Where Butterflies Rest, Damage Runs Rampant

["F A B I O C C H I::" <eco_fabiocchi at tin.it>]

June 2, 2004
Where Butterflies Rest, Damage Runs Rampant
By GINGER THOMPSON 
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/02/international/americas/02butt.html
     
SAN LUIS, Mexico - The illegal loggers smeared mud on their faces to hide their 
identities. Then they smashed a camera they feared would expose their pillaging.

The evidence, however, was everywhere. Two trucks rumbled down the mountain 
with illegally cut wood. The mud-smeared loggers had fresh blood under their 
fingernails from loading. In a federally protected forest that is a winter 
haven for the monarch butterfly, the landscape was as barren as the moon.

This is Mexico's most famous national park, a 10,000-year-old evergreen forest 
set aside by presidential decree and supported by millions of dollars in 
international aid for colonies of orange and gold butterflies that migrate 
annually from the United States and Canada, in clouds that look like fire in 
the sky.

But when the butterflies leave each spring, and the hundreds of thousands of 
tourists go home, this reserve stretching west from the suburbs of Mexico City 
to the mountains of Michoacán becomes a symbol of the rapid destruction of all 
the nation's forests, and is overtaken by organized crime and mob justice. 
Heavily armed mafias chop down the trees at an alarming rate - about 70 mature 
trees each day, or a small forest a week, Mexican authorities say.

The mobs ambush the police and terrorize village leaders who threaten to stop 
them. Left alone to defend their property, some beleaguered villages take the 
law into their own hands to fight back against the loggers, often using the 
same violent tactics. Most villages surrender and sell their trees.

The illegal logging, peasant leaders say, is driven by a surging demand for 
wood; by the crushing poverty of the Indians who live in communal cooperatives, 
called "ejidos"; and by the lingering resentment over the government's decision 
18 years ago to turn the precious forests into a reserve for insects that their 
people refer to as "worms."

Indeed, the mud-smeared men of San Luis spoke with contempt for a society they 
say cares more about the butterflies than about their families. This land 
belongs to them, they said, and they would not surrender their rights to a 
presidential decree, much less forsake the needs of their children for bugs.

"Everyone worries about the butterflies," said one illegal logger, the brim of 
his baseball cap pulled to his nose to hide his face. "What about us?"

Then the loggers lashed out against a group of journalists. They smashed a 
photographer's camera, punched a radio reporter in the face, and threatened to 
hold the group hostage, accusing the journalists of being government spies.

The smell of alcohol made their voices more menacing.

"We are not going to hurt you," they said. "We are thieves, not savages."

The police and government environmental inspectors have also been attacked, and 
rarely venture into villages like San Luis, unless they do so en masse and in 
military style. Officers and inspectors have been detained for hours by 
criminal mobs that set their vehicles on fire. The loggers have staged 
roadblocks to take back trucks of wood that had been confiscated by the police; 
and stormed jails to free their leaders.

Inundated by pleas from communities like this one and by calls of outrage by 
international environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, 
President Vicente Fox sent the army into the forest in May to restore order.

"We are at war," said Gabriel Mendoza Jiménez, deputy secretary of public 
security for the state of Michoacán. "This is not only a problem of cops and 
robbers. This is a fight for civil order over impunity."

Victor Lichtinger, a former minister of the environment, said that in much of 
the world including most of Mexico, deforestation remains a largely quiet 
phenomenon, spreading almost a tree at a time, and driven by the poverty of 
rural farmers who cut down small plots of the forest to make way for 
subsistence crops. But Mexico's forests, he added, are also the strongholds of 
drug traffickers and armed rebels. They are seething with tensions from 
unresolved land disputes that go back generations. They are far removed from 
the reaches of the law.

From the day the government established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere 
Reserve, peasants here have lived at odds with the government, and the 
deforestation turned fast and turbulent.

Mexico had given this land to peasants from the spoils of the revolution. With 
the creation of the reserve in 1986, the peasants accused the government of 
taking their land away.

The people of San Cristóbal, at the southern edge of the butterfly reserve, 
burned down their trees, rather than cede control to the government. Fourteen 
years later, the Mexican government expanded the reserve to more than 132,000 
acres from 45,000 acres, offering peasants who live in extreme poverty few 
economic incentives to save their trees. The tensions, and deforestation, 
spread.

Now, as the demand for wood grows in factories, construction companies and 
fruit packing plants, middlemen have moved into the forests offering good money 
for timber - about five times the average daily wage for a 60-year-old pine - 
and peasants have decided to do business.

"What was once a problem of poverty and a necessity to survive has turned into 
a crime of greed," Mr. Lichtinger said, speaking of the logging in the 
butterfly reserve. "There is no way to get the mafias to submit to the law."

Governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel said, "If we tell people they cannot exploit 
their forests, and walk away, then we condemn them to dying of hunger, or we 
force them to become involved in illegal logging."

The governor said the growing tensions in the butterfly reserve were one result 
of a three-year-old crackdown against industries around the area that buy 
illegal wood. Some 100 sawmills had been closed or fined, he said, and 159 
people had been arrested, most of them poor workers.

But in a state with four million people, fewer than 9,000 police officers and a 
flourishing illegal marijuana trade, the governor acknowledged he could only 
crack down so hard. He said he was reluctant to send officers chasing illegal 
loggers in the forests because he worried about "confrontations with peasants 
that get out of control."

He said he supported President Fox's decision to send the military.

Mr. Mendoza, the public security official, agreed. "I could send officers into 
the forests and lose three of them a day," he said, "but I am not willing to 
make that sacrifice."

Federal environmental authorities are also strapped for money and manpower. 
Unlike the United States, where nearly 2,000 permanent and seasonal armed 
rangers patrol 387 national parks, Mexico's protected areas are hardly 
protected at all, with fewer than 400 roving, unarmed inspectors assigned to 
watch over 150 natural reserves.

Diana Ponce, a deputy prosecutor for Profepa, the agency charged with 
protecting Mexico's natural resources, said peasants are ravaging forests from 
Chihuahua to Chiapas. She estimated that the country loses about 1.3 million 
acres of forests each year, the fifth worst deforestation rate in the world.

Some 70,000 acres are cut down each year from the Lacandon rain forest, home of 
the Zapatista National Liberation Army and the hemisphere's most biologically 
diverse jungle after the Amazon. Environmentalists predict it could disappear 
within the next two decades.

The old-growth pine forests in the northern Sierra Tarahumara and its rich 
diversity of wildlife face threats from drug traffickers who burn down the 
trees up to 200 years old to plant marijuana. Villagers who stand against the 
traffickers have been killed. Two peasant leaders, Isidro Baldenegro López and 
Hermenegildo Rivas Carillo, were arrested last year without warrants. Amnesty 
International considers them prisoners of conscience, comparing their arrests 
to the government's abuses against the forest crusaders Rodolfo Montiel and 
Teodoro Cabrera of the state of Guerrero.

But no forest's plight draws more attention these days than the monarch 
butterfly reserve.

Homero Aridjis, a poet, author and leading Mexican environmentalist, said: "The 
federal government has no control. The state government has no control. The 
forest has become a no man's land."

The World Wildlife Fund reported two years ago that some 40 percent of the 
butterfly reserve had been destroyed from 1971 to 1999. Last month, the 
organization reported that more than 500 hectares have been lost in the last 
three years. Aerial photographs, the group said, showed that the villages of 
Francisco Serrato and Emiliano Zapata had lost all of their forests.

"I have climbed the mountains to ask my people why they are cutting the 
forests," said Alejo Claudio Cayetano, an Indian leader in the ejido, or 
community, of Cresencio Morales. "They tell me that if they do not cut them, 
others will, and then they will have nothing."

People in the ejido of El Paso fight hard to hold on to their forest. The camp 
of plastic tents beneath their towering pine and Oyamel firs is their battle 
station, manned by grandmothers and sons, who leave their homes five days a 
week to help guard the trees.

Last year, the leader of the ejido, Armando Sanchez Martínez, discovered a 
truck loaded with wood that had been illegally cut from their forest. He set it 
on fire.

Then a couple of months ago, after gunmen fired on his truck, Mr. Sanchez 
bought a handful of rifles and handguns and recruited the other ejido residents 
to serve on civilian patrols. Their support, he said, was unanimous.

"The illegal loggers wanted to shoot one of us to frighten us and take our 
forest," he said. "Now they are going to have to shoot us all."