Mexican activists pay price for opposing deforestationBANCO NUEVO, Mexico _ The rivers and streams were withering in the valleys of the harsh Sierra Madre above Mexico's Pacific Coast, and Rodolfo Montiel was convinced he knew why.
The 45-year-old peasant reasoned that, as loggers cut down more of the towering pines in the hills above his village, the barren mountainsides could no longer soak up and store rainwater. Instead, water cascaded off the treeless land during the rainy season, dragging tons of topsoil with it, and the terrain stayed sun-scorched through the six-month dry season.
Their complaints ignored, Montiel and his self-described peasant-ecologists took bolder action. They set up impromptu roadblocks in early 1998 to halt the loaded logging trucks that rumbled down through their Coyuquilla River valley each day. That provoked the wrath of the logging interests. A year ago, Montiel was arrested by soldiers, imprisoned and allegedly tortured, and the logging trucks began rolling again.
Yet far from crushing his unlikely movement, Montiel's arrest has galvanized a cross-border coalition of environmentalists and human rights activists in his defense. As he sat in jail awaiting trial in May, he received the prestigious $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize for courageous activism and was named an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.
Indeed, Montiel's case has turned a global spotlight onto what was a shadowy trail of destruction through one of the hemisphere's important forests. The damage to these woodlands, along a 200-mile swath of Guerrero state above the resorts of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, has become a worst-case symbol of systematic deforestation in Mexico, from the Lacandon rain forest in the south to the Sierra Taruhumara region in the northern state of Chihuahua.Environment Secretary Julia Carabias Lillo acknowledges that Mexico loses 1.5 million to 1.6 million acres of forests annually, or about 1.2 percent of its forested land. The United States, by contrast, has a net gain in forests each year.
Carabias notes that Mexico's deforestation rate is among the highest of countries with diverse ecosystems, and she calls the loss of forests in Guerrero state one of the world's 10 most serious deforestation challenges.
The array of problems in these jagged mountains is certainly daunting. Drug traffickers frequently set forest fires to clear ground for growing marijuana and poppies to make heroin, and guerrillas from Mexico's only active armed rebellion hide out here. Village feuds add another layer of complexity. The army provides the only law enforcement in these parts, residents say, and its priority is hardly the trees.
With few alternatives to earn cash, peasant leaders of the communal land cooperatives known as "ejidos" have signed contracts to sell hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of logs. Montiel's followers say some "ejido" leaders greedily encourage exploitation of their lands to fill their own pockets. This allows clandestine loggers to flourish in a climate of corruption and intimidation where control by forestry inspectors has all but vanished.
"When I arrived here 38 years ago, this place was full of marshes. It was wet even in the dry season," said Perfecto Bautista Martinez, a farmer here in Banco Nuevo, a hamlet of 20 families on a high bluff just 30 miles inland but three punishing hours by motorbike up a dirt track into the mountains.
"But then they started to cut down the forests and clear fields, and now it's just dust," he said. "We are ecologists now because we have seen the symptoms of the destruction all these years. We had to think of our children: Do we want them to receive a desert from us? That's why we organized."
Bautista Martinez was one of Montiel's allies in forming, in February 1998, the Organization of Peasant Ecologists of the Sierra of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catalan. The group drew in farmers from the Coyuquilla River valley, which runs from the coastal town of Petatlan up to the crest of the Sierra Madre range, and from the "hot lands" northeast of the 10,000-foot mountain ridge toward the town of Coyuca de Catalan, 75 miles inland.
The organization's first target was Boise Cascade Corp., the Idaho-based wood conglomerate that had contracted in 1995 with the region's union of "ejidos" for exclusive rights to buy the forests' long, straight pine logs -- some of them a yard thick. Boise Cascade pulled out shortly after the protests and roadblocks began in early 1998, citing an irregular supply of wood. Domestic buyers soon filled the void.
The peasant ecologists blamed Bernardino Bautista Valle, the "ejido" boss from Montiel's village of El Mameyal, for selling the wood rights for the benefit of a handful of insiders. Bautista Valle in turn went to the army and police to accuse Montiel and his group of being drug traffickers and members of the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, which operates in the area and killed seven police officers near here in March 1999.
The Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center in Mexico City, which has taken up Montiel's cause, said Bautista Valle is one of the old-style "caciques," or local chieftains, who dominate isolated rural areas and who are often in corrupt cahoots with state authorities -- in schemes such as logging more wood than allowed by law.
The human rights center said gunmen loyal to the cacique killed one ecologist near Banco Nuevo in May 1998, and a soldier, allegedly accompanying Bautista Valle, killed another ecologist in July that year. A Banco Nuevo "ejido" official, Jesus Cervantes Luviana, told La Jornada newspaper in August 1998 that he had been tortured by soldiers to force him to point out four ecologist leaders, including Montiel, whom the soldiers said "were chiefs of the hooded ones," a reference to EPR guerrillas.
Earlier this year, Bautista Valle's son was murdered as he descended from Banco Nuevo toward El Mameyal. Villagers think it was a revenge attack for assaults against the ecologists. The cacique has fled from the village and his whereabouts are unknown.
Montiel was arrested by the army in the village of Pizotla near Coyuca de Catalan while he was selling clothes to earn a living. A peasant was shot to death during the raid, and Montiel's friend, Teodoro Cabrera, was arrested and remains jailed with Montiel in the regional city of Iguala.
Montiel was charged with illegal possession of a military weapon and with planting marijuana and possessing poppy and marijuana seeds. He insists that the weapon and seeds were planted to frame him.
The problem is indeed far broader than Guerrero. Deforestation affects much of Mexico.
To be sure, the major source of the deforestation is not logging but the clearing of land for farming. This was the main cause in the Lacandon forest in Chiapas state, Mexico's only tropical rain forest. Mexico has lost 70 percent of its humid jungle, said Alejandro Villamar, an adviser to the Commerce Committee in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Mexico's Congress.
In Chihuahua state, the Sierra Taruhumara region is Mexico's largest forested area. A report issued in April by researchers from the state human rights commission and the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Texas found that 411 complaints of improper use of forest resources were filed from 1996 to 1999 but that none has resulted in prosecution.
"There is no concerted policy to promote sustainable development in the Sierra Taruhumara," the report said. "To the contrary, the voracious, anarchic and corrupt exploitation of forest resources has been encouraged to satisfy the demands of the market and the interests of the companies."