently apt to mistake

wind farms for storm fronts.

Another is the protection

of vulnerable species, which

often pits conservationists

against environmentalists.

From the red kites of

Paderborn and the lesser-

spotted eagles of the Baltic

coast to the pipistrelle bats

knocked down by whizzing

blades in Saxony on their way

from Belarus, there seems to

be no shortage of endangered

flying animals at risk of a fatal

encounter with a turbine.

Over the past decade,

Nabu, a conservation charity

loosely equivalent to the

RSPB, has mounted 45 legal

challenges to 240 planned

wind installations, mostly

with success.

Simon Müller, Germany

director at the Agora

Energiewende think tank in

Berlin, said the rules also

provided a pretext for nimbys

and climate sceptics to block

wind farms. “In some cases,

people who are just against

wind have been using this

route to say, ‘That’s the

problem we have with it’,

although really it was just a

convenient way of getting rid

of the projects,” he said.

Nimbyism is a potent force

in its own right. Hundreds of

“citizens’ initiatives” have

banded together into an

umbrella lobby group called

Vernunftkraft (power of

reason) that orchestrates the

national anti-wind-farm

movement. Mindful of these

citizens’ votes, local

politicians have sometimes

stacked the planning laws

against wind. Bavaria has a

rule that turbines must be

separated from the nearest

house by a distance of at least

ten times their height — which

can mean two kilometres.

The Federal Environment

Agency estimated that such

rules could ultimately cost

Germany about 40 gigawatts

of wind power, enough to

save the annual carbon

emissions of a country the

size of Ireland.

Vladimir Putin’s onslaught

in Ukraine has forced Berlin

to start urgently trying to

wean the country off Russian

gas and revive its once-proud

renewable sector.

At the same time, though,

it has been forced to fall back

on other fossil fuels,

temporarily burning more

coal and committing itself to

importing large volumes of

liquefied natural gas from

Qatar and the United States

until well into the 2030s.

Habeck recently conceded

through gritted teeth that

Germany would miss its

climate targets this year, and

probably in 2023 as well.

Yet there is evidence of

progress too. Habeck wants

to give renewable energy top

priority in the planning

system as a matter of national

security. Modern wind

turbines are so efficient that

fewer are needed to generate

the same amount of extra

electricity.

Self-interest also helps.

While some Germans dread

the sight of windmills in the

landscape, many others are

alive to the benefits they

bring, such as jobs and

funding for councils. There

are also signs that life is

returning to the long-

moribund solar industry.

Germany’s tortuous

“energy turnaround” is likely

to go through a few more

twists yet but Muller did not

hesitate when asked whether

the country would hit its

renewables targets by 2030:

“Yes.”

“Here the whole sky is

smoke,” the writer Joseph

Roth noted as he travelled

through the Ruhr, Germany’s

old industrial heartland,

nearly a century ago. “It

hangs in a grey pall over the

land that has made it and that

continues to make more of it

... It is sacrifice, god and

priest all at once.”

Today the skies have

largely cleared, yet as the war

in Ukraine throws another

spanner into the works of

Germany’s stalling shift to

clean energy, the coal-fired

plant at Datteln, the largest in

the region, will belch smoke

for years to come.

Oliver Moody Berlin

Cecilia Flores

sniffs the end

of her rod —

“the smell of

death lingers

in the soil”

They

found a

jawbone.

‘It’s

female,’

she said

ENNCARNI PINDADO

was given a camel calf on a

visit to Mali — but it suffered

an unfortunate fate after

being left with locals until

shipping could be arranged: it

was turned into a tajine.

An official in Paris said

Macron was “really going out

of his way to please the

Queen”. The gift was thought

to have two aims. It was taken

as a signal of Macron’s desire

to improve relations with

Britain without having to kiss

and make up with Boris

Johnson, whom Macron

considers a “good-for-

nothing”, by all accounts.

But the dispatch of

Fabuleu de Maucour to

Britain was also a way of

pandering to French public

opinion: despite having

beheaded their own royals in

1793, 70 per cent of the

French, according to a poll in

2015, have a positive image of

Britain’s monarchy.

Stéphane Bern, France’s

best-known royal

commentator, says that

people often bow and curtsy

to him simply because the

Macron is

keen to

please the

Queen

British monarch once

honoured him with an OBE.

In short, it will have done

Macron no harm to have

celebrated the Platinum

Jubilee with unbridled

enthusiasm in an otherwise

trouble-filled week.

It began with the ill-fated

Champions League final in

Paris, a fiasco in which

security experts and

opposition politicians have

poured scorn on the French

police’s explanations for tear-

gassing fans.

This was followed by a

revolt at the Quai d’Orsai and

a walkout of diplomats

disgruntled over a plan to

downgrade their status and to

treat them as ordinary civil

servants: this meant they

could be transferred to jobs in

what they consider to be

lowly ministries such as

finance or agriculture.

Macron can count on

Fabuleu de Maucour, at least,

to uphold national honour.

They had been digging the hole for more
than an hour when a strip of dark cloth
appeared in the soft brown soil. Victor
Flores, 19, gently scraped away more
earth with his shovel to reveal a head,
face down. It had traces of black hair on
it. Was it his brother?
Standing nearby, Cecilia Flores, who is
searching for two missing sons, stared
intently at the skull, her eyes filling with
tears. “Hope ends when you find a body,”
she said. “A part of me wants to find my
boys. Another part doesn’t — not if it’s like
this, a pile of bones.”
Flores, 50, had come to this sun-baked
wilderness in Mexico’s northern state of
Sinaloa with a handful of other grieving
mothers searching for missing sons. Drug
violence is raging through this lawless
land of massacres and disappearances.
“Mexico has become one big, clandes-
tine cemetery,” said Flores, who wore a
khaki hat with long flaps to protect her
from the sun and mosquitoes. “The gov-
ernment doesn’t investigate, it doesn’t
care. So it’s up to us to do the searching.”
The methods are basic. Keeping an eye
out for scorpions and rattlesnakes, the
searchers plunge metal rods into the
earth, pull them out and sniff the end.
“It’s surprising how long the smell of
death lingers in the soil,” said Flores, who
leads the Madres Buscadoras, or “search-
ing mothers”, one of several groups that
have proved more effective than the
authorities at finding human remains.
We had driven in a minivan along a rut-
ted dirt track through fields of sorghum
and maize to a dried-out former dam,
about an hour east of Los Mochis, where
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, boss of the
Sinaloa cartel, was detained in 2016
before extradition to America.
A convoy of police and military vehi-
cles came with us: often the searchers
receive threats from the cartels — and two
were shot dead in their homes last year.
“Some of the mothers stopped coming
to dig after that,” said Flores, who wore a
white T-shirt emblazoned with photos of
her missing sons. “But I’m not afraid. I’m
not looking for those responsible, I just
want to find my sons.”
She led me into a thicket of mesquite

Mothers dig for bodies of their

sons in Mexico’s killing fields

and pine trees. “The killers like to dig

their graves in the shade,” she said — and

as the sun rose over this parched killing

fields, I could understand why. After

prodding the soil with her rod, she said:

“I think there’s something here.”

She was right. Soon Victor, her son,

had dug up a human jawbone. “It’s a

female, not square like a man’s,” said

Flores. Her daughter, also named Cecilia,

then plucked what appeared to be a false,

white fingernail from the soil.

Flores believed the body to which the

jawbone had been attached lay some-

where nearby and the site had been dis-

turbed by coyotes. She got out her phone,

obliged to report the find to official foren-

sic workers for the state of Sinaloa.

She claims to have found hundreds of

sets of human remains since she began

searching in 2015, when her son Alejan-

dro, a porter at a fertiliser company, went

missing, aged 19. Marco Antonio, another

son, disappeared in 2019, aged 31. She

displayed a picture on her phone, the last

of the three of them together. “That was

when I was happy,” she said.

Staring later that morning at the skull

Victor had uncovered, she wondered if it

could be one of the boys. She urged Vic-

tor to keep digging, keen to see the shirt.

It turned out to be stripy — unlike those

worn by her sons when they disap-

peared. The third body of the day

emerged in the afternoon after a mechan-

ical digger was brought in to help. Soon a

strip of dark cloth, a pelvic bone and part

of an arm was unearthed.

By now, state investigative experts had

arrived on the scene. They used trowels

and brushes to uncover the rest of the

corpse. It was lying in a foetal position

with two bullet holes in the back of the

skull. “Poor little dear,” said a woman

standing next to me, Rufina Vazquez, 62,

who was hunting for two sons missing

since 2018. “He’s curled up like a baby.”

Raul Robles, one of the state forensic

experts, lifted bones onto a plastic sheet.

The skull was placed in a brown paper

bag. Robles thought the victim was shot

elsewhere before being buried here. Ear-

lier, though, I had found six shell casings

on the ground nearby. One of the

national guardsmen said they probably

came from a cuerno, or “horn”, slang for

the curved magazine of the Kalashnikov,

a weapon often used by the narcos.

Robles asked me to take him to the

spot and conceded that the victims may

have been shot where they were buried;

may have been forced to dig their graves.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obra-

dor had promised to end the violence,

but his policy of “hugs, not bullets” for

dealing with drug gangs has allowed

them to wrest ever greater swathes of ter-

ritory from government control.

Since Amlo, as he is known from his

initials, came to power in 2018, more

than 120,000 violent deaths and 30,000

disappearances have been recorded. The

number of disappearances since 2006

climbed above 100,000 last month.

In parts of the country, bodies are left

hanging from bridges, dumped on the

street or in car boots, dismembered,

decapitated, often both. A macabre entry

in the country’s lexicon of horror

denotes one who dissolves victims in acid

— pozolero, after a Mexican stew. “Today,

Mexico is a much more dangerous place

than ten years ago,” Edith Olivares Fer-

reto of Amnesty International told me in

Mexico City, referring not only to fre-

quent massacres but also a dramatic rise

in murders of journalists and human

rights activists. “Parts of the country you

can’t go to, it’s too dangerous.”

At first glance, Los Mochis seemed

peaceful enough, El Chapo’s abandoned

house — a white building, modest by drug

lord standards — the only reminder of the

town’s history as a hub of the drug trade.

According to locals, there is no street

crime. “This is where the drug lords like

to live,” said a shop owner, who insisted

on anonymity. “Their kids go to school

here, so there are no robberies, no

assaults, without their authorisation.”

For Julio Manzanares, a former local

official at a state commission for tracking

the disappeared, this tranquillity “masks

a sordid reality” of multiple murders and

disappearances. “All the bad stuff around

here tends to happen out of sight.”

The disappeared — los desaparecidos —

have been a grim part of Latin American

history since the Cold War, when security

forces kidnapped, tortured and mur-

dered thousands of leftists in Argentina

and Chile. But Mexico’s horror is on an

even greater scale — and it continues.

Some are victims of gangs fighting for

drug routes. Yet according to human

rights groups, as many as one third may

have been “disappeared” by security for-

ces accused of colluding with gangs. A

notorious case was the disappearance of

43 student activists in 2014 in the south-

ern state of Guerrero.

“Lots of family members say their

loved ones were kidnapped by people in

uniforms of the state, police or army,”

said Olivares. “And the state is not look-

ing for them.” According to her, 98 per

cent of crimes go unpunished.

Flores fears that the bodies she finds

may end up like the remains of the

56,000 people the state has been unable

to identify: they have been laid to rest in a

common grave. “It’s like being doubly

disappeared,” she said.

Families of the missing, meanwhile,

swing between hope and dread. “I have

many sleepless nights,” said Monica Vala-

dez, 50, another buscadora whose son,

Jonathan, 21, disappeared last year in the

neighbouring state of Sonora. “I reported

him missing in August and since then not

a word. The authorities should be doing

their job, but they’re not.” Flores, for her

part, will not give up. “That’s my life

now,” she said. “Digging holes.”

@MCinParis

Banking the Narcos, Business, page 7

In a largely lawless country, families are left to hunt for ‘the disappeared’: the drug cartels’ victims

French saddle up

for detente with

fabulous gift horse

The French diplomatic corps

went on strike last week but

that did not prevent

President Macron from

dispatching to Britain an

emissary of impeccable

breeding and exemplary

behaviour.

The mission of Fabuleu de

Maucour, a horse from the

stables of the French

Republican Guard — the Gallic

equivalent of the Household

Cavalry — is to help smooth

relations with the British.

A source at the Elysée

Palace said that the gelding

had been chosen with care, a

gift for the Queen on her

Platinum Jubilee. Not only is

it grey, which the French

have been told is the Queen’s

favourite equine colour, but it

hails from a line of champion

showjumpers. The seven-

year-old was known for

“physical and psychological

maturity” and “exemplary

behaviour”. It was “very

representative of ... French

breeding”.

General Eric Bio Farina,

the Republican Guard’s

commanding officer,

suggested it had been a

wrench to lose Fabuleu de

Mancour, a “beacon” among

his 470 horses. The creature

was sent across the Channel

with a saddle, bridle, bit and

halter dating from 1874, an

1822 sabre and Macron’s

message of congratulations to

the Queen: “You are the

golden thread that binds our

two countries, proof of the

unwavering friendship

between our nations.”

Only once before had

Macron offered such an

extravagant, equine tribute to

a head of state: he gave

China’s President Xi an eight-

year-old gelding, also from

the Republican Guard

stables, in 2018. This was

seen as a response to China’s

“furry diplomacy” — Beijing

had sent two pandas, Huan

Huan and Yuan Zi, to France

in 2012, albeit on loan.

French heads of state are

more used to receiving horses

than giving them away. In the

1970s, Anwar Sadat, the

Egyptian president, gave

President Valéry Giscard

d’Estaing an Arab

thoroughbred. In 1994, a

horse given to François

Mitterrand, Giscard’s socialist

successor, by Turkmenistan’s

leader became a subject of

controversy when it was later

reported to have been sold.

François Hollande,

another socialist president,

Adam Sage Paris

Fabuleu de Maucour was part of the Republican Guard

MATTHEW

CAMPBELL

Los Mochis Mexico

Dhows competing in the Al Gaffal race in Dubai. The event, which covers 23 miles, was established in memory of the pearl divers integral to what was once the Gulf’s biggest trade

PEARLY WHITES

ALI HAIDER/EPA

JONATHAN BRADY/PA