Mexico

The month of September has certainly been rich in important events, warranting the active participation of relevant social actors. The ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico, was doubtlessly the most resounding one, both because of the presence of thousands of people and organizations from all over the world, demonstrating in the streets against the WTO, and because of the firm attitude of some countries from the South, in facing the domineering attitude of certain governments from the North. The world will never be the same after Cancun.

September 2003 is a crucial month for the global environment movement. During September, global trade talks under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation are to be held in Cancun, Mexico. Social and environmental organisations plan sharp protests against the way the Bretton Woods organisations are still pushing the world headlong down a slide towards unregulated markets, international trade without equity and liberalization without restraint.

Chiapas, in southern Mexico, is home to peasants, mestizos and indigenous Tzontal, Tzontzil, Chole, Zoque and Tojolabal peoples. There, bananas, cacao, sugar cane, and rice are planted. Each family has its own agricultural plot, where they plant maize and beans for subsistence.

An emergency delegation sponsored by Global Exchange has returned from the Montes Azules Integral Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico, and has prepared the following statement: We denounce the imminent forced relocation of indigenous communities settled in Montes Azules. Further, we concur with most nongovernmental organizations that the dislocations are being carried out as a pretext for further commercial exploitation of the region, such as oil exploration, bioprospecting, and the construction of hydroelectric dams.

Mexico has joined a model giving priority to the needs of transnational industrial capital demand, aimed at exportation. The environmental policy and rights of the indigenous and peasant peoples are subordinated to this demand (see WRM Bulletin 14).

The US conservation group, Conservation International (CI) is requesting the Mexican government to use its armed forces to crush the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) once and for all, according to reports in the Mexican newspaper "La Jornada." The organisation maintains that the guerrilla group and the "illegal" invasion by peasants of the Lacandona forest are destroying the tropical forest, and therefore military intervention is necessary.

Corporate interests in oil palm, (see WRM Bulletin 47) have found in Mexico, and more precisely in Chiapas, an ideal spot for their business, basically due to the climatic diversity of the zone, the availability of cheap labour (more so because of its condition as frontier state with Central America, where undocumented workers abound), and the possibility of easy access to peasant community land. The peasants, pushed and pressed by the powerful market forces expressed in agrarian policies, become salary earners on their own land, which is no longer the base of their food security.

The Zoque forest stretches over the boundaries of the three states of greatest biodiversity in Mexico: Oaxaca, Veracruz and Chiapas. It is the most compact and best conserved continuous forest of North America, with a million hectares that include pine, holm oak and pine-holm oak forests, cloud or mesophile forests, and high, medium and low tropical forests.

The Mexican authorities themselves have recognised, through the Secretariat for the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), the seriousness of the Mexican situation in terms of forest loss.

Digna Ochoa, the lawyer defending Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera recently liberated (see article in this section), untiring defender of peasant rights, has been murdered. At 37, she had spent over 10 years defending the rights of the communities from an unjust system privatising local forest resources in favour of major national and foreign companies. Her murder is a symbol, both of the dignity of the Mexican people, and of the unworthiness of those holding power.

It is with great pleasure that we received news on Thursday 8 November that a few hours previously, Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, the environmentalist peasants, unjustly imprisoned in Guerrero since May 1999, had been liberated. President Fox has not recognised their innocence, but under the pressure of the unanimous claim of Mexican and international society, he has pardoned them for humanitarian reasons.

Shrimp, considered as the country’s pink gold, became the focus of Mexico’s export-oriented fishing activity because of the importance and economic value of the crustacean in the international --particularly US-- market. Five Mexican states along the Pacific coast (Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Oaxaca, and Chiapas) and two along the east coast (Tamaulipas and Campeche) have developed shrimp aquaculture.