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Pastimes : Mexico -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (50)	7/8/2001 5:10:29 PM
From: CIMA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 143

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.'' _ 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.