Mexico

Chiapas means much for many people all over the world. It is a synonym of Zapatistas and of Subcomandante Marcos, and these, in turn, of struggle for liberation and against injustice. However, for national and transnational corporations, Chiapas is still merely a synonym of cheap land, cheap labour, abundant resources and profit opportunities.

The US-based Boise Cascade has been practising unsustainable logging both in Southern and Northern countries, including the US itself. One of the most outstanding conflicts in which the company was involved is that of the community forests (“ejidos”) of the Sierra of Petatlán in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, that resulted in the detention and prosecution of Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, two peasants who organized resistance against Boise Cascade (see WRM Bulletins 26, 35 and 38).

Mexico was urged in an international declaration released on 27 November in Wellington, New Zealand, immediately to release tortured farmer environmentalists, Rodolfo Montiel Flores and Teodoro Cabrera Garcia who have been imprisoned after conviction on trumped up charges following their peaceful opposition to logging in the Mexican state of Guerrero (see WRM bulletins 26, 35 and 38).

Mexican "justice" has once again ruled against justice. Rodolfo Montiel, a "campesino" leader imprisoned for leading a successful opposition movement against logging operations by the US-based Boise Cascade in the state of Guerrero (see WRM Bulletin 26), was found guilty and received a sentence of six years and eight months, in a sentence issued by Fifth District Court Judge Maclovio Murillo. Montiel, together with his colleague Teodoro Cabrera, have already been imprisoned for 15 months. Cabrera was also found guilty and given a 10-year term.

Two-thirds of Mexico’s territory was once covered with different type of tree formations, such as the riparian forests, the thorny chapultepeco thicket, the low thorny forest, the high evergreen forest, the crasicaule thicket, the mountain mesophyle forest and many others. Still nowadays Mexico is considered a "megadiverse" country with regard to both flora and fauna, part of which is hosted in forests and thickets. These rich areas have been suffering a severe degradation and destruction process in the last decades.

Local indigenous and peasant communities are usually accused of forest degradation and are either evicted from their lands, or repressed, or both. At the same time, logging companies which benefit from deforestation, receive support from those same governments that accuse local peoples of destroying the environment. The following two cases from Mexico constitute but a drop in a sea of many such cases occuring throughout the world.

On May 2, 1999, Rodolfo Montiel Flores, the Mexican campesino who has been successfully leading public opposition in the Pacific Coast state of Guerrero against destructive logging operations by Boise Cascade -one of the world's largest timber corporations- was arrested by federal soldiers who violently entered the village of Pizotla. During this armed action also another campesino, Teodoro Cabrera Garcia, was arrested and Salome Sanchez Ortiz was shot dead. Military officials characterized both of them as "members of an ecologist-guerrilla organization".

The Tehuantepec Isthmus is home to the most important humid tropical forests in a country considered one of the five most megabiodiverse countries in the world. The area is also the only natural bridge between tropical subhumid and humid forests of the Pacific and the Golf of Mexico coasts. It is also the region with the greatest availability of accessible water.

The community of Ejido Pino Gordo, in the State of Chihuahua, formed by Tarahuamaras (or Raramuris, as they call themselves) indigenous peoples, is struggling against illegal logging that is destroying the 200-year old forests that surround their village in the Sierra Madre, about 850 miles northwest of Mexico City.

The expansion of tourism has meant the increase of the possibility of enjoying leisure time for many people wordwide. Nevertheless, tourism usually brings negative social and environmental consequences with it and more so in the case of the fragile mangrove ecosystems.

The increased activities of the "maquiladora" industry (installed within Mexico and based on imported inputs and external export markets), have resulted in an enormous deficit in packaging papers --which are currently being imported from the US and Canada-- used in the necessary packaging of the industrial goods for the supply of external markets.

The municipality of San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico is witnessing with great concern how the overdevelopment that has taken place in nearby Puerto Vallarta has attracted the attention of big investing consortia and spurred the ambitions of politicians and senior government officials from this country, resulting in a hoarding of lands, federal zones and mangroves for the purpose of commercial development.