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ENVIRONMENT-MEXICO: Yet More Casualties in War on Indigenous Activists
By Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, May 23 (IPS) - The "war" waged on indigenous environmental
activists by loggers in Mexico has claimed the lives of two more victims,
including a nine-year-old boy, while local and international
non-governmental organisations report continued arbitrary arrests of
campesinos struggling to protect the forests.
"Campesino (peasant farmer) environmentalists are being systematically
attacked. The latest incidents only serve to underscore the persecution and
repression they suffer, and the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators,"
said Verónica Bassot, spokesperson for Tlachinollan, a human rights group
that works with campesino organisations.
The mountains of the southwestern state of Guerrero are plagued by
uncontrolled logging.
There are 17 municipalities in the region with predominantly indigenous
populations - either full-blooded or mixed-race members of the Nahuatl,
Mixtec and Tlapaneco ethnic groups - and 11 of these have been classified by
official government studies as "highly marginalised". One is considered the
poorest municipality in the entire country.
Satellite images reveal that between 1999 and 2000 alone, some 86,000 of the
226,203 hectares of forest cover in the mountains disappeared, according to
figures from the international environmental watchdog Greenpeace.
The latest casualties in this undeclared war were a nine-year-old boy and
his 20-year-old brother, shot dead Thursday night in the Guerrero mountains.
The victims were the sons of Albertano Peñalosa, leader of the Campesino
Environmentalist Organisation of the Sierra of Petatlán and Coyuca de
Catalán (OCESP), who was wounded in the attack, along with two other sons.
The next day, the Mexican army arrested three of Peñalosa's fellow OCESP
members, on charges of killing a logger's son. They will join Felipe Arreaga
who has been in jail since last November for the same reason, and is
considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.
In a telephone interview from the mountains of Guerrero, Bassot told IPS
that the destruction of the forests and the violence against
environmentalists fighting to defend them are the work of "powerful caciques
(local political bosses) who do as they please, and even enjoy a certain
amount of protection from the military troops that patrol the area."
"The government of the state of Guerrero (led since Apr. 1 by Zeferino
Torreblanca of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD) and
President Vicente Fox are not taking action, and that is why impunity and
fear continue to reign here in these mountains," she added.
Like the rest of the campesinos from the Guerrero mountains currently in
custody and the father of the two boys murdered last week, Rodolfo Montiel
and Teodoro Cabrera are also OCESP members. In 1999, they were arrested and
tortured by soldiers on trumped-up weapons and drugs possession charges.
Montiel and Cabrera were finally released in 2001, after Fox granted them a
presidential pardon on health grounds.
While still in prison, the two men were awarded the Goldman Prize,
established by U.S. non-governmental organisations and considered the
"environmental Nobel". They were also granted the Chico Mendes award, named
for the Brazilian campesino, trade unionist and environmentalist murdered in
1988.
The 2005 Goldman Prize - which comes with a 125,000-dollar cash award - went
to another indigenous environmental activist, Isidro Baldenegro, who was
imprisoned on weapons and drug charges in March 2003.
Baldenegro was released in June 2004 after numerous denunciations of
irregularities in his case, and campaigns waged by environmental and human
rights groups who declared him a prisoner of conscience.
Local and international human rights groups maintain that OCESP members are
persecuted solely for the fact that they oppose the destruction of the
forests, much of which is caused by illegal logging.
The campesinos taken into custody on Friday are accused of participating in
the 1998 murder of the son of Bernardino Batista, the leader of a loggers
association.
"All of these cases are fraught with injustice and irregularities, in which
the army and the police work as instruments of the loggers," stressed
Bassot.
"It is shameful to see the way defenders of the environment are persecuted
and their struggle is criminalised," she added.
London-based Amnesty International has repeatedly highlighted the "misuse of
the judicial system in Mexico to silence or deter dissidents or opposition
by civil society through the use of fabricated or unfounded criminal
charges," particularly in the case of environmental activists.
According to reports from Tlachinollan, "the army has taken over as the
authority exercising both police and military control" in the Guerrero
mountains.
Army troops force their way into indigenous communities, eat their food,
drink their water, and interrogate, arrest and intimidate locals on the
grounds that they are enforcing the federal weapons and explosive laws and
fighting drug trafficking, state the reports.
"Let me put this very clearly: you get in the way of certain interests, and
that's the problem, that's why I'm here," OCESP member Felipe Arreaga told
IPS in November, shortly after being sent to prison.
Similar statements were made by Montiel and Cabrera during their own
incarceration. Since their release, they have been living practically
underground outside the state of Guerrero, for fear of an attempt on their
lives.
(END/2005)
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