The Algarvian former politician José Mendes Bota says the fact that there is a wave of politicians only now railing against oil and gas exploration in the Algarve is a ‘joke.’
Only now, claims Bota, are these politicians interested in giving interviews about their anti-oil credentials, but asks where they were years ago when his was the only voice raised against the original oil and gas licensing process.
Recalling the distant, hazy days of 1986, Bota "presented the first application" on the Algarve’s slide into becoming an oil and gas production zone.
"I made a complaint in Brussels against the Portuguese Government and wrote long articles about it," says Bota who suggests people look up the newspaper articles to see what he wrote and to spot “those politicians who, at the time, attacked me because I attacked oil."
Bota asks, "where was the Green Party, where was the Communist Party, where was the Left Bloc, where was the Socialist Party back in the time when we still has the time to prevent the contracts being signed?"
The former PSD MP claims the credit for preventing the Sócrates Socialist government from signing the oil concession contracts which in fact had been prepared many years before. Later, says the politician, he was "very sorry to see my own party’s government signing the oil contracts," referring to the coalition government led by PSD Pedro Passos Coelho
From that time on, "I stopped my fight" considering that oil in the Algarve is an "irreversible process as lots of money is at stake."
It is the financial aspect of the oil contracts that leads Bota to conclude that there no government will have the courage to tear up the contracts.
In addition to the shortsightedness of many politicians, Bota believes that one of the reasons why the Algarve was defeated in this and other struggles is that the region "did not have a voice."
The solution, in Bota’s view, is regionalisation, which would enable the Algarve to speak out with a concerted voice against oil exploration and extraction.
Bota’s downbeat comments at the Portimão book fair concluded with his opinion that regionalisation for the Algarve will never be a reality as the major parties and the government are against the idea of a semi-indepennt south.
With oil concession consortia, made up of big players Partex, Repsol, Galp and ENI, this month indefinitely postponing their planned drilling activities off the west coast at Aljezur and to the south of Faro, Bota may yet see the current surge of anti-oil 'people power' and activism as being no match for a dithering government, now under pressure to declare the oil concession contracts null and void.
Bota’s conclusion that politicians are largely ignored is a valid one, but anti-oil residents of the Algarve have started to be noticed and already have made more impact than those elected to serve their interests.
Loulé mayor Vítor Aleixo has been interviewed about his stance on oil and gas in the Algarve and says he is allied with a local population against the industrialisation of the Algarve’s land and sea.
"The City Council, interpreting the general feeling of the county's population, is collaborating with associations that have been expressing their indignation in a variety of ways.”
“Today, people come together when a cause is fair and nobidy wants to see quality of life adulterated.”
As for the anti-oil legal action taken by the Algarve mayors’ group, AMAL, Vitor Aleixo said that "if we are all united and rowing in the same direction, the success of our proposal will be 'more guaranteed' and it’s important that the Algarve mayors act in unison, thus demonstrating that there is a level of collective awareness of the natural heritage that unites institutions, local authorities and society in general."
