MEXICO: Unfamiliar Turf: Saving the Environment© 2001 The Washington Post Company
December 28, 2001
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
PIE DE LA CUESTA, Mexico - This narrow sandbar, the most famous place in Mexico to watch the Pacific swallow the evening sun, hugs a natural wonder called the Coyuca Lagoon. Hollywood moviemakers have come here to film Tarzan swinging through the tangled trees and Rambo wading in the jungle swamps.
Though only a few miles down a cluttered ocean drive from high-rise Acapulco, the vast and wild lagoon had safely dodged development for decades -- until early this year. Then, hundreds of would-be pioneers arrived, machetes in hand. They hacked and whacked for days, sidestepping snakes and scorpions as they felled almost every tree and cleared a mile of shoreline down to the dirt.
Eventually 3,000 people raised a squatters' city because they wanted something many poor people only dream of: a place of their own. And what a place. The lagoon is a haven for flamingos, pelicans, oysters and rare turtles. Elegant coconut palms tower over thick swamplands of mangroves and eelgrass, where shrimp fishermen in narrow canoes toss nets of nearly invisible filament into the shallows.
"The air is so fresh here," said Idolina Rodriguez Vela, 71, a great-grandmother and one of the first residents, offering a cup of Nescafé from her shack a few yards from the lagoon. "I hope I can stay here forever."
In the past, there would have been little question that she could. But in a changing Mexico, where President Vicente Fox has promised to make protecting the neglected environment a hallmark of his term, there are unprecedented moves to oust the squatters, known here as "parachutists."
Government officials have long tolerated illegal land seizures by the poor as an inevitable reality. Mexico's population has quadrupled since 1950, from 25 million to 100 million. At the same time, there has been relentless migration from dying farming areas into the cities, which has resulted in a severe urban housing shortage.
With 40 percent of Mexico's population considered very poor, many of these millions have simply taken over empty land. In Mexico City alone there are more than 60,000 families living in 700 illegal settlements created by "invasion." Many of the settlements are in areas that are vacant because they are environmentally fragile, including land along streams, sewer lines or steep ravines where construction worsens erosion.
Most of these settlements do not have plumbing, leading to acute pollution problems in a nation already plagued by water contamination.
The government has almost always looked the other way. Many Mexicans are sympathetic to poor people who bend the law, even by taking over property, to feed or shelter their families. Local political bosses have often helped create the problem. By orchestrating illegal land takeovers to force the mayor or governor to negotiate with them, local bosses have won a variety of concessions to solve the very land problem they helped create.
Fox has vowed to change this and enforce the laws. He and his high-profile environmental secretary, Victor Lichtinger, have pledged to safeguard Mexico's coastal waters and forests, dispatching a small army of federal environmental prosecutors.
Leading the charge here in Guerrero state is Inocente Leon Piñeda, a bespectacled lawyer who is a sort of environmental Elliot Ness, busting polluters on the glitzy Acapulco beachfronts and in forgotten mountain villages.
His efforts are only a beginning. Leon has just eight agents to cover a state the size of West Virginia. Many of the inspectors don't have tape measures to record the size of contraband logs or even transportation to reach the polluters. For months, Leon used his own cell phone and computer.
Despite modest means, Fox's environmental enforcers have conducted several surprise operations. They have stopped construction on hotels and homes begun without required environmental impact studies. For the first time, building permits matter.
Surveying the shantytown at Coyuca Lagoon, Leon, 33, sees things with a preacher's clarity. "They must leave," he said. "I don't want them to kill the lagoon."
The government's new resolve comes at a time of increasing public awareness of environmental issues. More than 10,000 people have signed petitions urging the government to dismantle the lagoon encampment. Angry activists take bullhorns to the street complaining about government inaction. Some have held public meetings to present plans for protecting the lagoon.
"If they are not moved, in five years this lagoon will be a toilet," said Robyn Sidney, who has lived in the area for 37 years and is helping lead the civic fight. Standing in a boat surveying the shantytown, she said: "We will not stand for it. Look at the birds here, the fish. It's a treasure."
As Leon prepares an eviction order, local, state and federal authorities are pointing fingers at one another about who is responsible for relocating the squatters, and who will take the blame if there is any violence during a forced eviction. Eleven months have passed since Rodriguez chopped down the pine trees to build her one-room home. There are now 1,000 huts with an average of three residents in each.
"We don't want to pollute this water," said Rodriguez, swatting at swarms of toffee-colored gnats that cover everything. "But we don't have any choice because we are poor."
Living Off the Land
About 100 miles north of the Coyuca Lagoon, in the rugged forested mountains of Guerrero near the silver-mining town of Taxco, Leon rolled into the town of Ixcateopan in a caravan of four-wheel-drive trucks. Shutters slammed and doors closed as Leon and his eight agents hopped out.
The townspeople survive on the furniture they make from the trees they cut down. There are more than 100 family carpentry workshops here; perhaps five have permits to cut down trees. Mexico is losing its forests fast; 40 percent have disappeared since 1960. Environmentalists blame some of the damage on large logging companies. But they also say the cutting of a few trees at a time by the hundreds of thousands of poor people here to put food on their tables is a harder problem to solve.
Leon and his men walked to the back of one house in the center of town and found the Calderon family hard at work in their wood shop. Covered with sweat and sawdust, they were forming dining room chairs out of pine and juniper. A stack of white cedar, bark still on and chain-saw cuts still fresh, stood nearby.
Leon flashed his badge and demanded to see the family's permit to cut wood. They had nothing. Leon's men started writing up a complaint, which could lead to a hearing, and a fine as high as $1,000 because of the large amount of wood found. That is a large sum here, a place where one worker earns $75 for spending three weeks carving a kitchen table.
Edmundo Calderon looked stunned as the inspectors confiscated his wood. "We are not criminals, we are just working," he said.
Calderon said he has worked 14-hour days in his shop for 30 years. He held up his hands to show that he had lost two fingers to his saws. He's 72, but the wrinkles on his thin face made him look a decade older. He told the inspectors that he didn't understand why the government was chasing an old man. He said that in the past, officers rarely came by, and when they did, they simply asked for a bribe -- maybe a nice wooden bed or a table -- to look the other way.
Leon told Calderon that those days were over and handed the carpenter a phone number, a new hot line for citizens to rat out official corruption anonymously.
The old way was kinder, said a fuming Maria Calderon, Edmundo's daughter. "We want Fox to understand something," she said. "If he takes our livelihood away, he has to give us something else. We are a peaceful town because we have work."
Leon said he hears the same argument every day: We're poor so we have to break the law, cutting trees illegally to earn a living and building shantytowns on delicate waterways to have a home. Leon said he doesn't buy it -- poverty is no justification for destroying Mexico's water and air.
So he enforces the law and is despised for it. "People have said, 'Be careful. You have a family.' They have hit my car with a brick, put nails in my tires. Well, it's going to get more dangerous because we are going to continue to do our job."
A few months ago, snipers shot at two of his logging inspectors, hitting the roof of the government car they were driving. Even his shabby office in Acapulco recently was burglarized; stolen were inspection documents about a $1 million construction site he shut down.
During one of several visits with Leon and his environmental enforcers by a Washington Post reporter, Guerrero Gov. Rene Juarez Cisneros called Leon on his cell phone to chew him out about shutting down a road near the airport. Business was being disrupted, but Leon said debris from the bridge was being tossed into the river and killing fish.
"I am the most unpopular guy in the state," Leon said, driving out of the hills back to his base in Acapulco. "Even the environmentalists aren't happy. They want me to napalm the old ways. But I'm not a Batman, I am not a vigilante; I'm a lawyer."
On that day, he left behind the town of 100 carpenters and drove east toward Taxco on a winding road where much of the traffic consists of men, women and children leading donkeys loaded down with freshly cut wood. Some will use it for cooking fires in homes that have no electricity or running water. And many will sell it to carpenters.
He turned onto a rocky path. The first man he met was Julio Hernandez, 64, whose possessions appeared to be a shack, a donkey and one large, freshly cut log. Leon eyed the lumber, hacked down with an ax, and asked Hernandez where it came from.
"I cut it down. I had to. I need to sell it," Hernandez said. "It's better to do this than rob people. It's the only way we have to make a living."
Hernandez said he doesn't understand this new federal effort to protect the forests. "This land belongs to us, the people who live here," he said. "We cut this land like you cut your garden."
Leon took a deep breath and walked on. He let Hernandez go, for now, looking for bigger thieves, those with chain saws. But the problem right in front of him -- one old man with an ax and a single 10-foot log -- illustrated a difficult truth about these hills.
"There's no one target, there's no rich evil company doing all this -- it's everybody," Leon said. "You just have to avoid looking in their faces and do the job."
New Rules of the Game
If the squatter village at the Coyuca Lagoon has a founding father, it is David Molina Francisco, a local tough who led 1,000 machete-wielding squatters onto this vacant land just after New Year's Day.
Molina knows well how Mexico's land-extortion game is played. Take over the land, threaten the government with bloodshed if it tries to evict, and negotiate a settlement that ensures some land for the squatters and a nice cut for the man who made it all happen.
But it's not working out that way this time. Molina is sitting in a jail cell, awaiting trial on a list of charges, including rape. It is widely believed that his arrest was payback for his old-style, bare-knuckle politics.
"The person responsible for leading the invasion is in jail, and we are negotiating to relocate the squatters," said Juarez, Guerrero's governor. "We'll clear the area, but this is a social problem and people need alternatives. We can't take out guns and shoot at them; we have to find a solution."
The mayor of the small municipality with jurisdiction over the invaded land is Julio Cesar Diego Galeana. He said he could not stop the invasion because he has only 125 police officers and there were 1,000 people clearing the land. He said he has been coordinating with the governor and is hopeful the people will be moved to another piece of land "in three or four months." Diego said the parachutists who are truly poor will get government aid to build homes elsewhere.
"We can't jail them all," Diego said when asked why the eviction process is so slow. "That would provoke anti-government sentiments."
Officials at the jail where Molina is being held have not permitted him to be interviewed. But before he was locked up, he told reporters that greedy officials had taken this land, which rightfully should belong to the people. "If they want a war, they will get it," he said.
The land is owned by a bank and a former Guerrero governor, Israel Nogueda, who was ousted from office in the 1970s under a cloud of corruption. Nogueda said he came by the land legitimately. Asked why Mexico has a long history of presidents, governors and mayors owning the finest resort and beachfront land, Nogueda, 66, laughed heartily. "Don't make me talk," he said.
For now, Rodriguez, the great-grandmother who was in the vanguard of the invasion, has never been happier and doesn't want to budge. As she sat on a plastic chair outside her hut, she described her unenviable life: orphaned at 10, married at 14 and widowed at 35. "I have had to work like a man since I was a little girl," she said.
Her home, like most of the others, has an outhouse that leaches into the soil a few yards from a well used for drinking water. People bathe and wash clothes in the lagoon, which along this stretch is turning chocolate brown from runoff.
There are so many people living here now that big trucks rumble through delivering Coke, Corona beer and tortillas. Many homesteaders have planted flower gardens; some fly the Mexican flag on tall flagpoles. There is no telephone, no pavement and no plumbing. Electricity has been rigged illegally. A few of the more optimistic squatters have poured concrete for backyard pools, obviously hoping to stay awhile.
Rodriguez said the government's threatened crackdown has made things tense. Some residents have armed themselves and dug deep trenches in roads into the settlement to make it harder for police to sweep in and move them out. The place is dangerous, and everyone is on edge because nobody knows what is going to happen next.
Rodriguez hears that an eviction notice may be posted, but nothing has happened yet. She waits, rocking quietly in her hammock on warm evenings. The Coyuca Lagoon lies just beyond, shimmering and wounded.
Researcher Laurie Freeman contributed to this report.