Oil at the Grassroots: Report from Tabasco
Town, Sarah & Hanson, Heather
In rural Tabasco, a swampy state on Mexico's Gulf Coast, a middle-aged farmer named Don Ram6n* has spent the past three years organizing his neighbors to protest environmental damage from the oil...
...Pipelines leak and sometimes explode, causing injury and death...
...Many small farmers and fishermen live on communal ejido land or inside protected biosphere reserves, and many are indigenous Chontal...
...Avocados also used to grow here, but the trees can no longer withstand acid rain associated with the Pemex facilities...
...Parties bringing complaints must still convince Mexico's Attorney General to take on their cases...
...Comply with your own regulations...
...Don Ram6n lives in a farming community near the municipality of Cunduackn...
...By 1999, only ten civil cases had gone before the Mexican Supreme Court, most of them focusing solely on standing rather than on substantive issues of environmental law...
...Sarah Town led a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation to Tabasco, Mexico in 1999, producing a booklet entitled Petrolizaci6n in Mexico: Oil Takes Over...
...Oil's social effects have been equally devastating...
...She is currently a firstyear law student at New York University...
...Abandoned offshore platforms release scraps and oil into the Gulf, and artificial breakers affect the salinity of coastal lagoons and rivers...
...They report declines in productivity over the last few decades-fewer fish in the water, less fruit on the trees, and therefore less food and less income...
...It's not about giving a campesino 2000 pesos...
...Even the initial hurdle of gaining standing-recognition by the courts that one has the right to sue-has proved difficult...
...Don Ram6n believes 26 recent cancer-related deaths in his community and a neighboring one, with a total population of only about 800, may be the result of such pollution...
...It's about saying [to Pemex]: 'Gentlemen, your regulations state that there should not be a house, a health center or a school within 100 meters of an oil well...
...Santo Tomas' goal is to restore faith in the legal system as a tool to protect the communities' rights, teach their members about the laws and norms that govern the oil industry, train them to document claims and eventually take their cases to court...
...In recent years hundreds of activists have been charged with crimes after protesting lack of attention to their claims...
...Don Ram6n's community, for example, still has only one school and one teacher for all the primary grades...
...In February 1996, for example, protesters blocked a bridge to the productive Sen oil field...
...Meanwhile, in Tabasco, Santo Tomas is developing a legal organizing strategy with three communitiesincluding Don Ram6n's-that have wellsubstantiated claims against Pemex...
...Past Tabasco Governor Roberto Madrazo, rather than supporting the rights of affected regions as other administrations sometimes did, subdued demonstrators, arrested and jailed protesters, and maintained armed guards at installations...
...The company separates crude oil from natural gas and waste products in sight of Cunduacdn's small landowners, who these days are harvesting the season's watermelon...
...National Human Rights Commission, applying pressure until 1992, when the Commission mandated that Pemex and the state and federal governments pay damages...
...Reparations, meanwhile, have focused on individual payments...
...T he carrot and stick of reparations and repression has led activists to explore legal strategies for accountability...
...Also surrounding Cunduachn are installations maintained by Mexico's national oil company Petr6leos MexicanosPemex...
...Don Ram6n gazing at a gas fire over a pit of crude...
...Oil-producing states receive relatively generous government funding, but patronage politics often controls the distribution of such money, reinforcing traditional inequalities...
...Much of Tabasco contains oil wells, pipelines and separation stations...
...In 1996, Mexico created another legal avenue by enacting its first environmental criminal code...
...Since the 1980s, communities statewide have been calling for accountability for Pemex...
...Oil isn't for the nation," a campesino reports, "it is only for a chosen few...
...Residents complain that there is more crime now, people have lost their culture and they have not seen the benefits of the wealth being pumped out of their state...
...The future for Don Ram6n and his neighbors remains uncertain, but these legal strategies may bring their struggle into a new arena and produce far-reaching institutional changes...
...Environmental degradation is one way the government passes oil development costs onto Gulf Coast communities...
...As in much of rural Tabasco, area riverbanks and roadsides are lined with homes surrounded by fruit trees, which supplement family food supplies, along with small domestic livestock and locally caught fish...
...After over a decade of fruitless waiting for redress, citizensoften with active support from the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)-carried out hundreds of blockades of Pemex installations...
...One of the first and largest groups to organize, the Riverine Pact, mobilized tens of thousands of fishermen...
...The following month, 30,000 marched in Villahermosa to protest the repression...
...Joining other organized sectors, they brought a complaint before the Mexican *Don Ram6n's last name is being omitted to protect him from government repression against environmental organizers in his area...
...Yet obstacles still exist...
...While very few locals have gotten jobs with Pemex, the influx of highly paid oil workers has upped prices for basic necessities...
...Community pressure forced the company to pump the wastewater back underground, but inadequate maintenance caused a pipeline to burst last year...
...But procedures for filing claims-set up to comply with the Commission's mandate-have been managed by agencies designed mainly to quell complaints, By 1997, only 6,000 of 63,000 claims against Pemex had been processed...
...Corruption reportedly runs rampant: The reparations funds have financed large construction projects in Villahermosa, been stolen by Pemex and state officials, and become part of the web of electoral financing designed to keep the state's ruling party in power...
...But attempts to use Mexican courts to enforce civil environmental law have faced serious challenges...
...Pemex also used to dump wastewater filled with heavy metals into nearby rivers and unlined holding ponds...
...Still, a year and a half later, locals await the sentencing of one convicted official...
...These, in combination with preemptive bribes, have enabled Pemex to avoid the real issues of clean-up and future damage prevention, while undermining community organizing...
...The state has responded in various ways...
...Constant gas flaring fills the air with sulfur, which rains back down, eating away zinc roofs, ruining crops and polluting water supplies...
...Heather Hanson is completing her Ph.D...
...But some legal efforts have borne fruit...
...More than 30 police and military vehicles were sent in, and 100 people were arrested on charges that threatened to imprison them for up to 40 years...
...The poor have been bought off...
...In rural Tabasco, a swampy state on Mexico's Gulf Coast, a middle-aged farmer named Don Ram6n* has spent the past three years organizing his neighbors to protest environmental damage from the oil industry...
...Pemex-built transport roads have caused flooding in some regions and drought in others...
...They then recruited the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (CEMDA) and Greenpeace-Mexico, and filed a complaint with the Attorney General...
...in Sociology at the University of California at Davis and is currently writing her dissertation on citizen efforts to shape the course of oil development in Tabasco...
...Leadership has been silenced through brutality, jail time, and threats...
...As Santo Tomas lawyer Javier NLfiez says, "We are going to use all the legal mechanisms available: internal oil industry regulations, national and international environmental law...
...Ixhuatldn is Mexico's first environmental case to achieve the arrest of a polluter...
...Community members brought in local politicians and the staff of Tabasco-based Santo Tomas Ecological Association to pressure Pemex officials...
...Much of the money earmarked for reparations has instead been employed to strengthen party-stateindustry relationships...
...In addition, the fact that Pemex accounts for about a third of Mexico's national income represents a significant conflict of interest for state prosecutors...
...In April 1999, activists won indictments against four Pemex officials in the case of lxhuatlln del Sureste, Veracruz, where residents had caught company subcontractors red-handed, dumping toxins in a marsh near the area's main water source...
...Joint police and military groups such as Bases for Mixed Operations (BOM) guard Pemnex installations and break up protests...
Vol. 34 • January 2001 • No. 4
