09/30/01 -- MAYA: The Fated Forest

MAYA: The Fated Forest
Few Options; Searching for solutions; Efforts to bring tourism, manufacturing and other alternatives to farming to the rain forest's economy have met with little enthusiasm. The Maya say they have not been consulted about many development plans

ALTAMIRANO, Mexico -- Those hoping to save what's left of the Selva Lacandona say the problem is simply one of too many people with too few options.

Rectifying that problem has proved anything but simple.

"People know they can't keep destroying the forest, but you have to give them the means to not do it," says Porfirio Encino, who grew up in a Maya farm community in the forest and now serves as secretary of indigenous affairs for the Chiapas state government. "We need a new mentality."

But poor education, long-standing social resentments, past government abuses and profound distrust all hobble the search for new strategies and the chances of implementing them, planners and indigenous advocates say. They say that most ideas for building a future for the forest have failed to include the opinions of the Maya who live in it.

"The Indian people aren't being considered in all these plans," says Encino, who was a peasant leader before accepting his government post. "We don't just want employment. We want to be participants in our development."

Most adults who live in North America's largest rain forest left school before completing the sixth grade, census data show, and one in every three is illiterate.

Large families are the norm in the forest, and a federal program to cut family size has not succeeded.

The region is isolated from major cities and ports, and good roads and electric lines are few.

Attempts to promote light manufacturing, tourism or other alternatives to corn farming and cattle ranching have met with limited success. Grandiose government proposals to encourage private investment by building roads, ports and other public works have met rejection from many indigenous leaders and grass-roots activists.

Entrepreneurial schemes by a handful of outsiders to develop everything from tree plantations to golf courses have received similar opposition.

And for nearly eight years now, the forest's possibilities have been held hostage by the conflict between the mostly Maya Zapatista National Liberation Army on one side and the Mexican government and local rivals on the other.

Like Mexico itself, the Selva Lacandona region has long been known as a rich land filled with poor people.

Much of the forest's natural wealth -- whether timber or oil or medicinal plants -- has lined the pockets of the powerful. Most of the Selva Lacandona's 400,000 residents make their livings on small farms, which many experts say condemns the forest to failure and its people to poverty.

A major hurdle to generating more evenly distributed riches, planners say, is the rapid growth of the forest population. Experts say it is fueled by the Roman Catholic faith of many residents and by the peasant tradition of having large families.

New migration has virtually halted, and a growing number of desperate villagers has begun leaving to find work in Mexico's cities and the United States. Still, by some estimates the area's population will more than double to nearly 1 million people in less than 15 years.

But experts point out that the fewer than 1.5 million people living in the entire Maya Forest -- which stretches from this corner of Chiapas into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala and Belize -- are just a fraction of the estimated 5 million who lived here at the height of the Maya civilization 1,200 years ago.

The problem isn't an abundance of people, some experts say, but an absence of opportunity.

"The forest is threatened not so much by the number of inhabitants as by the economic activities they practice," says demographics expert German Martinez Velasco, the head of the Chiapas state census agency. "It's more a lack of economic alternatives."

The crisis here echoes across rural Mexico, where prices for most crops have slumped below the cost of production amid increased global competition. Government officials say that only 10 million of the 28 million Mexicans now dependent upon agriculture have a place in the country's future as farmers.

"This whole mythology of the Maya as the men of corn, that every Maya family has a genetic right to a piece of forest and a bag of seed corn -- that's a destructive attitude," says James Nations, an anthropologist with the Washington, D.C.-based environmental group Conservation International.

"They don't need more land for their people," says Nations, who has worked in the Selva Lacandona for decades. "They need a livelihood and economic production for their people."

There appears to be a lot to work with. Peppered with the magnificent ruins of ancient Maya cities and with enough natural wonders to set an eco-tourist's heart aflutter, the Selva Lacandona area attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

Oil and gas lie deep in the earth. Mahogany, cedar and other expensive woods coveted by world markets grow thick as corn. Other plant species may someday hold the cures for cancer and other diseases.

As much as one-quarter of the country's fresh water flows in local rivers, offering a potential for hydroelectric power to sell to industrialized northern Mexico.

But many forest residents remain skeptical of development plans.

The Zapatista rebels, whose insurgency still largely sets the agenda in the Selva Lacandona, have consistently demanded more land for farming. The rebels have rejected most other economic development ideas, saying they will benefit just the wealthy.

Much of the current debate about development revolves around an initiative called Plan Puebla-Panama, President Vicente Fox's vague proposal for massive public and private investment across southern Mexico.

The plan is so named because it envisions an effort extending from the Mexican state of Puebla through Central America. It would initially involve about $ 10 billion worth of new roads, rail lines, power plants and other improvements across southern Mexico.

Planners say the improvements would lead to the construction of factories, large-scale farms and other projects that would lift the region's wages and eventually wean its people from a future of rural misery.

"What's clear is that these people need better living conditions and development options," says Raul Arriaga, a deputy secretary in the environmental ministry. "They require health, housing, education and food. And for that, they need a source of income."

But years of coming out on the short end in dealings with the government in particular and non-Indians in general have left many forest residents resentful and suspicious of outsiders.

"They have been offered so many things that have never arrived," Arriaga says. "No one believes anymore."

Many of its critics here see the Puebla-Panama proposal as a plot to force peasants from their land and to uproot indigenous culture. The goal, these critics say, is to create a low-paid labor pool for assembly plants called "maquiladoras" and to help huge agribusiness farms that harvest timber and other crops for export.

"We want to continue working our land and to make a living like that," says Antonio Jimenez, leader of a Maya peasant organization in the forest. "The government doesn't care about us."

Mexican state and federal officials insist that private investment is key to solving the poverty at the root of much of the deforestation.

"The Puebla-Panama plan was criticized before people knew what it was about," says Chiapas Gov. Pablo Salazar, whose election last December ended seven decades of one-party rule in the state and who was supported by the same leftist groups now opposing the Fox proposal.

"We don't have the intention of turning Chiapas into a "maquiladora" state," Salazar says. "But it's very important to know that there is a jobs deficit here. We have to generate employment."

Salazar's government is working to attract clothing-assembly plants to larger towns on the edges of the Selva Lacandona. Arriaga and other officials are pushing plans for huge privately owned tree plantations, like those already operating in other southern states.

Some experts say such plantations, which extend for thousands of acres and include land owned by different people, prove both unwieldy to organize and of limited benefit to rural communities. The lower-quality timber produced on many of the plantations competes in an already-saturated world marketplace.

"Mexico should go after niche markets with high-value, good-quality, community-produced timber," says David Bray, chairman of the environmental studies department at Florida International University in Miami, who has studied Mexican forestry for 25 years.

Maya farmer cooperatives have been producing mahogany and other high-priced woods in the coastal forest south of the resort city of Cancun for years now. As a result, Bray says, very little forest has been lost in that area in recent decades.

"The challenge is to get people the skills and knowledge to generate new forms of incomes off existing forests," Bray says.

Community forestry has not taken root in the Selva Lacandona because logging concessions often have been the monopoly of large companies and those linked to state and federal officials. The problem has been compounded in recent years by the Zapatista uprising which has split many forest communities.

"The forest could be the solution to the poverty" of its people, says Alejandro Lopez Portillo, the director of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected area in the Selva Lacandona. "The thing is to manage the forest, not to leave it there like an adornment.

"We have to demonstrate that an acre of forest is much more profitable than an acre of pasture or an acre of cornfield," he says.

Private environmental and development organizations, as well as government agencies, have been trying for years to promote the production of vanilla, cacao, shade-grown organic coffee and other "forest-friendly" products in Selva Lacandona communities.

A few villages have tapped into the exploding tourist interest in the Maya region, building lodges and restaurants to serve travelers and offering tours of the ruins and forests. Still others hope to attract "maquiladoras."

"What people are asking for is more employment," says Martin Hernandez, the top elected official in San Quintin, an army garrison boomtown on the western edge of the Montes Azules reserve. "There are a lot of people without work.

"How else are they going to survive when there is no more land?" says Hernandez, whose community was founded 35 years ago and now is home to about 3,000 people.

For all the tension it generates, the Zapatista movement has brought some economic benefits.

Hoping to quell the rebellion, the Mexican government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid into the forest.

The government has built new roads and bridges and improved existing ones. It has constructed schools and health clinics and staffed them. It has extended water, sewer and power lines to Maya villages.

It also has paved a 250-mile highway, formerly a kidney-jolting path that became a quagmire each rainy season. The road loops around the forest and along the Guatemala border.

Paving the highway has enabled communities to attract more tourists and get their products to market. But environmentalists worry that the road, which shortens to six hours a car trip that once took several days, will encourage greater deforestation.

"It depends upon who is looking at it. If it's an ecologist who lives in Mexico City and wants to protect the forest, this is a corridor that will destroy it," says Arriaga, the federal environmental official. "But one of the conditions for development is communication with the outside world."

Still, the continued failure of the Fox government to make peace with the Zapatistas continues to limit the economic possibilities. The rebels' fading support makes it unlikely that they can dictate policy. But the rebels still wield enough power to scuttle any plans they don't like.

"If there always will be conflict, there won't be any investment," says Encino, the Chiapas official. "That's why reconciliation is fundamental." Error: Unable to read footer file.