Mexico’s Forests at a Watershed

The rivers and streams were withering in the valleys of the harsh Sierra Madre above Mexico’s Pacific Coast, and Rodolfo Montiel was convinced that he knew why.

The 45-year-old peasant reasoned that, as loggers cut down more of the towering pines in the hills above his village, the barren mountainsides could no longer soak up and store rainwater. Instead, water cascaded off the treeless land during the rainy season, dragging tons of topsoil with it, and the terrain stayed sun-scorched through the six-month dry season.

Their complaints ignored, Montiel and his fellow self-described peasant-ecologists took bolder action. They set up impromptu roadblocks in early 1998 to halt the loaded logging trucks that rumbled down through their Coyuquilla River valley each day. That provoked the wrath of the logging interests. A year ago, Montiel was arrested by soldiers, imprisoned and allegedly tortured, and the logging trucks began rolling again.

But instead of crushing his unlikely movement, Montiel’s arrest has galvanized a cross-border coalition of environmentalists and human rights activists in his defense. As he sat in jail awaiting trial last month, he received the prestigious $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize for courageous activism and was named an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.

Indeed, Montiel’s case has turned a global spotlight onto what was a shadowy trail of destruction through one of the hemisphere’s important forests. The damage to these woodlands, along a 200-mile swath of Guerrero state above the resorts of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, has become a worst-case symbol of systematic deforestation in Mexico, from the Lacandon rain forest in the south to the Sierra Taruhumara region in the northern state of Chihuahua.

Environment Secretary Julia Carabias Lillo acknowledges that Mexico loses 1.5 million to 1.6 million acres of forests annually, or about 1.2% of its forested land. The United States, by contrast, has a net gain in forests each year.

Carabias notes that Mexico’s deforestation rate is among the highest in countries with diverse ecosystems, and she calls the loss of forests in Guerrero state one of the world’s 10 most serious deforestation challenges.

Drug Traffickers, Rebels Use the Land

The array of problems in these jagged mountains is certainly daunting. Drug traffickers frequently set forest fires to clear ground for growing marijuana and poppies to make heroin, and guerrillas from Mexico’s only currently active armed rebellion hide out here. Village feuds add another layer of complexity. The army provides the only law enforcement in these parts, residents say, and its priority is hardly the trees.

With few alternatives to earn cash, peasant leaders of the communal land cooperatives known as ejidos have signed contracts to sell hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of logs. Montiel’s followers say some ejido leaders greedily encourage exploitation of their lands to fill their own pockets. This allows clandestine loggers to flourish in a climate of corruption and intimidation where control by forestry inspectors has all but vanished.

“When I arrived here 38 years ago, this place was full of marshes. It was wet even in the dry season,” said Perfecto Bautista Martinez, a farmer here in Banco Nuevo, a hamlet of 20 families on a high bluff just 30 miles inland but three punishing hours by motorbike up a dirt track into the mountains.

“But then they started to cut down the forests and clear fields, and now it’s just dust,” he said. “We are ecologists now because we have seen the symptoms of the destruction all these years. We had to think of our children: Do we want them to receive a desert from us? That’s why we organized.”

Bautista Martinez was one of Montiel’s allies in forming, in February 1998, the Organization of Peasant Ecologists of the Sierra of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catalan. The group drew in farmers from the Coyuquilla River valley, which runs from the coastal town of Petatlan up to the crest of the Sierra Madre range, and from the “hot lands” northeast of the 10,000-foot mountain ridge toward the town of Coyuca de Catalan, 75 miles inland.

The organization’s first target was Boise Cascade Corp., the Idaho-based wood conglomerate that had contracted in 1995 with the region’s union of ejidos for exclusive rights to buy the forests’ long, straight pine logs--some of them a yard thick. Boise Cascade pulled out shortly after the protests and roadblocks began in early 1998, citing an irregular supply of wood. Domestic buyers soon filled the void.

The peasant ecologists blamed Bernardino Bautista Valle, the ejido boss from Montiel’s village of El Mameyal, for selling the wood rights for the benefit of a handful of insiders. Bautista Valle in turn went to the army and police to accuse Montiel and his group of being drug traffickers and members of the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, which operates in the area and killed seven police officers near here in March 1999.

The Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center in Mexico City, which has taken up Montiel’s cause, said Bautista Valle is one of the old-style caciques, or local chieftains, who dominate isolated rural areas and who are often in corrupt cahoots with state authorities--in schemes such as logging more wood than allowed by law.

The human rights center said gunmen loyal to the cacique killed one ecologist near Banco Nuevo in May 1998, and a soldier, allegedly accompanying Bautista Valle, killed another ecologist in July that year. A Banco Nuevo ejido official, Jesus Cervantes Luviana, told La Jornada newspaper in August 1998 that soldiers had tortured him to force him to point out four ecologist leaders, including Montiel, who the soldiers said “were chiefs of the hooded ones,” a reference to EPR guerrillas.

Earlier this year, Bautista Valle’s son was murdered as he descended from Banco Nuevo toward El Mameyal. Villagers think that it was a revenge attack for assaults against the ecologists. The cacique has fled from the village and his whereabouts are unknown.

Detained Activist Says He Was Framed

Montiel was arrested by the army in the village of Pizotla near Coyuca de Catalan while he was selling clothes to earn a living. A peasant was shot to death during the raid, and Montiel’s friend, Teodoro Cabrera, was arrested and remains jailed with Montiel in the regional city of Iguala.

Montiel was charged with illegal possession of a military weapon and with planting marijuana and possessing poppy and marijuana seeds. He insists that the weapon and seeds were planted to frame him.

Carabias, the environment minister, said: “The president himself is informed about the matter. It will receive every attention, from the perspective of justice, to ensure the law is applied without bias.”

Last month, she promised activists that she would conduct an audit of logging permits issued for the region to determine if they were properly granted and if the logging was being carried out in compliance with the permits. She said she expected preliminary results in a few months if her inspectors can get there and work safely.

“We almost can’t get there,” she said. “Every time we send inspectors there, death threats are made. I have had to change my personnel there several times because of death threats.

“Given the sum of poverty, caciques, the absence of a democratic political process, drug trafficking and guerrillas, deforestation is just one more variable,” Carabias said. “The problem is of such a magnitude that a person like Montiel becomes an expression of the broader problem.”

The problem is indeed far broader than Guerrero. Deforestation affects much of Mexico.

To be sure, the major source of the deforestation is not logging but the clearing of land for farming. This was the main cause in the Lacandon forest in Chiapas state, Mexico’s only tropical rain forest. Mexico has lost 70% of its humid jungle, researcher Alejandro Villamar said.

In Chihuahua state, the Sierra Taruhumara region is Mexico’s largest forested area. A report issued last month by researchers from the state human rights commission and the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Texas found that 411 complaints of improper use of forest resources were filed from 1996 to 1999 but that none has resulted in prosecution.

“There is no concerted policy to promote sustainable development in the Sierra Taruhumara,” the report said. “To the contrary, the voracious, anarchic and corrupt exploitation of forest resources has been encouraged to satisfy the demands of the market and the interests of the companies.”

In the central states of Michoacan and Mexico, just north of Guerrero, illegal logging has wreaked havoc in the reserves that make up the winter migratory sanctuary of the monarch butterfly. The federal attorney general’s office reported recently that it seized 4 tons of logs illegally cut in a national park, one of the few cases of judicial action.

“The logging has grown terribly in Michoacan,” said poet Homero Aridjis, an environmental champion. “The sawmills have increased in size and number. The logging trucks pass constantly. In the night, 30 trucks pass through the [butterfly] sanctuaries to cut clandestinely.

“This is part of a dynamic destruction of forests in Mexico that is out of control,” Aridjis said. “The authorities are not capable of stopping this destruction. Many of these woodcutters are armed, or work for powerful companies. And many governors and politicians are involved in the woodcutting business. The issue cannot be separated from the political problem-- the lack of accountability of bureaucrats and of governors who are like feudal politicians.”

In 1998, the worst forest fires in half a century charred areas of central and southern Mexico, sending palls of smoke northward that darkened skies in Texas and the central U.S. The careless setting of fires to clear fields has been a major cause of deforestation, as flames leap out of control. Delicate highland forests in Oaxaca state suffered extensive damage that year.

Carabias has waged an information campaign since 1998 to get farmers to stop using fires to clear land, with some signs of success.

But drug traffickers are immune to such pleas. And in Guerrero, the lure of profits from poppy or marijuana cultivation appears to have been more persuasive, encouraging traffickers to set fires and open up fields for their illicit crops.

“In every ejido, everybody knows who are the ones with plantations of poppies and marijuana,” said Sylvestre Pacheco, an environmental activist in Zihuatanejo who works with Montiel and other peasants. “The Sierra is a zone with an absolute absence of authority.”

But Pacheco said the problem of illegal logging could be resolved with serious political will by erecting roadblocks at the few exit points for logging trucks out of the mountains and checking that their cargoes have appropriate government permits. He said a successful pilot project in Guerrero, the most conflict-torn region, could serve as a model for the rest of the country.

Formally, the state government contends that forest resources are underutilized. Official figures say permits have been granted for 8.8 million cubic feet of logs annually, while as much as 26.4 million could be cut on a sustainable basis.

That view is mirrored on a national level. The Environment Ministry, which is responsible for protecting forests and for encouraging their safe exploitation, says only one-third of the 66 million acres suitable for forestry are being exploited “due to lack of technology and investment.”

The government’s 1999 Forestry Atlas notes that Mexico is a net importer of wood products, and employment in the industry fell by 24% from 1989 to 1997. Carabias believes that well-supervised development of the industry, with adequate technical support, could be healthy for local communities and for the forests.

But to assertions that forest resources are underutilized, activist Pacheco responded: “We are sure they are cutting far more wood than they have permits for, and they haven’t reforested. The permits say they have to manage the forests, and inspectors are supposed to mark with a brand each tree that can be cut. But there are no authorities to supervise this cutting.”

Soil in Region Is Especially Fragile

Moreover, the steep river basins in Guerrero are especially vulnerable, according to researcher Villamar, who works on forestry issues for the center-left Democratic Revolution Party. He has also written extensively on deforestation. “The soil there is very fragile, and the destruction of the forests uncovers the soil very quickly, causing terrible erosion that affects the campesinos [peasant farmers] below.”

Villamar said that more than 60% of the water basins in Mexico are damaged by erosion, pollution and deforestation and that “an increase in deforestation in damaged basins causes more damage, like a sickness that is contagious.”

Montiel and his cohorts understand that relationship, Villamar said, “so their battle was not for the forest itself but for the whole ecosystem. It makes no sense to fight for the land if there is no water.”

Awareness of the issue is growing as the impact worsens.

“I see a real desperation among the people--there is a lot of immigration to the United States,” said Gustavo Jimenez, a Roman Catholic priest whose parish embraces the highland villages.

The largest customer for logs in the area is Boards & Veneers of Guerrero, a Mexican-owned plywood factory near Zihuatanejo that has contracts for 1.7 million cubic feet annually, all consumed domestically. The year-old factory employs 500 people and is one of a handful of industrial businesses on the entire Guerrero coast.

“The forest is like an orchard--you have to care for it,” said factory supply chief Jesus Maria Basterra. “It would make no sense for us to see the forests exhausted. We need the forests to be used rationally. And the only resource those people have is to exploit their forests. You don’t see any other form of life up there.”

He said the company is working with the ejidos to reforest areas being logged near the mountain peaks in the villages of Durazno and Corrales, north of Petatlan. “And we don’t buy a single meter of wood that is not branded by the inspectors.”

In Rodolfo Montiel’s home village of El Mameyal, halfway up the Coyuquilla River valley, ecologist organization co-founders Jesus Cortez and Jesus Sanchez say people have come to support the group despite the intimidation of the last two years.

“The government treated us very badly and called us guerrillas or narcos. They said we were not ecologists but ‘hooded ones,’ ” Cortez said. “But we have never protected the drug traffickers or their crops.

“Our organization started because the people realized that, years ago, there was plenty of water in the river,” he added. “When these logging companies came, the forests were being destroyed. If the forest dies, all the people will die too.”