COLUMN ONE : Fighting to Save Their Own : In Belize, it’s the jaguar. In Colombia, it’s the Andean condor. Latin Americans are more aggressively preserving imperiled species after years of relying on others.

The tawny, doll-sized monkeys with bushy manes and beseeching eyes showed no alarm when three men invaded their tropical forest. Instead of fleeing, the golden lion tamarins circulated overhead, lolling from branch to branch, some venturing down to within a few feet of their visitors.

“They are super-calm. They’re just curious,” explained Fernando de Moraes, the manager of a 13,000-acre reserve where Brazilian environmentalists, with international support, are trying to save the tamarin from extinction.

But it isn’t just the monkeys the activists want to save: To protect the tamarin, they must also preserve its natural habitat--and hundreds of other animal and plant species that depend on one another for survival in the wild. This makes the cute, friendly animal a perfect “flagship species,” a living emblem of the endangered lowland rain forest northeast of Rio de Janeiro along the Atlantic coastline.

North Americans have long been familiar with the concept of flagship species, used in the fight to preserve the whooping crane and the brown pelican.

Now the idea has taken hold in Latin America: It’s the vaquita porpoise in the Gulf of California. The jaguar in Belize. The Andean condor in Colombia. The giant river otter in Peru. The Spix’s macaw in Brazil. The huemul deer in southern Argentina and Chile.

Throughout this region, a rapidly spreading movement is relying on flagship species to rally government, public and international support for conservation causes.

These imperiled animals have also received heightened attention from what has become a driving force in the Latin American conservation movement: Local “NGOs” or non-governmental organizations that have sprung up like mushrooms in a humid forest during the past several years.

“I think Latin America is leading the developing world in the rapid increase of NGOs,” said Thomas Lovejoy, an environmentalist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. “There has been an explosion in public awareness and new conservation organizations.”

The regional boom in such grass-roots groups has been sparked partly by environmental activism in the United States and Europe. Many of the Latin American groups work closely with international counterparts, drawing on their expertise.

Environmentalists began to pop up when military regimes started to ease their repression in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As democracy returned to country after country, the green groups multiplied. In Brazil, where concern has focused on the Amazon forest, more than 1,000 of them have been formed since the armed forces gave up power in 1985.

“It had to do mostly with the empowerment of private organizations with democratization,” said Lou Ann Dietz of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The emergence of environmental groups has not halted the devastation in the region. Deforestation, erosion, water pollution and other forms of ecological damage continue to mount in Latin America.

Preservation efforts also continue to be too costly for many countries plagued by poverty. And while the number of parks and preserves has grown, many are “paper” efforts and offer flora and fauna little real protection from squatters, loggers and poachers.

But the environmental movement’s impact is growing as the groups gain experience and influence.

In Mexico, the Monarch Butterfly Foundation is working with the government to save preserves for the migrating insects. The Peruvian Assn. for the Conservation of Nature led a successful drive to create a 678,000-acre park where the endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkey finds refuge.

Such organizations often can act while government agencies are bogged down in bureaucracy.

“In almost all our projects, if there weren’t NGOs, they wouldn’t work,” said Maria Iolita Bampi of the official Brazilian Environment Institute.

Ilmar Santos, director general of the 5-year-old Biodiversitas Foundation, said Brazilian organizations like his spend much of their time assisting and cajoling the government.

“If the government did things perfectly, NGOs . . wouldn’t have a job,” Santos said.

Many Latin American environmentalists have realized the import of working with residents of threatened areas, helping communities with economic problems and enlisting cooperation in conservation projects.

To educate local communities and the public, the approach of designating flagship species is useful, said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of the U.S.-based Conservation International. “Flagship species grab people much more than the general concept of saving ecosystems,” he noted.

In Silva Jardim, a rural town 75 miles from Rio de Janeiro, environmentalists have worked with ranchers and residents for a decade, promoting preservation of the tamarin and what remains of its forest habitat, which once covered these coastal lowlands.

When the project began in 1983, about 250 tamarins lived in the 13,000-acre Poco das Antas Biological Reserve. Today, there are about 300, the most the forest can support. Another 120 monkeys have been reintroduced into native woods on 10 area ranches. Those animals came mostly from foreign zoos, participants in a related, captive-breeding program for the species; some 550 golden lion tamarins live in zoos around the world.

“Through the reintroduction, we are protecting private forests,” said Denise Rambaldi, a forestry engineer and educator in the tamarin project. “When you protect the golden lion tamarin, automatically you are protecting the forest and all of the other species in the forest.”

Rambaldi said ranchers cooperate with the project because they understand the importance of preserving forests to also protect the soil and water. But the prestige of the local flagship species also plays a role. “The lion tamarin is known throughout the world, so for them it is very chic to say they have lion tamarins on their ranch,” she said.

The project must incorporate many more private woods to fulfill its goal of preserving 57,000 acres--the amount of forest scientists say is needed to support the 2,000 tamarins that will guarantee the varied genetic pool required to preserve the species.

Among foreign groups and government agencies participating in the project are the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Smithsonian, the Friends of the National Zoo and Wildlife Preservation Trust Fund International.

The Brazilian groups include the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature and the Primate Center of Rio de Janeiro. IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, also is active.

That array is typical of the kind of cooperative approach that often is most successful in working with flagship species.

Notable examples of flagship species projects abound: Brazilians are trying to save three kinds of blue macaw, the Spix’s and the Lear’s in the northeast and the hyacinth in the Pantanal wetlands.

The muriqui, largest monkey in the Americas, is another flagship species for the preservation of the estimated 10% that remains of the coastal forest. Brazil’s IBAMA has established a center on Itamaraca Island, near Recife, for protection of the Brazilian coastal manatee, endangered by hunting.

Common elements in the many projects include a growing awareness that in Latin America, environmental problems--and their solutions--go beyond a single species, ecosystem or country.

Times staff writer Juanita Darling in Mexico City and special correspondents Adriana von Hagen in Lima, Peru, and Steven Ambrus in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.

Celebrity Species

Here is a sampling of flagship species in the ecological spotlight in Latin America:

VAQUITA PORPOISE

As a result of efforts by various non-governmental organizations, the Mexican government has created a 2.3-million-acre reserve in the northern Gulf of California and Colorado River delta--the only area where a small porpoise known as the vaquita is found.

Fishermen had been catching juvenile vaquitas in their nets, and the mammals were also suffering from the decreased flow and contamination of Colorado River waters. Estimates of the surviving porpoise population were as low as 100.

“People were horrified because it was just disappearing before our eyes,” said Evelyn Wilcox, World Wildlife Fund marine coordinator for Latin America. A local group has begun working with gulf fishermen, and the WWF and Conservation International are helping.

“The reserve will not only preserve the endangered species but also protect an array of commercial fish,” said Alejandro Robles, director of Conservation International’s office in Guaymas, on the gulf.

ENGLISH MONKEY

Known as the uacari in Portuguese, this large primate has white fur and a bald, bright-red head. It lives in a system of big islands and small lakes in Brazil’s eastern Amazon region, and it is threatened with extinction by hunters. “They eat it and they sell it,” said Paulo Lyra, a WWF officer in Brazil.

The state of Amazonas has established the 2.8-million-acre Mamiraua Ecological Station but has provided no guards or money to protect it.

So the WWF and Brazilian environmentalists, with financial help from the British government, are setting up a conservation association to work with rural residents. Other rare species in the preserve include the recently discovered blackish squirrel monkey, the umbrella bird, two species of fresh water dolphin and the endangered Amazon manatee.

The residents in the past have allowed outsiders in to hunt English monkeys and other animals, fish and cut wood, Lyra said. “But now the population is going to look after the place.”

MONARCH BUTTERFLY

Seven years ago, the Mexican government created five mountaintop sanctuaries to protect the winter home of the monarch butterfly, which migrates 5,000 miles to summer in the United States and Canada.

Today, two of those sanctuaries are deforested and the other three have been ravaged by loggers.

Like loggers in the Pacific Northwest who resist preservation of the spotted owl, the 24 peasant communities located near the Mexican reserves fear that their livelihood is endangered by attempts to protect the monarch.

Last winter, 70% of the monarch population was wiped out. The government blamed a cold snap, but biologists said the shrinking oyamel fir forests provided the butterfly too little protection against the weather.

Lincoln Brower, a zoologist who has studied the butterfly for nearly two decades, called last winter a warning: “If we ignore it, we will lose them forever.”

The Mexico City-based Monarch Butterfly Foundation, which assists the government with four sanctuaries, is leading an effort to reforest and to persuade peasants that there is more money to be made in ecotourism than logging.

JAGUAR

The flagship species for Belize’s 108,000-acre Cockscomb Basin Forest Preserve is the jaguar, one of Latin America’s biggest cats. The preserve is also home to a large variety of other species, including howler monkeys translocated from other areas of the Central American country where they are threatened by deforestation.

The government has turned management of the Cockscomb over to the Belize Audubon Society. The WWF helps with funding and technical assistance.

The park’s rangers are all people from surrounding villages who are familiar with the natural environment and how local people use and abuse it. “They are aware of threats to the area,” said Pamela Hathaway, a WWF project officer for Central America.

ANDEAN CONDOR

Working with the San Diego Zoo and other private groups, the Colombian government is reintroducing Andean condors into the country’s high Cordilleras, where hunting and human encroachment had reduced the bird’s population to an estimated 30. Since 1989, 26 young zoo-bred males have been set free at three locations.

The male condors have been fed and monitored and now are ready for breeding with several females introduced in the past year. The goal is to establish a growing and self-sufficient population of the big birds; that will also require careful conservation of their natural environment.

GIANT RIVER OTTER

The world’s largest otters, measuring up to six feet and weighing as much as 70 pounds, were formerly found in rivers and lakes throughout South America’s humid tropics. But poaching for the international fur trade has left only 1,000 to 3,000 of the animals.

About 100 of them are protected in Manu National Park, a Massachusetts-sized wildlife reserve created in southeastern Peru in 1973. Christof Schenck, who studies Manu’s otters for the Frankfurt Zoological Society and participates in a preservation project for the animals, said the otter serves as an indicator of how healthy the ecosystem is.

“Whenever giant otters still find living conditions, i.e., healthy water and a rich choice of fish, the rain forest environment is still intact,” Schenck said.

BLUE MACAW

Brazil is trying to save three kinds of blue macaw, the Spix’s and the Lear’s in the northeast and the hyacinth in the Pantanal wetlands.

The Spix’s, native to the semiarid interior of Bahia state in northeastern Brazil, near the Sao Francisco River, is the rarest bird in Latin America. Only one of the parrots, a male, is known to survive in the wild, although many live in zoos around the world.

After the wild bird was found near the town of Curaca in 1990, the government’s environmental protection agency IBAMA formed an international committee of official agencies and private groups to promote the regeneration of the Spix’s. The committee includes U.S.-based Conservation International, the International Council for Bird Preservation, the WWF and three Brazilian groups.

Environmentalists are conducting an education campaign to promote conservation among residents of the area and are planning to help them build fences to keep livestock from eating tender shoots that propagate trees needed for the macaw’s survival. And next year, biologists plan to reintroduce a captive female Spix’s to mate with the wild male.

“The male is going to serve as a guide for the female to learn survival in nature,” said Marcos Da’Re, an IBAMA biologist working on the project.

YELLOW-TAILED WOOLLY MONKEY

This endangered Amazon primate, endemic to the cloud forests of northeastern Peru, was discovered by German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt in 1802 and “rediscovered” by an American expedition in 1974. The rediscovery spurred the creation in 1983 of the Rio Abiseo National Park.

The yellow-tailed woolly “became a symbol of the need to protect the cloud forest,” said Silvia Sanchez, president of the Peruvian Assn. for the Conservation of Nature, which spearheaded the drive to create the 678,000-acre Rio Abiseo park.

It is home to many species found nowhere else, such as the hairy armadillo and the Huallaga toucan. But park funding from the WWF and the University of Colorado has run out, and the number of park rangers has dwindled from nine to three.

SEA TURTLES

The leatherback and other sea turtles along the Atlantic coast of Brazil--including the loggerhead, the hawksbill the green ridley and the olive ridley--are making a comeback thanks to a joint public-private project called Tamar. The main partners are IBAMA and the Pro-Tamar Foundation, headed by oceanographer Neca Marcovaldi.

The turtles, some weighing as much as 1,500 pounds, were disappearing rapidly. Poachers were stealing eggs and hunting females when they came out of the sea to lay them in the sand. Other turtles were dying after being caught accidentally in fishermen’s nets.

Tamar works with local fishing communities along more than 600 miles of coast, paying fishermen to protect female turtles and eggs and teaching them how to resuscitate turtles captured in their nets. “It’s done with pressure on the chest, almost the same technique you use on people,” Marcovaldi said.