Which Comes First--Food or the Forest?

From the air, the forest looks like a green serape tossed over a campfire. It is tattered, scorched and smoldering--slowly being burned to bits.

Less than a thousand miles from the U.S. border, Mexico’s largest rain forest--the Selva Lacandona--may not survive beyond the middle of the next century. At least 40% of its original 4 million acres already has been destroyed.

The Selva Lacandona is not nearly as big as the Amazon. But it is home to a larger array of mammals than the Brazilian forests. The wildlife includes jaguars, howler monkeys and macaws. The plant life includes the Barbasco vine, which supplied the ingredients of the first birth control pill. In all, half of Mexico’s flora and fauna live in the semitropical jungle in the southern state of Chiapas.

Although commercial logging is the cause of destruction in many forests, it is not the main issue here. The remoteness and density of the Lacandona have protected much of it from the ravages of clear-cutting.

Instead, it is being laid waste by disenfranchised peasants who are defying environmental laws much as their forefathers rebelled against the landed aristocracy.

In their quest for more arable land, residents of fast-growing villages--known as ejidos--are moving into the forest and burning trees to make room for cornfields and cow pastures. They insist slash-and-burn agriculture is their only means of feeding their families. It’s either forest or food, they say, many of them having had no land and few prospects until the government encouraged their migration to the jungle a generation ago.

About 300,000 people live in forest villages, a total likely to double in the next 20 years.

The dismemberment of the Lacandona raises a different challenge for conservation groups used to claiming the high moral ground in battles with multinational energy and timber companies.

This time, their adversaries are poor people. Not only that, they are icons of social upheaval--the heroes of the celebrated 1994 Zapatista rebellion, which embarrassed the government while arousing international sympathy for the long-suffering peasants of southern Mexico.

The collision of people and natural resources in the Lacandona poses a dilemma for Mexican authorities as well. The government is responsible for protecting the forest but also wants to keep peace with the people who are cutting it down.

Up to now, the forest has been the loser. Although soldiers are stationed throughout the region, they usually watch the fires burn, reluctant to do anything unless one gets out of control and threatens a nearby settlement.

Nowhere are the stakes higher than the Montes Azules Reserve, an 800,000-acre mountainous expanse of virgin forest not far from the Guatemalan border. It’s one of the most spectacular areas of the entire forest--but also the stronghold of the Zapatista movement.

Here, 1,200 soldiers, based in a rude stockade, look on as residents of a neighboring village--Ejido Emiliano Zapata--burn a new patch of forest on virtually every day that is dry enough for a fire.

The troops tend a small nursery, growing thousands of seedlings that are offered free to the villagers in hopes they will plant them to replace stately mahoganies and Spanish cedars.

“It’s the best we can do,” said the general in charge of the troops. “The burning of the forest won’t stop because the people need to plant crops for food.”

So far, there’s been little enthusiasm for replanting. The general’s seedlings have had few takers.

Teaching the Value of the Forest

Fernando Ochoa is having a little better luck.

Six years ago, the 48-year-old horticulturist from Colima, several hundred miles to the northwest, gave up a thriving greenhouse business to devote himself to preserving the forest.

Ochoa has a fighting chance because he represents neither the government nor the mainstream environmental movement, which is almost equally mistrusted. Last year, a field station run by Conservation International was overrun by armed peasants, who made off with equipment and supplies.

His approach is to try to convince the locals that they can make money off the land without destroying it--through ecotourism. And he’s realistic enough to narrow his focus to just one fragment of the Montes Azules reserve, an area known as Laguna Miramar.

Inaccessible by road, Miramar is hidden in a misty valley, bordered by a curtain of vines and creepers. Here, the full pageantry of the Lacandona is on display: chattering birds and monkeys, 600-year-old Maya ruins, insects that glow like neon in the dark, and orchids and giant bromeliads that crown the stems of ancient ficus trees.

The lake is a destination for Ochoa’s bare-bones tourism business. Visitors pay $180 for four days of camping and exploring. He has trained locals to be guides and cooks, hoping to one day turn over the operation to them.

The residents of Ejido Zapata, which controls access to Miramar, are fond of the self-effacing Ochoa, calling him “Don Fernando” when his small plane arrives on a makeshift landing strip.

But they won’t easily give over the land to such an unproven enterprise. Initially, Ochoa sought to ban deforestation on 1,600 acres around the lake. Village officials would only agree to protect the 400 acres within a kilometer of the shoreline. Pitched on the hillsides above the shore, much of that land would be hard to cultivate anyway.

To these people, only now being connected by roads and power lines to the outside world, the forest is not something to be revered--but a symbol of isolation and backwardness. Per capita income remains the lowest in Mexico and rates of illiteracy, malnutrition and infant mortality are among the highest.

“Most people here still see the trees as more of a nuisance than an asset,” Ochoa said.

Making the point for him on a recent visit was the mammoth trunk of a Spanish cedar, six feet in diameter. It was lying athwart the trail to Laguna Miramar, where it had been chopped down.

The ancient Mayas regarded cedars as pillars of the earth, but their successors routinely topple them by severing their shallow roots with an ax and pushing them over. This one was cut down by a farmer worried that its branches might fall and injure the cows that grazed underneath.

“It’s been lying here for a year,” Ochoa said, “rotting.”

A Checkerboard of Claims

A blank space on 19th century maps of Mexico, the Selva Lacandona was once known as “the desert of solitude.” Considered unfit for human habitation, the forest was an incubator of fevers and poisonous reptiles. It was also a brutal, lawless place, where timber contractors operated forced labor camps and peasant conscripts were chained, whipped or hung from trees if they didn’t cut their day’s quota of mahogany.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the government, under pressure from a burgeoning environmental movement, began to protect the Lacandona by creating reserves. By then, however, old logging roads had become access routes for peasants hoping to find refuge from peonage and poverty in Chiapas’ northern highlands.

The government, eager to avoid conflict between landless peasants and large property owners, encouraged thousands to emigrate to the Lacandona.

The newcomers brought with them slash-and-burn agricultural practices that had no place in a rain forest. And their presence put pressure on the tiny indigenous population--the Lacandon Indians, Maya descendants who had been living in harmony with the forest for centuries.

One who witnessed the clash of forces was Manuel Lopez, later to become Ochoa’s camp cook.

In 1968, he was one of 15 men to make a 100-mile trek through the forest to the juncture of the Rio Perla and the Rio Lacuntun. The modern-day pioneers named their new home after the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

The community was barely 5 years old when the government informed residents they were living on land set aside for a few hundred Indians. The newcomers were told to move, Lopez recalled, and the villages of some who refused were burned down. In 1978, the government declared some of the disputed land protected as part of the Montes Azules Reserve--inviting defiance by the settlers.

“We formed our own policy toward the reserve,” Lopez said. “It was decided that each ejido had the right to make up its own mind about going into the reserve.”

Eventually the forest became a confusing checkerboard of claims, some parts owned or managed by the government, some by the Indians, some in private ranches--and the new villages occupying more and more of it.

Disputes over land finally exploded in the Zapatista uprising of 1994. The peasant rebels were no match for the military, but their bravado captured the world’s attention while exposing the poverty of the region.

Officials responded by posting thousands of troops, offering aid to villages that disavowed the Zapatistas and by turning a blind eye to the destruction of the forest.

Today, Montes Azules is a reserve in name only. Hunting continues, reducing the jaguar population to a phantom of its former self. Macaws and other parrots keep disappearing, victims of an illegal trade that pays more than $500 for a live baby bird.

In true revolutionary fashion, the villagers renamed Montes Azules “Reserva Indigena Campesina”--the reserve of the indigenous peasants. And they vow to continue clearing the land.

“Every year we need more land to plant beans and corn to support our families,” said Lucio Mendoza Alvarez, one of the leaders of Ejido Zapata. “Besides, in our culture, it is customary to have five or six children, and we know we don’t have enough land to take care of the next generation.”

Planting their crops on thin jungle topsoil that runs out of nutrients after a year or two, the farmers are continually forced to push further into the forest in search of arable land.

Local people refer to the process as “La milpa que camina,” the corn field that walks.

When the corn is finished, they graze cattle--as long as the spent fields produce enough grass to support livestock.

The result? Today, the hills and canyons of the Lacandona are pocked with the bald remnants of abandoned pastures, some of them eroded to bedrock.

The Deforestation of Latin America

The conflict between poor people and nature--and the tortured landscape it produces--are not unique to southern Mexico. In recent years, illegal settlements within national parks and preserves have wrought havoc in a number of Latin American countries, including Brazil, Costa Rica and, most recently, Guatemala.

In Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, home of a national park with one of the richest concentrations of plants and animals in Central America, massive migration has caused the rain forest’s human population to balloon from 10,000 to 400,000 since 1960.

In March, a conservation field station in the reserve was overrun by 60 peasants who took hostages briefly, looted the building and burned it. In June, Carlos Catalan, a local resident who worked there with Conservation International, was shot and killed.

“Somehow, we’re going to have to make the point that short-term destruction of the land will only deplete resources and lead to worse impoverishment of people,” said Peter Seligmann, chairman of the Washington-based group.

But bad habits die hard, especially when they hold the promise of surplus cash to people unaccustomed to having anything left over once they feed their families.

In southern Mexico, new pickup trucks and fancy western wear signal the prosperity cattle ranching has brought some rain forest towns. Elsewhere, surging coffee prices have prompted burning of trees for plantations that allow the beans to grow quickly in full sun.

“There is no one magic alternative to what’s going on,” Seligmann said. “We have to have the resources and the cooperation of various governments to try different things. Organic farming is one approach. Ecotourism is another. We have to show people that, in the long run, the land will be far more valuable to them if they take care of it.”

That is the pitch Fernando Ochoa has been making to residents of the Lacandona. But he understands the forest often seems like a prison to people who cannot afford to get their crops to market or their sick children to a hospital because there are no roads.

“A lot of sick people have died because they couldn’t afford the [$30] price of a half-hour plane ride to the nearest clinic,” he said.

Ochoa recommended that the villagers use their share of the profits from his tourism business to pay for emergency medical expenses.

“They thought it was a good idea, but it’s not as if it’s a lot of money,” he said. “I still have work to do to convince them that conservation will pay off.”

Promises Go Up in Smoke

Peering through the plane window as he flew toward the Montes Azules reserve recently, Ochoa surveyed the rain forest for signs of new damage.

Two scorched brown ovals in the lush green mantle were undeniable evidence that someone had burned inside the small area he hoped to protect--the one-kilometer zone around the lake.

“People don’t keep their word sometimes. I am disappointed,” he said softly as the single-engine plane bounded along a dirt landing strip near the preserve.

There was another disappointment. He had hoped that the villagers would have repaired two shelters, vandalized by soldiers last year, that visitors camp in at the lake. But the villagers said they had been too busy with their fields.

It meant that, for another year, many of Ochoa’s paying clients would have to endure a nightly drenching as part of their rain forest experience.

Even under the best conditions, Ochoa attracts only a handful of people each year to Laguna Miramar. He concedes that he is a long way from cultivating an international constituency for the preservation of the forest.

One reason is that, for all its beauty, the Selva Lacandona still lives up to its 19th century reputation as a wild and inhospitable spot on the map.

To get within hiking distance of the Laguna Miramar requires a daylong drive over unpaved mountain roads or a nail-biting air charter. For nine or 10 months a year, it is oppressively hot. Malaria is a danger, as are a variety of intestinal parasites. The lake’s warm, gin-clear water makes for wonderful swimming, but parts of it are inhabited by crocodiles. Bugs and snakes are perils to be taken seriously, especially at night when the fearsome fer de lance, a venomous snake that grows to six feet, is out and about.

And while the locals make friendly guides, they have their own ways of doing things. Happy to show off the crocodiles in the lake’s swampier recesses, they lure the reptiles to the surface by throwing village dogs into the water.

Last year, an Italian photojournalist whom Ochoa was guiding drowned while swimming off an island rich in Maya ruins, where the calm waters are difficult to resist on a hot day. Ochoa’s story of the drowning is full of mystery and sorrow, befitting a place that itself may be doomed.

“He said he was fascinated by the play of the light on an underwater reef, and he kept diving deeper,” Ochoa said. “He was a good swimmer, so no one worried about him. We still don’t know why he drowned.”

Afterward, the divers who came to recover the body were also entranced by the lake, Ochoa said.

“They didn’t want to leave. Just like he did, they wanted to keep diving deeper. They said they had never seen such a beautiful place.”

The divers tied a rope around the body, then asked Ochoa to hold it while they swam. “What could I say? I took the rope. I sat there with the body floating beside me having all kinds of sad thoughts.”

One thought was a realization--that he could not go on indefinitely trying to save Laguna Miramar.

He says he will continue for four years, at most, before relinquishing his tourism project to residents.

“If it’s going to succeed, after a certain point, the people themselves have to take the responsibility for it,” Ochoa said.

“Miramar is a jewel. But it is their jewel.”