Chiapas Indians Hold Officials Hostage
Copyright 2000, InterPress Service
September 14, 2000
By Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, Sep. 8 (IPS) -- Indigenous Mexicans in the Lacandona jungle in the southern state of Chiapas are holding five government officials hostage to protest the environmental and social problems in the region -- home to the largest tropical rainforest reserve in North America.
The release of the hostages, held since Sept. 5, depends on the clarification of what happened to the $14 million granted by several aid organizations to conserve the jungle and fight social problems in the area, say the indigenous captors.
The Mexican Environmental Secretariat told IPS today that an official commission had left for the site where the five are being held in Chiapas, 1,000 km south of the capital, to find a solution to the situation.
The officials, held in a community center and said to be in good health, include the director of ecological reserves in Chiapas and four Environmental Secretariat employees.
According to sources in the Lacandona jungle, the hostage- takers also want Environmental Secretary Julia Carabias to come to the region.
This incident is just one more chapter in the environmental and social conflicts that have plagued the Chiapas jungle region for decades.
The state is home to the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which took up arms Jan 1, 1994, to demand full recognition of indigenous rights. It also holds most of the nation's tropical trees and 33 percent of all reptile and 32 percent of all bird species in Mexico.
The indigenous group holding the officials want Carabias to explain the fate of the $14 million provided over recent years by the World Wildlife Fund, the World Bank and the US-based Ford Motor Company for environmental projects in the Lacandona.
The Chiapas natives denounced the illegal deviation of funds and mismanagement of the conservation programs.
Just one century ago, the Lacandona Indians were practically the only human inhabitants of the Chiapas jungles. Today, they share the region with thousands of other indigenous peoples who immigrated there over the last 50 years, and with logging companies, guerrilla groups and hundreds of military troops - said to be fighting insurgency, insecurity and drug trafficking.
A hundred years ago the Lacandona covered approximately 1.3 million hectares and was home to 2,000 people. Today, its area has been reduced to less than a half million hectares and its population has grown to more than 300,000.
If human settlements continue to expand and deforestation is not stopped, within 50 years the Lacandona will be nothing more than a memory, the Environmental Secretariat has acknowledged in several official reports.
To preserve the region, the government has implemented programs that attempt to relocate tens of thousands of people to other areas of Chiapas. But those slated for resettlement have refused to do so.
The police warned in May that its agents would use force to evict the peasants who have settled in recent years in the Montes Azules Reserve, located in the Lacandona jungle.
But after several protests by political and human rights organizations, the Ernesto Zedillo government backed down, saying it would turn to negotiation tactics instead.
The Zapatista guerrillas see the relocation of indigenous populations and the heavy presence of military troops in the region as attempts to pen in the rebel force.
Secretary Carabias has complained for the last two years that she has not been able to attend to the problems in the jungle because the EZLN will not let her enter the area.
The Zapatistas, the recently arrived indigenous groups and the Lacandona peoples, however, maintain that they are not responsible for the destruction of the jungle.
They charge that it is the military and the logging companies that promote deforestation and that they are involved in the trafficking of the jungle's flora and fauna.
In May 1999, the Lacandona Indians sent a letter to President Zedillo warning that the jungle would soon be nothing but a desert.
They also denounced that the military detachments stationed in the area are like a zoo, that the soldiers mistreat the local peasants and that alcoholism and prostitution are on the rise due to the presence of the armed forces.
The World Conservation Union has indicated that, despite its problems, the Lacandona jungle remains on the list of the top 10 sites in Meso-America (Central America and Mexico) for biodiversity.