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CONSERVATION AS COUNTER
INSURGENCY IN THE CHIAPAS
RAINFOREST?
By Bill Weinberg
The bush plane takes off from Ocosingo, where the Chiapas highlands slope down to the tropical rainforest known as the Lacandon Selva—stronghold of Mexico’s rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). 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. And we are flying into the deepest and most hotly contested part of it—the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, recognized by the UN Environment Program for its global biological and cultural significance.
The land below is a patchwork of forest and areas cleared for cattle ranches and peasant communities. But as we head south into Montes Azules, the forested areas grow. We land at Nuevo San Gregorio, a Maya Indian 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. The church is brightly painted with a mural depicting village life and jungle animals as well as the obligatory Virgin of Guadalupe. Bright green guacamayas soar overhead and howler monkeys cry from the trees. The church and schoolhouse have solar panels; there is no other electricity.
Nicolas Morales Palé, one of the community leaders, brings us out to the cornfield and boasts of the settlement’s ecological program. He says they gave up slash-andburn agriculture ten years ago and have learned a method of rotation that allows them to survive without eating into the forest. Then he passionately grabs a piece of soil and holds it out to us, so we can see its richness for ourselves. “We will die here if we have to,” he says. “The women, the children, everybody. We’re not leaving alive. We will shed our own blood on this land. We are going to stay here because this land is for the campesinos.”
Although there is no government presence whatsoever in this remote settlement, army troops are now stationed in a ring around the biosphere reserve, awaiting orders to eject the “illegal” Indian communities. Since they emerged in the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, the jungle “autonomous municipalities” loyal to the rebels have been protected by the cease-fire. Now President Vicente Fox is preparing to move against the settlements—in the name of ecology.
Ecology groups working in the reserve like Conservation International say “illegal” jungle settlements like Nuevo San Gregorio are destroying the forest. But in the New Years communique commemorating their 1994 uprising, the EZLN’s Subcomandante Marcos pledged that the rebels will resist the government’s planned evictions from Montes Azules. “There will not be a peaceful expulsion,” wrote Marcos.
Of the 32 communities threatened with eviction, most are EZLN support bases. Others, like Nuevo San Gregorio, are unarmed and not formally part of the rebel movement, but have fraternal relations with the Zapatistas. Everyone in Nuevo San Gregorio supported the Zapatistas’ longstalled peace plan which would give Indian communities—even small jungle settlements like this one—constitutionallyguaranteed autonomy.
Hubliano Lopez-Sanchez, a peasant leader who works with Nuevo San Gregorio in their agro-ecology program, tells me: “We are campesinos and we know how to use the land. We are self-governing indigenous communities. So we have the right to autonomy, as the EZLN is fighting for.”
Ironically, these settlers are in the forest because the government encouraged them to clear it for farmland thirty years ago, in order to relieve the land pressures in the highlands. Then, when the biosphere reserve was declared in 1978, they instantly became squatters. The EZLN charges that the government is using this as an excuse to move against their support communities, despite the official truce.
In the evening, the Nuevo San Gregorio village band—a guitar-fiddle-bass trio—put on a concert for us in front of the church, performing valiantly on beat-up old instruments with missing strings. In the morning, after tortillas and eggs, we fly out— continuing south into the heart of the reserve. We fly over the shrinking heart of intact jungle, leaving settlements behind. A dense, unblemished canopy covers the low mountains for as far as the eye can see in any direction. But it doesn’t last long. Just beyond the clear turquoise of Laguna Miramar, which marks the southern border of the reserve, lies a brown plain of exposed, completely deforested earth. This is the drill grounds surrounding San Quentin, the main military base for the Lacandon Selva.
We land in Comitan, the major town on the other side of the forest. Here we meet a family displaced by the first evictions from the reserve, and still living in the compound of a government agency. They are from the settlement of Rio San Pablo, which agreed to leave Montes Azules in December. A detatchment of federal police backed up by a helicopter showed up to enforce the eviction. But now the families are still negotiating with federal authorities to be compensated with new lands elsewhere in Chiapas. Says family elder Domingo Perez Gomez: “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.” His advice to those still in the jungle: “Don’t leave the Selva, because the government is not to be trusted!”
Reached in Tuxtla, the state capital, Ignacio March, Conservation International’s pointman for Montes Azules, told me: “Some people seem to think that poverty is a good excuse to destroy the reserve. But the Lacandon Selva has been half destroyed over the last 20 years and poverty has only increased. The government cannot give land to every invader because that only provides an incentive to invade. It is a difficult problem. We still haven’t found a solution, and unfortunately the Zapatista conflict is an obstacle to finding one. Many people exploit that and are going into the jungle”.
Back in the highland city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, as I prepared to fly home to New York, the skies, which had been crystalline nearly throughout the trip, became soupy with haze. TV reported that a massive forest fire had broken out in Montes Azules. The government blamed slash-andburn agriculture by the illegal Indian communities. But residents of one such community, Ocho de Febrero, a Zapatista “autonomous municipality,” reported to local human rights groups that the fires had been intentionally set by unknown men. They had destroyed homes, cornfields and animals, forcing residents to flee to neighboring communities.
Bill Weinberg
44 Fifth Ave. #172
Brooklyn NY 11217
USA
E-mail: billw@echonyc.com
Website: http://ww4report.com
This article was written March 2003. A much longer version appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Native Americas: The Hemispheric Journal of Indigenous Issues (Fredericksburg, VA).