James F. Smith, Los Angeles Times

Thursday, June 1, 2000

Banco Nuevo, Mexico -- The rivers and streams were
withering in the valleys of the harsh Sierra Madre above Mexico's
Pacific Coast, and Rodolfo Montiel was convinced he knew why.

The 45-year-old peasant reasoned that, as loggers cut down more
of the towering pines in the hills above his village, the barren
mountainsides could no longer soak up and store rainwater.
Instead, water cascaded off the treeless land during the rainy
season, dragging tons of topsoil with it, and the terrain stayed
sun-scorched through the six- month dry season.

Their complaints ignored, Montiel and his self-described
peasant-ecologists took bolder action.

They set up impromptu roadblocks in early 1998 to halt the loaded
logging trucks that rumbled down through their Coyuquilla River
valley each day. That provoked the wrath of the logging interests.
A year ago, Montiel was arrested by soldiers, imprisoned and
allegedly tortured, and the logging trucks began rolling again.

Yet far from crushing his unlikely movement, Montiel's arrest has
galvanized a cross-border coalition of environmentalists and
human rights activists in his defense. As he sat in jail awaiting
trial last month, he received the prestigious $125,000 Goldman
Environmental Prize for courageous activism and was named an
Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.

Indeed, Montiel's case has turned a global spotlight onto what
was a shadowy trail of destruction through one of the
hemisphere's important forests.

``When I arrived here 38 years ago, this place was full of
marshes. It was wet even in the dry season,'' said Perfecto
Bautista Martinez, a farmer in Banco Nuevo, a hamlet of 20
families on a high bluff 30 miles inland.

``But then they started to cut down the forests and clear fields,
and now it's just dust,'' he said. ``We are ecologists now because
we have seen the symptoms of the destruction all these years. We
had to think of our children: Do we want them to receive a desert
from us? That's why we organized.''

The damage to these woodlands, along a 200-mile swath of
Guerrero state above the resorts of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, has
become a worst-case symbol of systematic deforestation in
Mexico, from the Lacandon rain forest in the south to the Sierra
Taruhumara region in the northern state of Chihuahua.

Environment Secretary Julia Carabias Lillo acknowledges that
Mexico loses 1.5 million to 1.6 million acres of forests annually,
or about 1.2 percent of its forested land. The United States, by
contrast, has a net gain in forests each year.

Carabias notes that Mexico's deforestation rate is among the
highest of countries with diverse ecosystems, and she calls the
loss of forests in Guerrero state one of the world's 10 most
serious deforestation challenges.

The array of problems in these jagged mountains is certainly
daunting. Drug traffickers frequently set forest fires to clear
ground for growing marijuana and poppies to make heroin, and
guerrillas from Mexico's only currently active armed rebellion
hide out here. Village feuds add another layer of complexity. The
army provides the only law enforcement in these parts, residents
say, and its priority is hardly the trees.

With few alternatives to earn cash, peasant leaders of the
communal land cooperatives known as ejidos have signed
contracts to sell hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of logs.
Montiel's followers say some ejido leaders greedily encourage
exploitation of their lands to fill their own pockets. This allows
clandestine loggers to flourish in a climate of corruption and
intimidation where control by forestry inspectors has all but
vanished.

Bautista Martinez was one of Montiel's allies in forming, in
February 1998, the Organization of Peasant Ecologists of the
Sierra of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catalan. The group drew in
farmers from the Coyuquilla River valley, which runs from the
coastal town of Petatlan up to the crest of the Sierra Madre range,
and from the ``hot lands'' northeast of the 10,000-foot mountain
ridge toward the town of Coyuca de Catalan, 75 miles inland.

The organization's first target was Boise Cascade Corp., the
Idaho- based wood conglomerate that had contracted in 1995 with
the region's union of ejidos for exclusive rights to buy the forests'
long, straight pine logs

--some of them a yard thick. Boise Cascade pulled out shortly
after the protests and roadblocks began in early 1998, citing an
irregular supply of wood that it later said was unrelated to the
protest. Domestic buyers soon filled the void.

The peasant ecologists blamed Bernardino Bautista Valle, the
ejido boss from Montiel's village of El Mameyal, for selling the
wood rights for the benefit of a handful of insiders. Bautista Valle
in turn went to the army and police to accuse Montiel and his
group of being drug traffickers and members of the Popular
Revolutionary Army, or EPR, which operates in the area and
killed seven police officers near here in March 1999.

The Miguel Agustin Pro-Human- Rights Center in Mexico City,
which has taken up Montiel's cause, said Bautista Valle is one of
the old-style caciques, or local chieftains, who dominate isolated
rural areas and who are often in cahoots with state authorities -- in
schemes such as logging more wood than allowed by law.

The human rights center said gunmen loyal to the cacique killed
one ecologist near Banco Nuevo in May 1998, and a soldier,
allegedly accompanying Bautista Valle, killed another ecologist in
July that year.

A Banco Nuevo ejido official, Jesus Cervantes Luviana, told La
Jornada newspaper in August 1998 that he had been tortured by
soldiers to force him to point out four ecologist leaders, including
Montiel, whom the soldiers said ``were chiefs of the hooded
ones,'' a reference to EPR guerrillas.

Earlier this year, Bautista Valle's son was slain as he descended
from Banco Nuevo toward El Mameyal. Villagers think it was a
revenge attack for assaults against the ecologists. The cacique has
fled from the village and his whereabouts are unknown.

Montiel was arrested by the army in the village of Pizotla near
Coyuca de Catalan while he was selling clothes to earn a living. A
peasant was shot to death during the raid, and Montiel's friend,
Teodoro Cabrera, was arrested and remains jailed with Montiel in
the regional city of Iguala.

Montiel was charged with illegal possession of a military weapon
and with growing marijuana and possessing poppy and marijuana
seeds. He insists that the weapon and seeds were planted on him
to frame him.