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FOREST CONSERVATION NEWS TODAY

Battleground in Mexico’s Tropical Rainforests

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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.

  http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Portal

  http://www.EnvironmentalSustainability.info/ -- Eco-Portal

August 4, 2002

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Forests.org

There is a colossal battle being waged to save North America's last

large pocket of tropical rain forest - Montes Azules in Mexico. 

There are no easy answers when habitat protection and grinding

poverty are at odds.  The one certainty is that more habitat loss

will inexorably lead to more suffering and more ecological refugees. 

Increasingly poverty is the result of ecological collapse after

industrial resource developers move on.  Further deforestation of the

World’s much diminished primary forests will not provide security or

livelihoods for any forest-dependent peoples.  Global ecological

sustainability – including our air, water, climate and other

ecological systems - and all of humanity’s security - depends upon

maintaining large blocks of mostly intact and regenerating natural

vegetation to power global ecological processes that make the Earth

habitable. 

If maintaining the Earth and securing our existence is something

humanity values, we have to pay for it – financing community

development, population control, reduced consumption and rigorously

patrolled protected areas.  The resources of the global growth

machine and military-industrial complex must be diverted to

developing and implementing policies to achieve equitable social

development and ecological sustainability.  Failure means global

ecological decay and human agony on a massive scale.  Success will

herald in the era of ecological restoration, peace and relative

prosperity for most.  Achieving global ecological sustainability in a

just and equitable manner is the challenge of our time.

g.b

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Title:  Tropical Rain Forest Sprouts Battleground

  Environmentalists are pitted against leftists and Zapatista rebels 

  in Montes Azules.

Source:  LA Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/science/

Date:  August 4, 2002

Byline:  MARK STEVENSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

LACANJA, Mexico -- The battle to save North America's last large

pocket of tropical rain forest is shattering old notions of political

correctness -- pitting leftists against environmentalists and

Zapatista rebels against other Indians.

Lacandon Indians, who have lived for centuries in the Montes Azules

jungle near the Guatemalan border, oppose the incursion of Indian

settlers from the nearby highlands. The settlers are clearing land in

the nature reserve to make room for farms.

The Zapatista rebels back the settlers, arguing that Indian farmers

are the best protectors of the rain forest. The rebels accuse

environmentalists who oppose the squatters' movement of being fronts

for corporate plans to exploit jungle resources.

At stake is a major source of fresh water in a parched nation, the

last jungle in North America big enough to support jaguars, and the

habitat of 340 species of birds and dozens of endangered plants and

animals.

The conflict is also raising worries about violence between Indians.

The ideological atmosphere has become so venomous that some

environmental groups have walked away from the debate, despite their

fears that settlement is threatening the jungle's viability.

The rhetoric of Indian rights and anti-globalization is being used to

justify deforestation, which environmentalists argue will benefit the

Indians little because the denuded land can yield crops for only a

ouple of seasons.

On a recent afternoon in the 1,290-square-mile Montes Azules--Blue

Mountains--the tall canopy of cedar, mahogany and cypress trees was

shrouded in smoke and dotted with farmers' fires.

Huge fire-blackened trunks of cypress trees loomed out of recently

cleared fields.

But the effects of human settlement are felt even in areas where

mammoth Guanacaste trees are still shrouded in vines and bromeliads,

where streams run crystal clear amid enormous ferns, palms and huge

wild elephant's ear plants.

Montes Azules is becoming a silent jungle as settlers carve it into

disconnected patches: in many parts, tapirs, howler monkeys and

parrots are already gone.

Patience is wearing thin among the Lacandones. Living in small,

jungle-friendly clearings for centuries, their number has dwindled to

just 800, but they are the legal owners of much of the reserve--much

more land than they need, the settlers say.

No accurate figure of the settler population is available, but

various estimates put it at 5,000 to 10,000.

"They are coming in, cutting the trees and destroying not just our

land, but our way of life," said Alfonso Chankin, a Lacandon leader

in traditional white cotton tunic, black hair down to his waist. His

clear plastic sandals are one of the few traces of his contact with

the outside world.

Speaking in halting Spanish in the yard of his thatched-roof home in

Lacanja, Chankin said that "if the government doesn't do anything, we

are going to have to take matters into our own hands and throw them

out ourselves."

The risk of violence is real. On May 31, 26 Indians in nearby Oaxaca

state were massacred by a neighboring community in a similar land

dispute.

Any attempt at eviction by the Lacandones and their allies would

almost certainly spark violence.

"The only way they will get us out of here is dead," said Manuel, a

Zapatista activist in El Suspiro, a squatter camp deep inside the

reserve. Near his bare wooden shack, felled trees smoldered in a

freshly cleared field.

Manuel, who like many Zapatistas identifies himself only by his first

name, mainly fears government soldiers and police.

Security forces appeared ready in April to forcibly remove the

settlers. But the national government backed off at the request of

Chiapas state officials, who want more talks--although negotiations

appear to be going nowhere.

"We're reaching a critical point where the jungle can't work as an

ecosystem anymore," said Ignacio March, a biologist for Washington-

based Conservation International, one of the few groups that has

braved the rebels' criticism to publicly oppose the settlements. "For

example, a jaguar can't live in a small patch of jungle. They need a

large, continuous habitat."

The rebels say they want to turn Montes Azules into an "Indian

Farmers' Reserve," a patchwork of farms and jungle.

Jaime, the Zapatista "commissioner" who oversees El Suspiro and

several other camps, said the rebels have instructed their supporters

not to burn or chop down trees, but admitted the rule is hard to

enforce.

Manuel, after some prompting from his boss, grudgingly said farmers

should "cut as little as possible."

"This land belonged to my ancestors," said Manuel, whose Tzotzil

forebears actually come from the highlands 80 miles to the east.

Highland Indians began migrating into the reserve in the 1960s,

sometimes encouraged by the government and also pressured by high

population growth and cattle ranchers who stole their land.

In an abrupt about-face in the 1970s, the government declared the

jungle off-limits to settlers and created a nature reserve. It

evicted some squatters and granted the tiny group of Lacandones

ownership of huge tracts in the reserve.

That closing of the last virgin corner of Chiapas bred resentment in

some Indian communities, anger that became the foundation for the

Zapatista movement that appeared 20 years later.

But after the government set up the reserve, it never patrolled or

protected it, and a patchwork system was instituted under which some

squatter camps were allowed to stay. Only about 20 forestry guards

patrol the whole reserve.

"People here don't respect authority anymore," said forest guard

Jorge Luis Gomez. "If we went into the squatters' camps, they'd lynch

us."

From the air, the reserve looks like a vast green blanket scattered

with blue lagoons and brown clearings. The number of settlements rose

sharply after the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising, which encouraged land

takeovers and effectively ended police operations in the region.

Zapatista members account for only about half the settlements, but

the rebels have effectively blocked the relocation of any settlers by

threatening violence, boycotting talks and occupying vacated jungle

camps.

A poorly financed government relocation program offers some land and

building materials outside the reserve, but running water and

electricity are often lacking.

"The government should accept the communities that are living in

Montes Azules, and allow them to become honorary and permanent

guardians of the biodiversity there," the pro-rebel Fray Bartolome

Human Rights Center said in a June letter to President Vicente Fox.

There is little evidence the squatter camps are protecting anything.

The settlers clear plots for corn, exhausting the soil after a few

harvests, then turn the land into pasture for cattle.

In the newly settled Seis de Octubre camp, 70 families were hacking

into the jungle to build long wooden shacks.

Ebelio Maldonado, a 27-year-old Tzeltal Indian, stood between a pile

of recently felled trees and a smoking field where precious tropical

hardwoods were reduced to ash.

"The Zapatista army sent us here to take care of the land," said

Maldonado, moving his hand in the air to trace the outline of the new

settlement. "We'll plant beans and corn and buy fertilizer, and we'll

take care of everything here in the jungle."

With large families--Manuel has seven children--the settlements must

expand. "We'd like to bring in some cattle and some mechanized

planting," Maldonado said.

The results of that can be seen in the two-thirds of the original

Lacandon jungle outside the reserve that has already been cut down.

Stream beds are dried up, and only a few skinny cows graze on sun-

baked grassland.

Ranchers love grass, but it is the enemy of the jungle. Once it takes

hold, it carpets the ground and interferes with the natural cycle of

regeneration that the Lacandones depend on.

Lacandon farmer Manuel Castellanos curses the grass as he stoops to

pluck it away in his small farm plot in a jungle clearing.

Such clearings can support a Lacandon family for 20 years because

they vary plantings -- yucca and other root crops, fruits and

vegetables, and corn.

The practice allows fields to regenerate, provide second-growth wood,

and be used again for farming.

"This is the heart of the water, the lungs of the world. This is our

heritage," Castellanos said. "And we are losing it."

Biologists hold out hopes that the Lacandones' knowledge of jungle

agriculture--imperfect, but better than the settlers' farming

methods--can be spread to other groups.

But that appears unlikely, given the hostility between the Lacandones

and the Zapatistas, who oppose the very concept of nature reserves.

"The Lacandones acted selfishly, and against their fellow Indians, by

not sharing the land," said Jaime, the Zapatista area leader. "There

is no way they, all alone, can take advantage of all this land."

The fact that the Lacandones don't want to "take advantage" of the

land--preferring instead to preserve it as an occasional hunting or

fishing ground--is an idea lost in the clash between the two groups'

cultures.

For a movement that demands respect for Indians, the Zapatistas

express open contempt for the Lacandones, calling them a manipulated,

pampered tool of the government.

Rebel sympathizers even refuse to call them Lacandones--the name the

Indians prefer. They insist on calling them "Caribes," the name of a

group of Indians from outside Mexico.

But the Zapatistas aim their harshest attacks at environmentalists.

Many rebel supporters view Zapatista support for squatters as part of

a battle against economic globalization. They see the objections to

the settlements as pretexts to hide corporate conspiracies, or to

help Mexico's conservative government and its now abandoned plan for

a hydroelectric dam near the reserve, or to weaken the Zapatista

movement.

The rebels cite cash donations by the U.S. Agency for International

Development and a Mexican agribusiness company to Conservation

International as proof that the environmentalists want to sell the

jungle's water or genetic samples of wildlife.

"They aren't really interested in protecting the reserve. They want

to mine it: for genetic material, for water, for hydroelectric

power," said Andres Aubrey, an anthropologist who has worked in

Chiapas for more than a decade.

Biologist Victor Hugo Hernandez, a former director of the reserve,

counters: "The whole bio-piracy issue is pretty much a pretext to

justify settlement."

The attack from the left -- long an ally of conservation movements --

has scared off the Washington-based World Wildlife Fund, which in

2000 signed a petition calling for the removal of settlers, but later

dropped that position and now refuses to talk about the reserve.

"We learned our lesson that time. We found ourselves in the middle of

so much polemics that you can't answer them," said Mercedes Otegui,

spokeswoman for the WWF in Mexico. "Our policy is now just not to get

involved."

Homer Aridjis, an environmental activist, said he had been pressured

by Zapatista sympathizers to support settlement. "I told them I

couldn't do it. No political cause, however good, justifies

destroying nature."

"Just because they are Indians, that doesn't justify them destroying

a jungle that is the patrimony of the whole nation, the whole world,"

Aridjis said.

March, the biologist at Conservation International, which has taken

the most heat, said, "We're attacked as spies because we use U.S.

satellite images, or because we are based in Washington."

But, he added, "the fight is not against us. It's against

deforestation."

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