Environment : Parks Under Siege in Latin America : Human invasions are threatening islands of natural wonder.

By WILLIAM R. LONG and MAC MARGOLIS

Nov. 22, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

ISIBORO-SECURE NATIONAL PARK, Bolivia —

Deep within this 2.2-million-acre reserve, smoke billowed up from the lap of a forested hill where Raul Romero was burning felled trees.

He was clearing virgin forest to plant rice to feed his family. In a year or two, when the weak tropical soil no longer is good for grain, he will probably replace the rice with coca bushes. Coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine, are Romero’s only cash crop.

“There is no other work for us in this place,” the 43-year-old Romero said as smoke from the burning trees swirled around him and his son, Freddy.

Thousands of farmers like Romero have taken over a 250,000-acre corner of Isiboro-Secure National Park, slashing and burning to plant patches of coca. Depredation of wilderness reserves is illegal and pitiable, but not unusual in Latin America.

Known for its vast rain forests, majestic Andean mountains and other natural splendors, this region of the continent does not lack national parks and reserves--at least on paper. But as Latin America’s population edges toward 500 million, and pressure on its natural resources grows, “protected areas” from Mexico to Argentina are coming under increasing assault from poaching, lumbering, mining, tourism, ranching and farming.

Internationally known areas where parks and preserves are in serious trouble include the Amazon rain forest and Pantanal wetlands of Brazil, Machu Picchu and the Manu River in Peru, the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in Colombia, the Peten forest of Guatemala and the Lacandon rain forest of Mexico.

Poverty, ignorance and corruption all contribute to the destruction. But James Nations, a vice president of Conservation International, said the most immediate problem is funding--”to hire the park guards, to buy the jeeps and to equip the conservation employees that should be out there on the ground patrolling areas and working with local people who live around the edges of those protected areas so that they have an economic alternative to destroying the park.”

Foreign governments and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, are providing millions of dollars a year to help protect Latin American natural areas, but it is not nearly enough. Foreign NGOs, including Conservation International, are also helping to create and support local NGOs.

“The positive response is bigger every year, but the threats are also bigger every year,” Nations said.

Some examples of the Latin American parks and preserves under pressure:

BOLIVIA

The Isiboro-Secure, Bolivia’s biggest park, is a lush expanse of subtropical forests and savannas, lakes and Amazon tributaries in the heart of South America. Its southern boundary meets the Chapare, one of the main coca-growing areas in South America.

As the Chapare filled up with coca growers in the 1980s, and as U.S. and Bolivian authorities pressed farmers to give up cultivation of the crop there, many growers moved into the more secluded Isiboro-Secure. Now, even the park’s Indian inhabitants cut down trees to grow coca.

“If we don’t have that, we don’t eat,” said Candido Ortega, a Yuracare native. Indians used to hunt wild animals for meat, but with the southern end of the park full of farmers, most of the game there is gone.

Farmer and Indian groups last year agreed on a “red line” limiting further penetration by settlers. Indians patrol the line, a 93-mile pathway across the park.

BRAZIL

The Mata Atlantica, or Atlantic Forest, stretches along Brazil’s entire coastline, harboring many unique species, including the largest primate in the Americas, the Uriqui monkey. Conservation International has designated the Mata Atlantica as the world’s most threatened ecosystem after the tropical forests of Madagascar.

In the Monte Paschoal National Park, an area of the Mata Atlantica in the state of Bahia, remnants of the forest are threatened by encroaching farmers and by Pataxo Indians, whose reservation borders on the park. The natives practice slash-and-burn agriculture and cut the park’s trees to produce charcoal. By unofficial estimates, nearly half of the park’s 100,000 acres has been deforested.

In Brazil’s enormous Amazon region, a plan for preserving large tracts of rain forest as “extractive reserves” is also running into problems. Environmentalists promoted preservation of big areas for extracting natural products such as rubber, Brazil nuts and wood dyes, which would give the reserves’ inhabitants an income from indigenous trees and plants.

But depressed prices for natural latex have made rubber-tapping unprofitable, and forest dwellers have had difficulty meeting orders for Brazil nuts. As a result, the extractive reserves seem doomed.

IBAMA, the government environmental agency, has four staffers to oversee the Mato Grosso National Park’s 333,000 acres, straddling the Pantanal wetlands and Cerrado scrublands in western Brazil, a favorite hunting ground for poachers in search of hides and pelts. Many of the area’s wildlife species--such as spotted jaguar, caiman, guara wolf, and Pantanal deer--are growing scarce.

ECUADOR

A growing tourist trade in the Galapagos Islands, a renowned national park 650 miles off Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, is putting severe pressure on the unique array of wildlife, which includes giant land tortoises, dragon-like lava iguanas, blue-footed boobies and 14 kinds of finches. About 46,000 tourists visited the islands in 1993, nine times the number two decades ago. An official protective limit of 12,000 tourists a year is ignored.

Meanwhile, Ecuadorians looking for jobs in tourism have swollen the local population, more than doubling the 1982 population of 6,200.

The tourist invasion of natural habitats, poaching by local residents and increasing numbers of domestic animals--as well as rats--are taking a worrisome toll on the natural flora and fauna.

COLOMBIA

Hector Vargas, the chief warden of Tayrona National Park, was shot and killed in September by unknown assailants. He was the sixth park official in Tayrona to be killed in the last 20 years.

Government officials and environmental activists say the violence in the 17,000-acre Tayrona park and in the nearby 946,000-acre Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park are the product of a caldron of conflicting forces in the region, including drug traffickers, guerrillas, paramilitary groups and illegal settlers.

“Because of a lack of governability and an inadequate presence of the state, many parks have become unmanageable,” Environment Minister Cecilia Lopez said. Some of the worst problems can be seen in the Sierra Nevada region, a detached mountain chain 18 miles from the Caribbean coast that is home to 30,000 Indians.

The marijuana boom of the 1970s led to the deforestation of thousands of acres inside the Sierra Nevada park by growers planting the weed, and led to the drying up of rivers in summer and massive flooding in the winter. The later cocaine boom brought coca growers and smugglers.

MEXICO

Indian communities in the two biosphere reserves that Mexico has created to preserve the Lacandon rain forest in the southernmost state of Chiapas were appalled to learn this autumn that the Agriculture Ministry had given two neighboring farm communities permission to clear damaged trees out of the reserves. The Group of 100, a loose-knit organization of intellectuals concerned about the environment, has charged that uncontrolled lumbering of precious woods is taking place in the reserves as a result of the permits.

The fight over lumbering is part of an ongoing battle in the Lacandon. In 1978, it appeared that the Indians had won when the 818,000-acre Montes Azules biosphere reserve was established. It became the first of 23 biosphere reserves the Mexican government would establish, in addition to 44 national parks.

But Montes Azules and Lacatun, a 152,800-acre reserve added nearby, exist only on maps. Settlers of Santa Helena village were told two decades ago that they had to move out of the reserve, but they remain. In the planting season, they clear land with machetes. When the fragile jungle topsoil gives out, they cut trees farther afield. Only 10% of what was a 3.2 million-acre jungle in 1875 still exists. All but 6% has been lost since 1960.

GUATEMALA

The Mayan Biosphere Reserve was created in 1990 but only really began to function as a reserve in 1992. It covers 3.9 million acres of the Peten jungle bordering Mexico and Belize plus a 1.2 million-acre buffer zone, and is the largest remaining tropical rain forest in Mesoamerica. With the buffer zone included, it is the size of El Salvador.

Not only does the park contain a vast treasure of biodiversity, it encloses the Tikal ruins and many ancient Mayan sites that generate more than $30 million a year in tourist revenue.

The park is administered by the National Commission for Protected Areas. The U.S. Agency for International Development has contributed $10 million for a park fund, but the commission gets only $90,000 a year, says Milton Cabrera, a commission official. “It is a toy budget, no more than symbolic.”

COSTA RICA

Despite the fame of its national park system, Costa Rica has one of the highest deforestation rates in Central America. Forty years ago, about 80% of Costa Rica was covered in trees; today, it’s 25%, all of which is in national parks and preserves.

A boom in tourism also threatens parks and wildlife. Costa Rica wants the tourists, but hotel construction and the increased tourist loads are destroying much of what the visitors are coming to see. In the Monteverde Cloud Forest, the famous golden toad and some other amphibian species have disappeared.

The 26,000-acre forest receives 20,000 tourists a year. Animals such as the colorful quetzal bird have moved deeper into the forest and are harder to see.

PERU

Manu National Park in southeastern Peru covers 3.7 million acres, an area about the size of Massachusetts. To control damage from tourism, authorities have set a limit of 500 visitors to the park a year, but at least 1,500 have been in so far this year.

Low-budget travelers, who bribe rangers to get in without paying park fees, trek through the park without authorized guides, camping on beaches along the river, spooking river otters and trampling turtle egg nests. Unauthorized guides shoot monkeys and other animals. No one keeps track of homesteaders, who are allowed to settle in park areas designated as “buffer zones.”

Peru’s Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary, a high Andean park that includes the ruins of the famous “Lost City of the Incas,” is under even greater pressure. The park is inhabited by more than 2,000 people, most of them in a town that has grown rapidly as merchants and vendors have moved in to make a living from the tourist trade.

Cattle, sheep and goats graze the park, devouring the native vegetation. Slash-and-burn farming scars the land, unleashing erosion and sometimes sparking forest fires. Residents also hunt native fauna such as the Andean condor, deer and puma. Rare orchids in the sanctuary are being depleted as poachers sell them to tourists or spirit them out of the country for the international orchid trade. Thousands of tourists trek through the park each year, especially along the old Inca Trail.

Contributing to this article were Times staff writers Juanita Darling and Tracy Wilkinson, and special correspondents Edward Orlebar, Steven Ambrus and Adriana von Hagen.

Some Parks in Peril

Isiboro-Secure National Park (Bolivia)

Size: 2.2 million acres

Threat: Colonization, timber interests.

Panatal National Park (Brazil)

Size: 333,450 acres

Threat: Deforestation, gold mining, poaching of crocodiles.

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park (Colombia)

Size: 946,101 acres

Threat: Colonization, destruction of archeological sites.

Galapagos National Park (Ecuador)

Size: 1,797,666 acres