Lima’s Wetlands Park Is Facing an Urban Siege : Peru: Developers and landowners try to grab pieces of ‘Little Everglades.’ Surrounding poverty also has an impact.

A pied-billed grebe pops to the surface of the open water of the Pantanos de Villa nature reserve, while snowy-white great egrets perch on palm trees and an osprey cruises overhead looking for food.

The wetland, only 12 miles from downtown Lima, is considered the capital’s own little version of the vast Florida Everglades.

It is the last natural area in the urban octopus of Lima and is an important resting spot for birds that migrate south to escape the North American winter.

But the 667 acres of fresh-water marsh, hedged in by the Pacific Ocean, Lima’s sprawl and the desert on Peru’s western coast, is under siege. It is beset not only by pollution, but by real estate developers and the poor overflowing the city’s shantytowns.

While blue-billed Andean ruddy ducks paddle about a lagoon, a dump truck spills dirt, rock, brick and trash at the edge of a filling operation that is eating away at the wetlands in one disputed area. The wind picks up a ripped black plastic garbage bag and blows it into the marsh grass.

“That’s why we’re in litigation,” said Arnold Millet, a park service official who with local environmentalists is trying to save the reserve.

Until recently, poaching went unchecked and armed robberies of visitors were common. One gang was caught on the reserve stripping stolen autos. Police even broke up a prostitution ring that used the area as an open-air brothel.

The pressure on the reserve is so severe that President Alberto Fujimori issued a decree in 1991 ordering the army to protect it.

Soldiers put a wire fence around the reserve, and troops acted as park rangers until Peru’s recent border conflict with Ecuador. When the soldiers left for the war front, Millet’s office got a branch of the National Police that specializes in environmental protection to patrol the reserve.

More than 25%--173 acres--of the wetlands are in litigation, with the park service and environmental groups on one side and residents and business that have encroached or would like to do so on the other, Millet said.

Once part of a large hacienda that was seized by a military government in the early 1970s, the wetlands were declared a “park zone” in 1977.

But government neglect led to property disputes as builders and poor squatters took advantage of ambiguous boundaries to grab pieces of the marsh.

In the most blatant case, two businessmen posing as “campesinos” staked a claim to 100 acres in the middle of the reserve, under a Peruvian law that gives peasants rights to previously idle land that they have worked for five years.

Carlos Chirinos, an attorney for the Peruvian Society for Environmental Rights, said a judge threw the claim out because of irregularities.

However, the businessmen, who are connected with a major Lima hotel owner, have appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

While lawyers fight in court to save the reserve and police keep an eye out for poachers, the park department is looking at ways to stem contamination from flowing into the Villa wetlands from nearby neighborhoods.

A major source of pollution is soap, detergent and bleach used by poor people who hand-wash clothing in springs that feed the marsh.

So the park department is building two rudimentary laundries with small water treatment plants in the neighboring shantytown, Millet said.

Park officials also have visited the Everglades National Park in Florida and exchanged technical data with scientists there, he said.

Talks are going on with Everglades officials in hopes of reaching a formal agreement on technical cooperation, which could include training for Peruvian staff, he said.

Despite the threats to the reserve, its protectors say they are optimistic.

Millet said water contamination is high but not critical, except where fill is dumped.

Anthony Luscombe, a naturalist from New York who also is president of Peru’s Conservation and Ecology Assn., said the number of birds that live in the reserve year round has been increasing. He attributes that to reduced hunting in the area.

“It makes it more acceptable to birds since they don’t get their tails shot off all the time,” he said.