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SPECIAL FEATURE -- 1100 WORDS
WHEN INDIAN SURVIVAL MEANS BURNING DOWN THE RAIN
FOREST
EDITOR'S NOTE: In Guatemala's vast Peten, which holds much of the
second largest rain forest in the hemisphere, Indian colonizers
squeezed off other lands are creating an ecological wasteland.
Environmental concerns carry little weight as long as they have no
other security or hope for the future. PNS Central America editor
Mary Jo McConahay sent this dispatch from the tiny Indian town of
Sipense. McConahay writes for the National Catholic Reporter,
Chronicle Foreign Service, Los Angeles Times magazine and other
publications.
BY MARY JO MCCONAHAY, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
You won't find the town of Sipense on a map, even a map of
Guatemala. It is too small -- only 51 families -- and impossibly remote.
It is also the kind of town people in this part of the world don't like to
admit exists.
Sipense is populated by displaced Indian farmers who are killing the
rain forest.
The trip begins in earnest only after three hours' travel by dirt road
from a provincial airport to a rough river station named Sayaxche,
which has several bars and trading posts but no telephone or telegraph.
Even from there it is an hour by canoe down a branch of a meandering
river called The Passion, where green-brown alligators keep a sun-
drugged watch from shore; then a four-hour walk through jungle that
sings with bowler monkeys and presumably resplendent birds I
couldn't see because the forest is so thick.
It was alarming to be still deep among the trees and wild orchids when
I first smelled the smoke from Sipense, one of the dozens of
settlements that lie at the heart of the dilemma that plagues the Peten,
the northern third of Guatemala. Its people migrate to the rain forest
to survive, and they are doing it the only way they know: by burning it
down.
"They are not supposed to clear the land out this far," complains my
guide from Sayaxche. We have walked out of the jungle onto a spot
that appears to be within the boundaries of one of the few government-
protected areas in this southern portion of the Peten. But someone has
obviously been at the trees with machete and chain saws.
I thought back a few days to an office filled with maps and charts in
Guatemala City, where a conservation expert reminded me that the
population of the Peten has increased from about 25,000 in the 1950s to
close to 300,000 now. About 60,000 hectares of jungle, he said, are
disappearing every year in the Peten, home of most of the second-
largest rain forest in the hemisphere. But it wasn't until I breathed the
acrid air outside Sipense that the numbers became real.
Suddenly there was open space where there shouldn't have been, and
the temperature jumped because there was nothing overhead to break
the fierce direct sun. For acres before us thick, gray ash covered the
ground, and the biggest, proudest trees lay fallen at crazy angles, still
smoldering.
This was death by rosa, or slash-and-burn agriculture, a traditional
method in the highlands, where these Kekchi Indians come from, but
murder on the tropical forest here and its thin soil, which then wears
out fast under intensive farming. Days later in another town (29
families) founded six years ago, just two years before Sipense, a
displaced Kekchi farmer would hold up for me a miniature ear of corn,
the kind you see in supermarket gourmet sections at home, and
question why his corn was shrinking. But this farmer wasn't growing
for export: he was supposed to feed his family of seven on his crop.
So if the farming isn't great, and if, as some here told me, they know
the forest does not exist for human beings to erase -- the Kekchi deeply
respect nature, and pray to deities for permission before they cut trees
or burn fields -- then why are they here? The answer they gave me in
Sipense is that they have no choice.
"Where we come from the land is even more tired," a peasant named
Inocente Ical, who spoke some Spanish, told me. Besides, added a
neighbor, in the Vera Paz region they used to call home, land is tied up
in large fincas, spreads where a few landowners pay an often unfair
wage to Indian tenant farmers. I had read the reports that said this
country's land distribution is the most skewed in the hemisphere, with
about 80 percent of it in the hands of about 2 percent of the population.
But what came to mind most strongly were the words of writer
Eduardo Galeano, who said the vast majority of Guatemalan Indians
subsists on plots "the size of a grave."
Mateo Tiul, 45, is the local authority named by the mayor of Sayaxche,
and he is proud of his position. Not that there is much official
business: there is no town hall, no treasury, no government clinic, no
services. So inconsequential is this town that when leftist guerrillas
fighting a fitful 30-year war took Sipense last year, the army didn't
come to take it back. After eight days the rebels left, and haven't
returned.
"We hope you find our place beautiful," Tiul told me, as he spread
clean plastic bags on the dirt floor of his two-room house to use as a
kind of table cloth. Actually, I found the scene outside appalling, the
ecological destruction on an apocalyptic scale, but I wasn't looking with
their eyes.
In the next few days I would see evidence of the most famous rn
for the disappearance of the rain forest: rapacious but not necessarily
illogical logging. The thickest jungle would suddenly open into
primitive but serviceable vehicle tracks, cut to remove precious cedar
and mahogany. Illegal logging has been a national scandal no one
seems willing or able to stop. But once the ugly brechas or roads are
hacked out, colonizers like the Kekchi in Sipense inevitably follow.
On the last few yards of Guatemalan territory, in a village on the border
with Mexico, I met botanist Eduardo Secaira, who has learned to speak
Kekchi and works for the Dos Pilas archaeological project. His work is
confirming that the ancient Maya were able to support for a
millennium a population many tihat of their descendants in the
Peten without destroying the rain forest, largely by cultivating a variety
of plants and metnstead of scorching the earth, then growing
corn and beans until it is exhausted. Secaira says conservationists have
an obligation to tell the peasant newcomers that "it's not true there
will be forest forever.
But Seicara admits that the Kekchi may not be disposed to listen to
outsiders. Like many of the 22 groups that make up the Indian
majority of this country, communities of Kekchi have a history of
being squeezed off the best land, and in the 1970s and '80s at least
hundreds were massacred in the highlands as they tried to claim title
and later as the civil war flared. Now, those who come to the Peten are
getting what they can when they can.
"There is no future for environmental concerns if people don't have
long-term faith that their lives will improve, or some hope and
security for the future," said Secaira.
What security these people know exists now in Peten. When I
returned from the border by way of Sipense and asked Ical whether he
thought he would ever go home again, he looked bemused as he
surveyed his neighbors' thatch houses and the simple church he is
helping to build under a smoky sky.
"This is my house," he said.
(06131991) **** END **** COPYRIGHT PNS