Globalization Lays Siege to Forests and Communities:
Mexico

Take Action to help Isidro Baldenegro Lopez.

"I hope there is some justice left to stop the destruction, the vicious illegal logging."
— Isidro Baldenegro Lopez, from his jail cell in Chihuahua, Mexico

Isidro Baldenegro Lopez is not the first member of his family who has fought to protect Mexico's forests. But unlike his father,Isidro Baldenegro has thus far managed to avoid an assassin's bullet. In Mexico, the illegal logging trade is used to launder millions of dollars in profits from drug trafficking and other illegal activities. What was Isidro Baldengro's reward for taking on a drug cartel widely believed to be in league with corrupt state government officials? Not a prize, award or medal. Instead, Isidro Baldenegro was thrown in jail.

In March 2003, Isidro Baldenegro joined three local women from the Coloradas de la Virgen community to lead a peaceful group of 40 indigenous Tarahumara in a successful effort to stop illegal loggers associated with the Fontes family drug cartel. Each of these three local women's husbands had previously been killed for standing up to the cartel.

Commercial loggers and farmers have cut or burned over half of Mexico's forests for domenstic use and to create agricultural pastures.

The Tarahumara people inhabit part of the northern state of Chihuahua in the Sierra Madre, bordering the United States. About 360 Tarahumara families occupy nearly 150,000 acres of the most bountiful woodlands in North America. They share their home with 23 species of pine (more than in any other region of the world) and approximately 200 species of oak.

The Tarahumara are working to preserve this forest for sustainable domestic use. Yet for nearly three decades, drug traffickers have been illegally logging and selling this timber as a means to launder drug profits.

Armed with a court order suspending the logging permit for the area and protected by state police and the army, Isidro Baldenegro's supporters forced logging trucks to turn aroundending a month-long blockade and a six-month court fight. Isidro Baldenegro was arrested soon after. Witnesses to the arrest state that the police searched his house without warrants.

When the police could find nothing incriminating, they forced him to hold weapons while they took photographs. This case is eerily similar to that of Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, anti logging activists from the state of Guerrero who were arrested and finally released in November of 2001 only after the murder of their lawyer, Digna Ochoa.

Roughly 360 Tarahumara families occupy nearly 150,000 acres of the most bountiful woodlands in North America.

The Sierra Madre Alliance, a Mexico-focused environmental and human rights organization, described the Fontes cartel as a group of "murderous local political bosses who have striven to manage communal ejido* lands as a private ranch, stealing cattle and timber, forcing drug cultivation, and murdering anyone who opposed them." The Fontes cartel is widely believed to have been behind the 1986 shooting of Isidro Baldenegro's father, Julio Baldenegro Lopez, in retribution for his efforts to stop illegal logging.

Cartels, like that of the Fontes, have operated throughout parts of Mexico with impunity: corrupting public officials, destroying forests, persecuting indigenous communities, rigging the judicial and electoral processes, and murdering opponents. The Mexican government has done little to stop these local drug barons so far. The majority of the drugs produced and transported by Mexican drug gangs are exclusively for distribution in the U.S.

The Mexican government often refuses to acknowledge claims of illegal logging made by indigenous communities. Mexico's rate of deforestation is second highest in the world, after Indonesia; between 1993 and 2000, Mexico lost almost 3 million acres of forest per year. Commercial loggers and farmers have cut or burned over half of Mexico's forests for domestic use and to create agricultural pastures. Recently enacted local forestry laws actually encourage communities to divide up forests and sign over plots of land to loggers.

However, the Mexican federal government recently initiated a $10 million program to stop illegal logging. The Fox administration has demonstrated other positive signs, such as providing state police and military officials to assist the Tarahumara protesters. In response to public concern, officials are launching an investigation into police misconduct in the case. There have been few signs, however, of any positive changes in the Chihuahua state government. By enforcing laws to protect forests and their defenders, the Chihuahua state government could break the cycle of destruction and violence.

Update

After pressure from national and international communities, environmental organizations, and human rights groups from around the world demanding the release of Isidro Baldenegro, the Mexican Attorney General's office ultimately dismissed formal charges against him on June 11th, 2004. Sentenced for the alleged crime of illegal drugs and weapons possession, he had spent 15 months in the Chihuahua state prison until he was finally given his freedom on June 23rd.

It was determined that there was no probable cause for Baldenegro's trial, and an investigation indicated that the four police who arrested him fabricated evidence to frame him. Rumors are that they did this on orders from localized organized crime groups who profit from illegal logging. In May 2004, Chihuahua state prosecutors formally charged the policemen with abusing authority, improper arrests, and theft.

Baldenegro fears that he is still under threat from the Fontes family, who reportedly ordered the policemen to arrest him. At Baldenegro's request for police protection, the attorney general is planning to install a radio network in the community that will provide 24-hour access to the county police headquarters, which is a six-hour drive away.

While many believe that the community's fear of the Fontes family outweighs their fear of corrupt policemen, no investigation has been instigated into the Fontes' crimes, and two of the policemen charged with the illegal arrest remain on the loose.

* An ejido is an area of land communally owned by a group of individuals with a specific system of democratic social organization. Ejidos were first introduced in 1917, as a bid to redress the imbalance in wealth distribution through post-revolutionary reforms designed to repossess privately-held estates and return the land to peasant farmers.