LATIN AMERICA: New Leaders Emerge from Environmental Movement

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava - Tierramérica*

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 9 2003 (IPS) - Brazil’s recently-named environment minister symbolises a new type of leadership in Latin America, an approach arising from activism aimed at profound changes.

Peasant farmers, filmmakers, academics, indigenous leaders, politicians and even former guerrillas make up the ranks of the environmental movement in Latin America, a vast and diverse phenomenon that has produced important leaders over the last few decades.

One such trailblazer is Marina Silva, 44, the new environment minister of Brazil who took office Jan 1 when President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva was sworn in.

As a young girl in the northwestern state of Acre, Silva worked helping her father, a "seringueiro" (rubbertree tapper), to support her eight siblings. She survived several bouts with malaria in the Amazon jungle and did not learn to read and write until she was 16.

It was then that hepatitis forced her to move to the city of Rio Branco, where she studied, receiving a degree in history, and became a social and political activist with Lula’s leftist Workers’ Party (PT).

An heir to the tradition established by Chico Mendes – a world-renowned leader of the seringueiros and defender of the Amazon forest who was assassinated in 1988 -, Silva helped organise the CUT labour union in Acre and struggled to protect the rubbertree forests from the chainsaws wielded by the men in the employ of large landowners.

Silva represents a new type of leadership, one born of environmental activism in Latin America.

Lula’s decision to name her to the post "has the consensus support of all environmentalists," Carlos Minc, a PT lawmaker in Rio de Janeiro, told Tierramérica.

Minc, 51, belongs to a group of former guerrillas who, exiled in Europe during the 1970s, returned to Brazil with new ecological ideas for their giant country. Lawmaker Fernando Gabeira and Rio de Janeiro secretaries Alfredo Sirkis (urban planning) and Liszt Vieira form part of the same movement.

These activists took up arms against Brazil’s military regime between 1968 and 1970. The three were arrested and tortured, but were then released in exchange for the return of a diplomat kidnapped by their colleagues.

Back in Brazil a decade later, they joined together to found the tiny Green Party. Only Sirkis remains a Green, while the others moved to the PT.

Throughout Latin America, many activists have paved the way for profound changes, and many paid with their lives for their zeal to protect nature.

In Peru, agronomist and university professor Godofredo García was slain in front of his son Ulisses by a masked man on Mar 31, 2001, in San Lorenzo Valley, a thousand kms north of Lima.

García, who was 63 at the time of his death, was leading the 100,000 residents of the valley in resisting a mega-project by the Canada-based Manhattan Mining to exploit gold, copper, silver and zinc deposits in the subsoils of the city of Tambogrande, which was extending to farming areas.

The plan, which entailed relocating 12,000 city residents, also came under fire because it threatens local agriculture, which sustains some 60,000 people.

The broad public campaign, backed by national and international organisations, including Oxfam America, was not successful in halting the open-pit mining project, which proponents claim will create 3,000 direct and indirect jobs. The inevitable suspicion among locals is that García was killed on the orders of Manhattan Mining.

Another murder of an environmental activist took place in Colombia in January 2000. Indigenous leader Eusberto Jojoa, founder of the Association for Peasant-Farmer Development, was the victim.

"It is an ongoing anguish because we still don’t know who killed him or why," Gonzalo Palomino Ortiz, a pioneer of the Colombian ecology movement, told Tierramérica.

Palomino, 66, is an activist in numerous groups and writes for several publications, as well as serving as biology professor and researcher at the University of Tolima.

One of Palomino’s great achievements was to create the Network of Private Nature Reserves, which covers 130 areas. It is touted as a triumph for individual effort, and the Environment ministry of Colombia has recognised the initiative as "an effective way to preserve ecosystems."

But one of the best-known ecological struggles in Colombia was the 15-year fight against dredging a river for gold in the western town of Ataco, in Tolima department. The battle was waged against the local mining subsidiary of the U.S.-based Chocó Pacífico company.

The protests by local rice-growers successfully blocked what was likely to have been an ecological disaster. Many members of the Agricultural National Salvation movement "emerged from that first major fight of national scope," notes Palomino.

In Costa Rica, agronomist Mario Boza, 60, played a role similar to that of Palomino, founding the National Park Service, which protects 24 percent of the Central American nation’s territory.

His influence extended beyond national borders when the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor project was drawn up, promoting sustainable development in the seven Central American countries and the southern states of Mexico.

Boza served as deputy minister of the Environment from 1990 to 1993 and continues to be an untiring writer and permanent presence at conferences on ecological issues.

"In many countries natural resources will continue to be destroyed and there will be major catastrophes, but there will also be excellent examples to follow, such that in 50 years there will be more positives than negatives," said Boza in a conversation with Tierramérica.

In Chile, Patricio Lanfranco, a documentary filmmaker, has emerged as another sort of environmental leader.

In 1996 he led the Anti-Northern Highway Coordinator, an umbrella for 25 neighborhood and business groups, to protest the construction of a highway to connect east and west Santiago.

The campaign did not prevent the road from being built, but did rack up some small victories, such as changes in the highway route in order to reduce the impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods.

In Lanfranco’s opinion, the effort had "a very positive outcome": the creation of the Living City Corporation, an organisation that carries out projects such as preserving the architectural heritage of the Bellavista district, this year’s winner – in a field of 150 applicants – of the Andrés Bello prize, awarded by a group of seven Latin American countries.

IPS correspondents Abraham Lama, María Isabel García, Néfer Muñoz and Gustavo González also contributed to this report.

* Tierramérica is a specialised news service (www.tierramerica.net) produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.