Mexico's battle to save its forests
MEXICO CITY -- In scenes reminiscent of the war on drugs, hundreds
of police in flak jackets and helmets are raiding the mountains to
defend Mexico's rapidly disappearing forests.
As in the battle against drugs, casualties are beginning to mount
and President Vicente Fox faces a legacy of corruption and
tolerance of an activity that threatens to tear Mexico apart.
Police have found camps of heavily armed loggers who are willing
to riddle forestry vehicles with bullets, shoot officials and mow
down activists.
To slow the steady stream of trucks carting away pine and cedar
from Mexico's mountains, three months ago the president declared
deforestation a ``national security issue.''
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But the loggers have proved they'll fight back.
On May 4, two men walked into a bar in the town of Putla, in
Oaxaca, shot to death Fidel Bautista Guerrero, 33, a Mixtec Indian
who had organized Indian farmers to conserve the forests.
State police pursued the killers to the ranch of a timber baron,
where they arrested eight men armed with AK-47s and other rifles.
Some of the violence is caused by drug traffickers who are willing
** to kill to protect crops hidden in forests on public land, or who
cut trees to grow drug crops.
It has all contributed to an atmosphere of lawlessness that has
shrunk Mexico's forests to a quarter of the size they were before
the Spanish came. Mexico has one of the highest deforestation
rates in the world, losing about 1.5 per cent of its forests and
jungles -- about 1.7 million acres every year.
In raid after raid this year, police have seized not only chain
saws, timber and heavy trucks from loggers, but also dozens of
assault rifles. |
