Earth's Tree News

Much of Mexico’s forestland is owned by 500 mostly-indigenous ejidos — shared community land — but indigenous ownership does not guarantee that the forests will be defended and conserved. Mexico’s lush forestland covers a quarter of its national territory and accounts for 1.3 percent of the world’s forest resources, but this land is becoming increasingly littered with the corpses of dead forest defenders. Mexican forests are a violent battleground between drug gangs clearing land for illicit cultivation, guerilla groups encamped under the canopy, heavily-armed wood poachers who steal 2,000,000 board feet of timber each year, and those who seek to defend the trees. In recent years, Mexico’s forests have become a killing floor every bit as lethal as Brazil where such environmental martyrs as Chico Méndez, Sister Dorothy Stang (LP, March 9, 2005) and young Dionicio Ribieras were allegedly by the pistoleros of ruthless landowners. The list of the dead is horrific. In the state of Mexico, 30 forest inspectors, a third of the state force, have been murdered since 1991 according to a count kept by Héctor Magallanes, Greenpeace Mexico forest action coordinator. While many ejidos zealously protect their forests which are held in common and represent the communities’ most valued resource, other indigenous groups such as the Lacandon, who occupy the forest of the same name lease out their timber rights to millions of meters of precious mahogany and cedar, stands to corporate loggers. On the other side of the ledger, Zapatista Mayan indigenous rebels who share the rain forest with the Lacandones, enforce timber cutting strictures in their communities and set up roadblocks at key chokepoints in the jungle and the surrounding canyons to keep the wood poachers from moving their loads to clandestine sawmills in the municipality of Ocosingo. Clashes at the roadblocks have resulted in casualties on both sides. “The earth is our mother,” explained Omar, a Zapatista forest defender on the Ejido Morelia, a recent forum in the Lacandon jungle. “We are prepared to die to defend her.”