Between More of Us / Blog

Nicolás Pradilla. Hillside planted with agave for mezcal production in the municipality of San Dionisio Ocotepec, Oaxaca. The clearing of hillsides and planting in rows accelerates the process of soil erosion and desertification.

Against forests

What role do local authorities play in caring for forests and promoting sustainable activities for the reproduction of life?

In the context of the climate crisis, the Mexican government has done little to mitigate the accelerated process of deforestation resulting from legal and illegal logging, and the expansion of the agricultural and mining frontier. It is a complex problem in which more and more players are involved, making it difficult to prevent deforestation and related violence. In 2020, Mexico lost 127,770 hectares of forest. According to the National Forestry Programme 2020-2024, the product of illegal logging in the country already exceeds one third of the total amount of timber traded. Over the last ten years, organised crime has become involved in the lucrative business of illegal logging in forested regions of the country, in many cases in complicity with local authorities. Furthermore, various communities have seen a profitable business in illegal logging under the prevailing impunity in different regions of the country, such as Michoacán, the coast of Jalisco, Guerrero, Chihuahua and the State of Mexico. What is lost with deforestation is, above all, the web of life that it harbors. There is also the people who co-produce life of these environments, their defenders.

On 27 October 2021 was last seen Irma Galindo Barrios, a Mixteca defender against deforestation in the forests of her community in the municipality of San Esteban Atatlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. Just a few days earlier, an armed group set fire to around 25 houses and killed seven people in the communities of Ndoyonoyuji, Guerrero Grande and Mier y Terán in the same municipality. Galindo had denounced on her social networks the complicity of the Mayor with the groups of illegal loggers days before her disappearance. In 2019, Galindo filed complaints with the competent national forestry authorities, but received no response. However, her house was burned down by illegal loggers that same year. At the time of her disappearance last year, Irma had the support of the Mecanismo de Protección para Personas Defensoras de Derechos Humanos y Periodistas (Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists), as well as the Red Nacional de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos en México (National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Mexico). A year after her disappearance, there is no news of her whereabouts and no effective investigation has been carried out to find her.

Only in September this year, Mexico was declared the deadliest country for human rights defenders, with 54 people killed in 2021. According to Global Witness, almost half of the land defenders killed last year in the world recognised themselves as indigenous. In addition, more than a third of these crimes are considered cases of enforced disappearance. In addition to Mexico, countries such as Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of Congo are among the regions with the highest number of murders linked to the defence of territory, forests and water. The driving force behind these attacks is often linked to mining, infrastructure megaprojects, agribusiness and other extractive industries that threaten all forms of life in the territory.

It is a matter of concern that this increase in violence for the circulation of capital is often carried out in collusion between state agents, organised crime and private enterprise. Ana del Conde and Heriberto Paredes have argued that the social and political destabilisation generated by the so-called ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico has opened up economic opportunities favoured by the blurred boundaries between the legal and the illegal allowed by the violence and oppression against local communities and their territories. Violence against environmental defenders in the face of government inaction generates social fractures and fear that facilitate the unpunished plundering of vital elements of life in largely indigenous territories. At the same time, the voracity of markets for products and services, such as tourism and alcoholic beverages, has generated new extractive enclaves that form chains of exploitation, such as the growing mezcal industry in Oaxaca, Mexico. According to Diana Manzo, the industrialisation of this traditional drink is intertwined with violent deforestation processes that bring with them soil erosion and open the door to mining within a few years. The deforestation of forests ravaged by illegal logging is, in this sense, a first step in several processes of value extraction that eventually open the door to legal and illegal mining, which leads, among other factors, to the contamination of soils and aquifers, as well as the forced displacement of the region’s inhabitants.1

People who defend their territories from extractive machinery are in many cases exposed to violence not only by illegal organisations of loggers, miners or voracious businessmen, but also by the authorities of their own towns, who tend to collude, facilitate or omit their actions. Local and regional authorities are primarily responsible for the violence against people who defend their ways of life and fight against the destruction of territories disputed by the accumulation of capital. In the struggle for climate justice, the defence of territories and ways of life is urgent to demand action from the authorities, but is also necessary to recognise that it is not from positions of power that these conflicts will be settled. How do we develop relationships of solidarity that make it impossible for these attacks on life to be repeated in the territories we inhabit, ravaged by extractive projects—in the city or in the mountains?

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