By Lorraine Orlandi
PETATLAN, Mexico (Reuters) – Reyna Mojica saw her two boys
shot to death just weeks ago, an attack she traces to a
vendetta she says began in 1998 when her family helped block
hundreds of logging trucks in Mexico’s Sierra Madre.
They call themselves the Peasant Ecologists of the Petatlan
Sierra and their fight to save a swath of forest near the
Pacific coast is among the world’s most important struggles
against deforestation, Greenpeace says.
The peasants have largely won. But they have paid dearly.
After the month-long blockade, international lumber firm
Boise Cascade canceled contracts for massive cutting operations
in the Petatlan mountains, citing supply problems, and 15
logging permits were revoked.
Since then at least a dozen peasant leaders have been
targeted. Some have been arrested and jailed on what are widely
seen as bogus charges engineered by political and economic
interests profiting from logging. Others have gone into hiding
and some have been killed.
“This has cost so much; it has cost lives,” said ecologist
Eva Alarcon in the mountaintop hamlet Banco Nuevo. “People are
on the lookout day and night. These men don’t sleep at home.”
While much of the logging has stopped, violence and
acrimony still flare largely, locals say, because the activists
represent a continuing challenge to the local power structure
of landowners and the court, military and police officials
allied to them. The results of that power clash are chilling.
One night in May, Mojica watched from her dirt-floor
kitchen as her husband and four children arrived in their
truck. Suddenly, gunshots exploded and she ran outside.
“I was yelling, ‘Don’t shoot, my children are out there, my
children are out there,”‘ she said later.
Two sons died, aged 9 and 20, the elder leaving a pregnant
widow. Mojica’s younger boy died in her arms. Rights groups say
her husband, ecologist Albertano Penaloza, who was injured, was
targeted for his activism. No one has been arrested.
Nonetheless, Mojica and her neighbors keep defending the
forest. Their fight is a textbook study of how grass-roots
activism meets stone-hard repression in Mexico’s countryside.
“The struggle is not just for us and our family, it is for
everyone,” Mojica said quietly. “I think it is worthwhile.”
FAVORS, BLOOD TIES
In the Petatlan Sierra, a rugged range rising from the
steamy Pacific coast into fresh pine forest, questions of
justice and power can turn on personal favors and blood ties.
Environmental groups say wealthy landowners and power
brokers profited from logging that between 1992 and 2000
destroyed 40 percent of 558,000 acres of woodland here, some of
the worst deforestation on the planet.
As old-growth forest was clear-cut, peasants saw streams
and rivers drying up and knew something was wrong. Stripping
the land of trees depleted the watershed.
They set out to educate neighbors, armed with Catholic
teachings about preserving nature, and came up against powerful
interests including a party boss with family ties to the army.
“Unfortunately, this group from Petatlan ran into very
powerful people who still have a lot to exploit,” said Amador
Campos, the leftist mayor of the nearby coastal resort
Zihuatanejo. “This is a war over money.”
For subsistence farmers the stakes were vital.
“Their struggle has been for survival, so as not to be left
with denuded soil, no water, barren earth,” said Alejandro
Calvillo of Greenpeace in Mexico.
By 1998 as many as 800 logging trucks roared down the
mountains daily. Hilltops were shaved to stubble. Community
pleas to state and federal officials brought no response.
So the ecologists took drastic action.
“They went down and stopped the trucks in the middle of the
road,” Alarcon recalled. “They threw out some logs and burned
them. That’s when the persecution started hard, really hard.”
Labeled “eco-guerrillas” by prosecutors, two ecologists
were arrested and tortured into confessing to gun and drug
crimes and another was killed in that raid, rights groups say.
The jailing of Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera became
an international rights cause until President Vicente Fox
pardoned them in 2001 under mounting pressure.
PROTEST, PLANTING
The ecologists had hoped such persecution would stop with
Fox’s 2000 election, which ended 71 years of one-party rule.
Instead, leader Felipe Arreaga has been jailed since
November on what rights groups say are false murder charges,
and in May three more ecologists were arrested on gun charges.
And Mojica’s family was ambushed, prompting state lawmakers
to form a special commission to investigate.
“For protecting the environment, they kill people, jail
them,” said Arreaga’s wife, Celsa Valdovinos, herself a leading
activist. “I’m scared. It looks like this won’t stop.”
Still, like Mojica she is wedded to the group’s mission,
which has turned largely from protest to reforestation. They
have planted 177,000 trees and formed firefighting brigades.
Shiny green baby firs now huddle on once bare
mountainsides. Spindly young cedars crowd the lower altitudes.
Some farmers harvest the trees’ seeds for sale, and as the
watershed rises they dream of marketing river shrimp.
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