Mexico: Lacandon Selva Conflict Grows
Weinberg, Bill
The Cessna bush plane takes off from Ocosingo, where the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico slope down to the Lacandon Selva-the jungle. We leave behind paved roads and the electricity grid,...
...In the morning, after tortillas and eggs, we fly out---continuing south into the heart of the reserve...
...The 'indigenous law' traitorously imposed by the congress and by Vicente Fox, and now ratified by the supreme court, only serves the great multinational companies that seek to plunder the strategic resources of Mexico through Plan Puebla-Panama and the Free Trade Area of the Americas...
...We're not leaving alive...
...Rio San Pablo was a new community...
...Former ARIC-I leader Porfirio Encinos is now Chiapas Governor Pablo Salazar's director for indigenous issues...
...Agency for International Development to rent bush planes for periodic observation flights over Montes Azules, and has recently detected forest fires in the most A community represents detected forest fires speaking on the threat or remote part of the reserve...
...The "good faith visit" by the Marines coincided with the first day of military action in Iraq...
...Hermann Bellinghausen, La Jornada, March 24, 2003...
...2 5 Montes Azules is designated as one of the "nuclear zones"-points of unspoiled high biodiversity-of the corridor...
...These lands belong to the people and we will not abandon them," said one protest leader...
...There is no government presence whatsoever in this remote settlement...
...But now the families are still negotiating with federal authorities to be compensated with new lands elsewhere in Chiapas...
...1 5 In June 2001, President Fox signed an agreement on the PPP with the presidents of the seven Central American republics in San Salvador, pledging to cooperate-initially-on grid integration and road improvement.1 6 The industrial colonization of the Selva with paved roads, darns and oil exploitation is seen Vol XXXVI, No 6 MAY/JuNE 2003 29 Vol XXXVI, No 6 MAY/UNE 2003 29REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT as a key pillar of the PPP But the Zapatistas decry the Plan as a "counterinsurgency" measure aimed at bringing the restive Indian communities of southern Mexico (and Central America) under industrial control...
...3 Late last year, governmc Mexico's federal Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat, environmen citing the ongoing destruction of coVer acti the forest by slash-and-burn agriculture, announced that these 32 Zapatista untitled communities will have to relocate from the reserve-preferably voluntarily, to be compensated with new lands elsewhere in Chiapas...
...EZLN communique, Dec...
...to Conservation International, and include all levels of the Mexican federal government) been so obvious in the Lacandon Selva and in Montes Azules...
...CI and allied nongovernmental organizations have projects in all these protected areas...
...Domingo P6rez's family are originally from Tila, in the Chol heartland of northern Chiapas, where the Highlands slope down towards the Gulf Coast...
...He researched this story as part of a Global Exchange delegation to Chiapas in March 2003...
...1 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Bill Weinberg is author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso Books, 2000) and editor of the on-line weekly World War 3 Report <www.ww3report.com...
...The residents of Nuevo San Gregorio came from the highland municipality of Huixtan, where they were ranch hands earning 25 centavos a day...
...They say they are at odds with negotiators from the federal environmental bureaucracy over lands they seek for compensation in Palenque, near Tila where they started...
...21, 2002...
...Plan Puebla-Panama is mirrored in another transnational plan for the isthmus-this one the brainchild of the World Bank's Global Environment Facility-called the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which would link all of the "biodiversity hotspots" of southern Mexico and Central America...
...Its a geo-strategic policy in reality-the government wants to eliminate the Zapatista support base...
...In 1992 the 61,874-hectare Lacantdn Reserve, which includes the Classic Maya archeological sites of Yaxchilan and Bonampak, was added to the biosphere reserve...
...The test wells were abandoned in the wake of the 1994 Zapatista uprising...
...La Jornada, Sept...
...3. Ricardo Hernandez, Conservation International project coordinator for Chiapas, in telephone interview with author from Tuxtla Gutierrez, April 2003...
...But the long-term solution lies in "national dialogue with the Zapatistas...
...Comillas, the group's principal stronghold, MOCRI is accused of threats and violence against nonMOCRI communities...
...But the group remains autonomous, and openly pledges nonviolent resistance to the expulsions...
...We fly over the shrinking heart of intact jungle, leaving settlements behind...
...In a December 29 communique, EZLN leader Subcomandante Marcos pledged that the rebels will resist the government's planned removal of Zapatista base communities from the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, in the heart of the Lacandon rainforest...
...2 6 CIEPAC's Hidalgo says some of the threatened communities in Montes Azules "might be willing to leave if housing and land was really provided...
...He says they gave up slash-and-burn agriculture ten years ago and have learned a method of rotation that allows them to survive without eating into the forest...
...This is the drill grounds surrounding San Quentin, the main military base for the Lacandon Selva...
...In December 2001, Fox's former head of national security and current Mexican delegate on the U.N...
...Visitors from Candelaria settlement say a detachment of Federal Preventative Police came to their community in February...
...We land at Nuevo San Gregorio, a Tzotzil Maya settlement on the edge of the reserve-a cluster of huts in a green valley, the forest a short walk in any direction, and a day's walk from the nearest road...
...In the evening, the Nuevo San Gregorio village band-a guitar-fiddle-bass trio--puts on a concert for us in front of the church, performing valiantly on beat-up old instruments with missing strings...
...There is a community agreement not to clear forest, and to only use traditional corn varieties-no purchased seed...
...The church and schoolhouse have solar panels...
...In contrast to the EZLN, ARIC-I is unarmed and civil...
...Many people exploit that and are going into the jungle" March believes that CI has been targeted unfairly by activists: "The problem is that we are in charge of the monitoring system for the Lacandon forest...
...They are manipulating people in other parts of Chiapas who are looking for land...
...5. Larry Rohter "Tropical Rain Forest in Mexico is Facing Destruction in Decade," New York Times, July 10, 1990...
...MOCRI has been pitted against the EZLN to the point-the rebels claim-of assassinating their followers...
...Barbara Belejack, "Bio 'Gold' Rush in Chiapas on Hold," NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 2002...
...The Tzotzils are a people from the heart of the highlands, the area around San Crist6bal...
...it had been "reduced to the minimum size essential for the integrity of its ecosystem...
...On6simo Hidalgo, CIEPAC, author's interview, San Crist6bal, March 2003...
...ARIC-I was formed by ARIC dissidents who broke from the PRI machine...
...2 8 The military presence in the Selva is rapidily escalating...
...We are ti...
...29 Mexico: Lacandon Selva Conflict Grows 1. Rocio Rodiles Hernandez, ECOSUR, author's interview, San Crist6bal, March 2003...
...1 1 Local rights groups reported that army troops had been moved into the area of the Biosphere Reserve, apparently awaiting orders to eject the Indian communities...
...1 2 On December 19, a detachment of Federal Preventative Police backed up by a helicopter carried A Chol Maya out a "voluntary eviction" of one Chol Indian community from the from the reserve, and federal authorities were said to be negotiating with December is s the evicted families for compensa- compound of tion with new lands elsewhere in Chiapas.1 3 aid a Even this deep in the Selva, the government has recently sent security forces on missions of intimidation, the residents charge...
...Nicolas Morales Pali, one of the community leaders in Nuevo San Gregorio, brings us out to a cornfield in the settlement...
...Hubliano L6pezSanchez, an ARIC-I regional leader for this section of the Selva, tells me: "We are campesinos and we know how to use the land...
...2 7 Meanwhile, Hidalgo shares the skepticism about the stated motives behind the planned expulsions...
...We wake up and we have no work to do...
...6 But the EZLN charges that the government is now using this as an excuse to move against their support communities, despite an official truce...
...Others, like Nuevo San Gregorio, are unarmed and not formally part of the rebel movement, but have fraternal relations with the Zapatistas...
...attack on Iraq began, Fox ordered special army and navy patrols along the Usumacinta, citing the threat of terrorist infiltration from Guatemala...
...But the San Andr6s Accords were never fulin filled, and the dialogue has been stalled for years...
...In September, Mexico's Supreme Court upheld a version of the San Andr6s Accords which Congress had stripped of all binding provisions on control of territory and resources by indigenous communities...
...31, 2002...
...8. 2001...
...2, 2001...
...4. La Jornada, Dec...
...We are not chickens in cages that can be fed transgenic corn...
...Soldiers are occupying key locations, going on patrols and making surveillance flights over the communities in question," said Patricia G6mez of San Crist6bal Fray Bartolom6 de las Casas Human Rights Center...
...On March 20, four U.S...
...Ironically, the Nuevo San Gregorio settlers are in the forest because the government encouraged them to clear it for farmland thirty years ago in order to relieve land pressures in the highlands...
...Deep suspicion of the plan is evident in the Selva communities...
...4 But the jungle settlers themselves-as well as the Maya Indian rebels of the EZLN, which most of the settlers support-believe that the eviction policy masks both a strategy of counterinsurgency and an agenda of corporate exploitation of the rainforest's oil, timber, hydro-electric and even genetic resources...
...The church is brightly painted with a mural depicting village life and jungle animals as well as the obligatory Virgin of Guadalupe...
...While the U.N.-recognized global program of biosphere reserves is supposed to incorporate small groups of indigenous peoples into management, ecologists charged that settler encroachment continued to eat away at the forest...
...In 1990, a World Bank study declared that the next decade would make or break the Lacandon Selva's chances for survival...
...Security Council, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, stated that environmental "terrorist activities" were occurring in several regions in the country, and that the state would shortly be deploying "all its force on a military scale" in those areas, calling it a "war operation...
...Wrote Hermann Bellinghausen, a reporter sympathetic to the Zapatista movement, in the Mexico City daily La Jornada, "Never before have the interest and actions of the United States government, large transnational companies and some world agencies (which range from the U.N...
...The political sophistication of these primitive settlements is impressive...
...And we are flying into the deepest and most hotly contested part of it-the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve...
...The private The jungle contractor General Geophysics of themselve France has resumed exploratory work in the Selva...
...EFE, Oct...
...The federal environmental prosecutor's office announced that the first targeted region would be Montes Azules...
...1 0 Everyone we spoke with in Nuevo San Gregorio supports the Zapatistas' long-stalled peace plan, the San Andr6s Accords, which would give Indian communities--even small jungle settlements like this one-constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy...
...There are researchers collecting plants in the reserve, but unfortunately because of the scandal everything botanists do is considered a threat and a Aerial view of Lake Miramar theft of the local resources...
...Said Mois6s P6rez L6pez of Nuevo San Gregorio: "We don't want our resources like water and rivers and plants to be privatized...
...The News, Mexico City, Dec...
...The settlers and their supporters in the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) charge the government wants to forcibly expel them both to reclaim the jungle from rebel control and to carry out development plans, exploiting the area's natural and biological resources...
...7 President Fox has failed to deliver on his campaign promise to bring a negotiated end to the conflict, and has pursued his predecessors' policy of military encirclement of the Selva...
...We don't want our plants to be genetically modified...
...7. Proceso, Dec...
...20, 2002...
...Federal police backed up by a helicopter showed up to enforce the eviction...
...At the community gathering where the residents and those from neighboring settlements speak with gringo visitors, the children line up holding handmade signs in stiff but impeccable Spanish...
...Last year, hundreds of Zapatista supporters marked October 12, Dia de la Raza, by blocking the entrance to the main Chiapas military base, Rancho Nuevo, both to demand demilitarization of the conflicted southern state and protest the PPP...
...Most of the indigenous groups in the area have no idea that they're part of a bio-corridor...
...Proceso, Dec...
...Meanwhile, they complain that the government is providing no education for the 18 children in the group...
...He is local coordinator of organic agriculture with ARIC-I...
...fr going to stay here because this land is for the campesinos...
...Just beyond the clear turquoise of Laguna Miramar, near the western border of the reserve, lies a brown plain of exposed, completely deforested earth...
...9. Heron Moreno, Red de Defensores, author's interview, San Crist6bal, March 2003...
...29, 2002...
...An ongoing conflict over the reserve has pitted settlers from the highlands against international environmental groups, who say settlements are threatening protected land, and the Mexican government...
...New York Times, Sept...
...They left ten years ago because there was no land...
...The original ARIC was loyal to the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) political machine, and was pitted against the relocation...
...Settlers in the Selva have an ecological vision, they guard their forest and their resources jealously...
...Proceso, Dec...
...But as we head south into Montes Azules, the forested areas grow...
...Ignacio March, Conservation International, author's interview, via telephone from Tuxtla Gutierrez, April 2003...
...They told me they left Huixtan's Rancho San Gregorio and came to the Selva to found their settlement when they heard President Luis Echeverria announce on the radio in 1971 that peasants should move there for land...
...MOCRI is the Regional Independent Campesino Movement-a name strikingly similar to ARIC-I, but such distinctions are critical in the jungle turf wars...
...Environment Program for its global biological and cultural significance...
...31, 2002...
...The News, Mexico City, Dec...
...17, 2002...
...The riches belong to those of us who have lived here for centuries and we will oppose their globalization...
...The women, the children, everybody...
...13, 2002...
...But COMPITCH assessor Ana Valadez protests: 'There has been no consultation...
...AP, June 16, 2001...
...Hermann Bellinghausen, La Jornada, March 26, 2002...
...She speaks with a baby strapped across her breast...
...We still haven't found a solution, and unfortunately the Zapatista conflict is an obstacle to finding one...
...The "hotspot" extends down the isthmus from Chiapas along the mountain spine of Central America, incorporating protected areas all the way to Panama-generally in remote trans-border tropical forests...
...Education is bilingual in Spanish and Tzotzil...
...oil provider after Canada and Saudi Arabia-drilled test wells at Nazaret outside Ocosingo, and along the Lacanttin River deep in the jungle, preparing to expand the oil industry south into the Chiapas rainforest from its heartland in Tabasco on the Gulf Coast...
...Moreno interview, March 2003...
...As the U.S...
...there is no other electricity...
...Luis Alvarez, President Vicente Fox's spokesman for dialogue to end Chiapas' long-simmering conflicts, said the move was a necessary one "to protect that ecological zone...
...military officials and a group of U.S...
...Environment Secretary Victor Lichtinger said new invasions of the reserve by new settlers have continued and "there has to be an action to stop that kind of thing...
...1 7 In the 1980s, the state oil company Pemex-third largest U.S...
...This represented a reversal of government policy Is the Mexican nt is using tal reasons to ons against supporters...
...An "environmental table" was to follow the talks on indigenous rights that gave rise to the San Andr6s Accords...
...Ironically, the government is preparing to expel jungle settlers in the name of rainforest protection just as it is blowing the dust off plans for massive exploitation of the region, much of it connected to Plan Puebla-Panama, a series of interoceanic rail and highway links, industrial and free-trade zones stretching from the Panama Canal to the Mexican state of Puebla...
...8 Reached in Tuxtla, the state capital, Ignacio March, Conservation International's representative for Montes Vol XXXVI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2003 27 Vol XXXVI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2003 27REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT Azules, told me, "Some people seem to think that poverty is a good excuse to destroy the reserve...
...March says CI receives a budget from the U.S...
...The residents fled there from the Marqu6s de Comillas region of the Selva-a heavily-settled area just south of the Biosphere Reserve-after family members were killed by MOCRI militants in 2000...
...It is a difficult problem...
...Sophie Style, "The Plan Puebla Panama," The Ecologist, UK, June 2001...
...Tired of growing corn on poor lands 12 miles from where they lived, they relocated to the Marqu6s de Comillas---only to flee again into Montes Azules...
...5 Satellite photos revealed that the Mexico-Guatemala border was clearly visible from space, so completely had the forest been cleared on the Mexican side...
...We are self-governing indigenous communities...
...2. <www.biodiversityhotspots.org...
...But with paved roads and army troops now ringing the rainforest in an arc that follows the Usumacinta River and the Guatemalan border, Pemex is planning to return...
...Bright green guacamayas soar overhead and howler monkeys cry from the trees...
...Most of the Selva communities not part of the EZLN support base follow ARIC-Independent, which broke from ARIC in 1994...
...His advice to those still in the jungle: "Don't leave the Selva, because the government is not to be trusted...
...EZLN...
...The main problem is poverty, and political leaders who are moving very poor people into the reserve," he concludes...
...11, 2002...
...28, 1999...
...1 4 In the Marqu6s de family evicted reserve last till living in the a government gency...
...Of these, 32 are "undocumented"-that is, they never had their lands offi- The EZLN say cially titled as an ejido, or agricultural settlement...
...Established in 1978, the reserve is recognized by the U.N...
...We are frequently attacked with false arguments, like we are against poor people and we want the security forces to take these people out...
...We land in Comitn, the major town on the other side of the forest...
...We want the government to stop threatening us...
...The government cannot give land to every invader because that only provides an incentive to invade...
...The EZLN broke off all contact with the government and press in protest of the the Lacandon Selva, Chiapas, decision, but a statement was issued by leaders of a protest march in San Crist6bal, representing several Chiapas Indian and campesino groups-including the Emiliano Zapata Campesino Organization, the National Coordinator of Indigenous Peoples and Civil Society in Resistance...
...2 By CI's count, there are 140 settler communities in the Montes Azules reserve, and 225 within the Lacandon Selva's protected areas...
...We have the duty to call public attention to any deforestation process in the reserve...
...9 Of the 32 communities, most are EZLN support bases...
...concerning the Selva-from encouraging its colonization by landless peasants to sealing it off as a protected area following an international outcry over the forest's rapid destruction...
...Marines participated in Mexican military exercises on the Mexico-Guatemala border dubbed "Strengthening Security and Vigilance," according to La Jornada reporter Hermann Bellinghausen...
...We are the eyes of the community to see what is going on in the rainforest...
...La Jornada, Feb...
...One reads, "We reject the eviction of indigenous people from Montes Azules...
...Now they have been relocated a third time...
...22, 2002...
...8. La Jornada, March 25, 2002...
...1 8 concerned w Logging has already resumed in the Marqu6s de Comillas, a heav- plans to expl ily settled area of the forest just REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT Says On6simo Hidalgo of the Economic and Political Investigative Center for Community Action (CIEPAC), which works with the rainforest communities: '"There will be no bioprospecting work in Chiapas for decades...
...They are from the settlement of Rio San Pablo, which agreed to leave Montes Azules in December...
...But it doesn't last long...
...6. Tim Golden, "Left Behind, Mexico's Indians Fight the Future," New York Times, January 9, 1994...
...We live like beggars in the street here," says Domingo P6rez...
...Meanwhile, despite the cancellation of the ICBG Maya project, an NGO-run research station-partly funded by Conservation International-continues to map the flora and fauna of Montes Azules,24 while the Mexican agro-business and biotech giant Grupo Pulsar has established numerous research stations in Chiapas...
...The Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, at 331,200 hectares, is a fifth the total size of the original Lacandon Selva, a lowland tropical forest in the basin of the Usumacinta River east of the Chiapas Highlands...
...We indigenous communities will fight against Plan Puebla-Panama to the bitter end...
...Then he passionately grabs a piece of soil and holds it out to us, so we can see its richness for ourselves...
...We leave behind paved roads and the electricity grid, heading into the verdant canyonlands of what remains a wild frontier, a stretch of jungle along the Guatemalan border only partly under government control...
...Says family elder Domingo P6rez G6mez: "If it isn't resolved soon, we will go to a ranch to work, because we are not used to living dependent on the government...
...A dense, unblemished canopy covers the low mountains for as far as the eye can see in any direction...
...www.gefweb.org...
...We cannot live like this...
...But the Lacandon Selva has been half destroyed over the last 20 years and poverty has only increased...
...The statement said the Supreme Court decision "definitively closes the doors to a dialogue necessary to construct peace in the state of Chiapas and all Mexico...
...The little schoolhouse is run by the Independent Rural Association of Collective Interest (ARIC-I), a regional campesino organization which the settlement is loyal to...
...Then, when the biosphere reserve was declared in 1978, they instantly became squatters...
...The land we are flying over is a patchwork of forest and areas cleared for cattle ranches and peasant communities...
...26REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT With 1,500 tree species, 33 percent of all Mexican bird species, 25 percent of all Mexican animal species, 44 percent of all Mexican diurnal butterflies and 10 percent of all Mexico's fish species, it is considered part of the Mesoamerican global "biodiversity hotspot" by the Washington D.C.-based environmental group Conservation International...
...So we have the right to autonomy, which the EZLN is fighting for...
...We will shed our own blood on this land...
...Last April the 32 communities threatened with eviction filed a formal protest with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights...
...There will not be a peaceful expulsion," wrote Marcos...
...Another says, "We demand constitutional recognition of our indigenous rights and cultures under Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization and the San Andr6s Accords...
...Hidalgo interview, March 2003...
...The government says that at 20,000 pesos a hectare, the lands they seek are too expensive...
...Morales boasts of the settlement's ecological program...
...Chiapas IMC, Sept...
...Isabela Morales P6rez, a member of a group that walked through the jungle to meet with us from another community, Nueva Israel adds, "How can they move us, with our children and our families, to another place where we will have to start from nothing...
...But we are just doing our duty, alerting the authorities to what is happening...
...Here we meet a Chol Maya family displaced by the first evictions from the reserve, and still living in the compound of a government aid agency...
...We will die here if we have to," he says...
...Environmental, bioprospecting, eco-tourism and birth control (eventually, sterilization of indigenous women) programs are acting as the spearhead for a far-reaching strategic and military project...
Vol. 36 • May 2003 • No. 6
