Tropical Rain Forest Sprouts Battleground

The battle to save North America’s last large pocket of tropical rain forest is shattering old notions of political correctness -- pitting leftists against environmentalists and Zapatista rebels against other Indians.

Lacandon Indians, who have lived for centuries in the Montes Azules jungle near the Guatemalan border, oppose the incursion of Indian settlers from the nearby highlands. The settlers are clearing land in the nature reserve to make room for farms.

The Zapatista rebels back the settlers, arguing that Indian farmers are the best protectors of the rain forest. The rebels accuse environmentalists who oppose the squatters’ movement of being fronts for corporate plans to exploit jungle resources.

At stake is a major source of fresh water in a parched nation, the last jungle in North America big enough to support jaguars, and the habitat of 340 species of birds and dozens of endangered plants and animals.

The conflict is also raising worries about violence between Indians. The ideological atmosphere has become so venomous that some environmental groups have walked away from the debate, despite their fears that settlement is threatening the jungle’s viability.

The rhetoric of Indian rights and anti-globalization is being used to justify deforestation, which environmentalists argue will benefit the Indians little because the denuded land can yield crops for only a couple of seasons.

On a recent afternoon in the 1,290-square-mile Montes Azules--Blue Mountains--the tall canopy of cedar, mahogany and cypress trees was shrouded in smoke and dotted with farmers’ fires.

Huge fire-blackened trunks of cypress trees loomed out of recently cleared fields.

But the effects of human settlement are felt even in areas where mammoth Guanacaste trees are still shrouded in vines and bromeliads, where streams run crystal clear amid enormous ferns, palms and huge wild elephant’s ear plants.

Montes Azules is becoming a silent jungle as settlers carve it into disconnected patches: in many parts, tapirs, howler monkeys and parrots are already gone.

Patience is wearing thin among the Lacandones. Living in small, jungle-friendly clearings for centuries, their number has dwindled to just 800, but they are the legal owners of much of the reserve--much more land than they need, the settlers say.

No accurate figure of the settler population is available, but various estimates put it at 5,000 to 10,000.

“They are coming in, cutting the trees and destroying not just our land, but our way of life,” said Alfonso Chankin, a Lacandon leader in traditional white cotton tunic, black hair down to his waist. His clear plastic sandals are one of the few traces of his contact with the outside world.

Speaking in halting Spanish in the yard of his thatched-roof home in Lacanja, Chankin said that “if the government doesn’t do anything, we are going to have to take matters into our own hands and throw them out ourselves.”

The risk of violence is real. On May 31, 26 Indians in nearby Oaxaca state were massacred by a neighboring community in a similar land dispute.

Any attempt at eviction by the Lacandones and their allies would almost certainly spark violence.

“The only way they will get us out of here is dead,” said Manuel, a Zapatista activist in El Suspiro, a squatter camp deep inside the reserve. Near his bare wooden shack, felled trees smoldered in a freshly cleared field.

Manuel, who like many Zapatistas identifies himself only by his first name, mainly fears government soldiers and police.

Security forces appeared ready in April to forcibly remove the settlers. But the national government backed off at the request of Chiapas state officials, who want more talks--although negotiations appear to be going nowhere.

“We’re reaching a critical point where the jungle can’t work as an ecosystem anymore,” said Ignacio March, a biologist for Washington-based Conservation International, one of the few groups that has braved the rebels’ criticism to publicly oppose the settlements. “For example, a jaguar can’t live in a small patch of jungle. They need a large, continuous habitat.”

The rebels say they want to turn Montes Azules into an “Indian Farmers’ Reserve,” a patchwork of farms and jungle.

Jaime, the Zapatista “commissioner” who oversees El Suspiro and several other camps, said the rebels have instructed their supporters not to burn or chop down trees, but admitted the rule is hard to enforce.

Manuel, after some prompting from his boss, grudgingly said farmers should “cut as little as possible.”

“This land belonged to my ancestors,” said Manuel, whose Tzotzil forebears actually come from the highlands 80 miles to the east.

Highland Indians began migrating into the reserve in the 1960s, sometimes encouraged by the government and also pressured by high population growth and cattle ranchers who stole their land.

In an abrupt about-face in the 1970s, the government declared the jungle off-limits to settlers and created a nature reserve. It evicted some squatters and granted the tiny group of Lacandones ownership of huge tracts in the reserve.

That closing of the last virgin corner of Chiapas bred resentment in some Indian communities, anger that became the foundation for the Zapatista movement that appeared 20 years later.

But after the government set up the reserve, it never patrolled or protected it, and a patchwork system was instituted under which some squatter camps were allowed to stay. Only about 20 forestry guards patrol the whole reserve.

“People here don’t respect authority anymore,” said forest guard Jorge Luis Gomez. “If we went into the squatters’ camps, they’d lynch us.”

From the air, the reserve looks like a vast green blanket scattered with blue lagoons and brown clearings. The number of settlements rose sharply after the Zapatistas’ 1994 uprising, which encouraged land takeovers and effectively ended police operations in the region.

Zapatista members account for only about half the settlements, but the rebels have effectively blocked the relocation of any settlers by threatening violence, boycotting talks and occupying vacated jungle camps.

A poorly financed government relocation program offers some land and building materials outside the reserve, but running water and electricity are often lacking.

“The government should accept the communities that are living in Montes Azules, and allow them to become honorary and permanent guardians of the biodiversity there,” the pro-rebel Fray Bartolome Human Rights Center said in a June letter to President Vicente Fox.

There is little evidence the squatter camps are protecting anything. The settlers clear plots for corn, exhausting the soil after a few harvests, then turn the land into pasture for cattle.

In the newly settled Seis de Octubre camp, 70 families were hacking into the jungle to build long wooden shacks.

Ebelio Maldonado, a 27-year-old Tzeltal Indian, stood between a pile of recently felled trees and a smoking field where precious tropical hardwoods were reduced to ash.

“The Zapatista army sent us here to take care of the land,” said Maldonado, moving his hand in the air to trace the outline of the new settlement. “We’ll plant beans and corn and buy fertilizer, and we’ll take care of everything here in the jungle.”

With large families--Manuel has seven children--the settlements must expand. “We’d like to bring in some cattle and some mechanized planting,” Maldonado said.

The results of that can be seen in the two-thirds of the original Lacandon jungle outside the reserve that has already been cut down. Stream beds are dried up, and only a few skinny cows graze on sun-baked grassland.

Ranchers love grass, but it is the enemy of the jungle. Once it takes hold, it carpets the ground and interferes with the natural cycle of regeneration that the Lacandones depend on.

Lacandon farmer Manuel Castellanos curses the grass as he stoops to pluck it away in his small farm plot in a jungle clearing.

Such clearings can support a Lacandon family for 20 years because they vary plantings -- yucca and other root crops, fruits and vegetables, and corn.

The practice allows fields to regenerate, provide second-growth wood, and be used again for farming.

“This is the heart of the water, the lungs of the world. This is our heritage,” Castellanos said. “And we are losing it.”

Biologists hold out hopes that the Lacandones’ knowledge of jungle agriculture--imperfect, but better than the settlers’ farming methods--can be spread to other groups.

But that appears unlikely, given the hostility between the Lacandones and the Zapatistas, who oppose the very concept of nature reserves.

“The Lacandones acted selfishly, and against their fellow Indians, by not sharing the land,” said Jaime, the Zapatista area leader. “There is no way they, all alone, can take advantage of all this land.”

The fact that the Lacandones don’t want to “take advantage” of the land--preferring instead to preserve it as an occasional hunting or fishing ground--is an idea lost in the clash between the two groups’ cultures.

For a movement that demands respect for Indians, the Zapatistas express open contempt for the Lacandones, calling them a manipulated, pampered tool of the government.

Rebel sympathizers even refuse to call them Lacandones--the name the Indians prefer. They insist on calling them “Caribes,” the name of a group of Indians from outside Mexico.

But the Zapatistas aim their harshest attacks at environmentalists.

Many rebel supporters view Zapatista support for squatters as part of a battle against economic globalization. They see the objections to the settlements as pretexts to hide corporate conspiracies, or to help Mexico’s conservative government and its now abandoned plan for a hydroelectric dam near the reserve, or to weaken the Zapatista movement.

The rebels cite cash donations by the U.S. Agency for International Development and a Mexican agribusiness company to Conservation International as proof that the environmentalists want to sell the jungle’s water or genetic samples of wildlife.

“They aren’t really interested in protecting the reserve. They want to mine it: for genetic material, for water, for hydroelectric power,” said Andres Aubrey, an anthropologist who has worked in Chiapas for more than a decade.

Biologist Victor Hugo Hernandez, a former director of the reserve, counters: “The whole bio-piracy issue is pretty much a pretext to justify settlement.”

The attack from the left -- long an ally of conservation movements -- has scared off the Washington-based World Wildlife Fund, which in 2000 signed a petition calling for the removal of settlers, but later dropped that position and now refuses to talk about the reserve.

“We learned our lesson that time. We found ourselves in the middle of so much polemics that you can’t answer them,” said Mercedes Otegui, spokeswoman for the WWF in Mexico. “Our policy is now just not to get involved.”

Homer Aridjis, an environmental activist, said he had been pressured by Zapatista sympathizers to support settlement. “I told them I couldn’t do it. No political cause, however good, justifies destroying nature.”

“Just because they are Indians, that doesn’t justify them destroying a jungle that is the patrimony of the whole nation, the whole world,” Aridjis said.

March, the biologist at Conservation International, which has taken the most heat, said, “We’re attacked as spies because we use U.S. satellite images, or because we are based in Washington.”

But, he added, “the fight is not against us. It’s against deforestation.”