MEXICO CITY, Sep 11 (Tierramérica) - Students at Mexico's National Polytechnic Institute developed a unique energy drink that combines sugarcane juice and an endemic plant that is also believed to be a sexual stimulant. In six months, it may be ready to compete on the market.

"It's a beverage that promises a lot. It creates great energy in the person who consumes it and there is no negative or addictive consequence, because it doesn't contain caffeine like other energy drinks do," Alicia Ramírez, one of the researchers at the Polytechnic who sponsored the invention, told Tierramérica.

In six months, maximum, she said, the beverage will find its way, either because someone will buy the formula or the inventors will market it themselves.

The drink's formula will not be revealed, but Ramírez said the plant stimulant it contains is called "damiana" and is found only in Mexico.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 11 (Tierramérica) - Although deforestation of the vast Brazilian Amazon region has seen an "encouraging" decline this year, the forested area destroyed is equivalent to more than half the territory of Belgium, according to the head of the Amazonian Institute of Man and the Environment, Carlos Souza Junior.

The Environment Ministry estimates that between August 2005 and July 2006, there was 11 percent less deforestation than in the 12 previous months. That data will be reviewed using more precise satellite images until December. The previous year, destruction of the forests had declined by 31 percent.

Government initiatives, creating more conservation areas along the agricultural frontier, inspecting logging operations, and the decline of soybean and beef prices have contributed to the slowing rate of forest devastation, Souza explained to Tierramérica.

The Amazon has already lost 700,000 square kilometers of forest.

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 11 (Tierramérica) - Residents and environmentalists in the central Argentine province of Córdoba denounced that for the past six months a 25-km road project has been under way to unite two tourist towns, but that they haven't been given access to the environmental impact study.

Víctor Ricco, with the Center for Human Rights and the Environment, told Tierramérica that since April there have been "numerous meetings" with members of the provincial roads agency who have avoided showing them copies of the highway project's environmental authorization.

The residents want to know exactly where the highway -- to connect Salsipuedes (a town of 6,400 people) and Valle Hermoso (5,000) -- as well as plans for mitigation of future potential environmental harm, he explained.

"The problem is not the paving, but rather the lack of access to information," Ricco said.

GUATEMALA, Sep 11 (Tierramérica) - Fifteen research and photo stations deep in the jungles of the northern Guatemalan department of El Petén are tracking the behavior of jaguars, which face extinction due to deforestation and over-hunting.

The preliminary results indicate success, because within a six-square-kilometer perimeter seven jaguars have been recorded, Roan McNab, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Guatemala, told Tierramérica.

Several environmental organizations, the public University of San Carlos, and the Ministry of Culture are participating in this monitoring project, one of whose objectives is to determine how many of these big cats live in El Petén, which borders Mexico.