Watching His Cause From Behind Bars

The forest is struggling back to life on the once-barren slopes of the Sierra Madre above this Pacific coastal resort, seven years after Felipe Arreaga’s defiant band of farmers turned back the logging trucks.

A group of women led by Arreaga’s wife has trucked in 176,000 red cedar saplings and planted them around 13 villages in the Coyuquilla River valley. Most of those communities have stopped issuing logging permits and clearing new fields for crops or cattle. Others enforce limits on what timber comes down and have started tree nurseries.

Residents say the undergrowth is noticeably thicker, soaking up more rain and causing streams that had dwindled to rise.

“The roadblock was the turning point,” said Damian Ruiz Vazquez, leader of the Zapotillal farming community. “We are learning to care for our forests.”

Arreaga has taught that lesson more effectively than anyone else, the valley’s farmers say. The devout Roman Catholic describes how his calling to safeguard a God-given “paradise on Earth” helped defeat the practice of illegal logging.

But it is a story he must tell from jail. In November, Arreaga was charged with murdering the son of the conservationists’ nemesis, the wealthy landowner who brokered the sell-off of the valley’s timber during the 1980s and ‘90s. Arreaga is awaiting trial.

Local farmers and Amnesty International say the landowner, Bernardo Bautista Valle, initiated the murder charge as vengeance for the anti-logging roadblock, which occurred several weeks before the 1998 killing. The accusation, which also names 10 other anti-logging activists as murder suspects, is based solely on the testimony of another Bautista son, who survived the roadside ambush.

Several people support Arreaga’s alibi that he was attending a wedding at the time. A different explanation for the slaying has gained credence in the valley: The landowner’s estranged wife allegedly ordered one of his bodyguards killed for setting up her husband with a mistress, but the hired gunmen mistook her son for the intended target.

“I am innocent and a lot of people know it,” the 56-year-old Arreaga said through a chain-link fence in the visiting area of Zihuatanejo’s prison. He is a soft-spoken man whose bifocals hang from a string over his beige prison uniform. “The only thing I have done is not to let them take down what is left of our forest.”

Mexico is trying to consolidate a democracy five years after voters ended a seven-decade grip on the presidency by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. But in many parts of the country, the old system endures as local bosses known as caciques manipulate the legal system for political and personal vendettas.

The fight over logging in this corner of Guerrero, a lawless state that has long been ruled by the PRI, has reached a standoff. Ecologists have mobilized enough farmers to stop the loggers. But the offended cacique, years after leaving his cattle ranch near El Mameyal after his son’s murder, still casts a shadow of fear.

“Nobody is going to testify for Felipe, because people here are still afraid of that gentleman who went away,” said El Mameyal’s mayor, Elio Martinez Mateos, who cannot bring himself to utter Bautista’s name. Others say Bautista is still somewhere in the Sierra Madre and often sends his pistoleros on menacing errands in a black SUV.

But no one seems to know exactly where he lives. The cacique and his surviving son are formal accusers in the murder case, but when Judge Jose Jacobo Gorrostieta tried to summon them to Zihuatanejo in November for cross-examination, his secretary could not locate them and gave up trying.

That presents a problem for Arreaga, who under Mexican law must prove his innocence.

“For the moment, he is considered the probable culprit,” the judge said, adding that he was not concerned about the powerful economic interests at play.

Those interests involve more than trees. Albertano Penalosa, a farmer in El Mameyal, said he had planted marijuana and poppy for opium production on cleared forest land while working for Bautista. He said army troops protected the illegal venture, supplied guns for the cacique’s bodyguards and often dropped in for barbecues.

After Arreaga and 103 other farmers blocked the logging trucks, “Bautista was the first to threaten to kill the leaders,” recalled Celsa Valdovinos, Arreaga’s wife. “He sent the army after them, claiming they were hooded ones” -- a term used for the bands of leftist guerrillas roaming the valley at the time.

The army arrested two blockade leaders, Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, in 1999. They confessed under torture to having taken part in an armed rebel attack and spent 2 1/2 years in prison. President Vicente Fox, whose election in 2000 toppled the PRI, freed them under pressure from international human rights groups, but his government has not gone after the torturers.

Montiel and Cabrera have since fled Guerrero, and other members of their Organization of Peasant Ecologists have dropped out. Only Arreaga and his wife have remained active, which is why they think he is the only one to have been arrested among those charged in the slaying.

Arreaga said he hoped that the recent upset defeat of the PRI in state elections would bring him justice.

Gov.-elect Zeferino Torreblanca, who won big in the valley, has promised to review the murder case and to break the power of the PRI-allied caciques.

“They are powerful because governors have been complicit,” Torreblanca said. “If I had taken their money, I would be their accomplice, but I did not. I will govern without them.”