WASHINGTON, (Nov. 29) IPS - Maya Indians from Belize are to visit
Washington next week in a bid to defend their rainforest homes from
loggers, according to Indian rights lawyers here.
Leaders of the Maya communities of Toledo, in southern Belize, hope to
meet with politicians and financiers here, to state their case against
logging concessions carved out of their traditional lands, and the
Belizean government's plans to pave a major highway through the country's
dense rainforests.
Represented by pro-bono lawyers from the Indian Law Resource Center
(ILRC), the Maya are filing a lawsuit in the Belizean supreme court to
"defend their land rights and challenge the government's authority to
grant logging concessions on their ancestral lands," according to a
statement.
Since 1993, the government has granted at least 17 long-term logging
concessions in Toledo district to foreign-owned companies.
The concessions cover some 224,600 hectares and cut deep into
traditional Mayan lands, according to maps produced by the Maya Mapping
Project under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley.
The largest concession was granted to Atlantic Industries, a Malaysian
timber company, for a reported 60 cents per acre. The concession engulfs
10 Mayan villages that are home to nearly half of the Mayan population,
according to leaders of the Toledo Alcaldes Association and the Toledo
Maya Cultural Council.
Atlantic Industries already has constructed a sawmill described in press
reports as one of the country's largest. Built without first obtaining the
environmental impact assessments required under Belizean law, the sawmill
is situated alongside the Belize Southern Highway and seems set to be the
centerpiece of what Mayan leader Julian Cho calls "a massive industrial
export-oriented logging industry."
The Maya say they were not consulted before the concessions were
granted. They see the government's actions not only as motivated by
profit, but as an attempt to preempt the indigenous communities' efforts
to win legal title to their lands.
Like many rainforest countries, Belize has no laws recognizing ancestral
land rights, according to the Maya.
The Maya equate these rights with the right to survival. Archaeologists
say that, around 900 A.D., there were about one million Maya in what is
now Belize. They first came into contact with outsiders -- Spanish
conquerors -- in 1508. Today, there are about 14,000 Maya left in Belize
-- about 7 percent of the population.
"If the Belize court does not grant an injunction before the logging
season resumes in January, the Maya will file a petition with the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights," part of the Organization of
American States, according to the ILRC.
The Commission's findings are not enforceable, the ILRC concedes but,
the group says, "it is a highly respected body that can exert powerful
moral authority to level the playing field in cases involving indigenous
people."
Following meetings with lawyers from the ILRC and Washington-based
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) last week, the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB) agreed to stall Belize's application for a $28.2
million loan to widen and pave the Southern Highway, according to the
NRDC's Arturo Garcia-Costas.
Instead, the Bank wants the Belizean government to "investigate the
probability of wholesale environmental and cultural destruction" if the
highway is completed, according to the ILRC.
But the highway project already has received funding from other sources,
including Kuwait, the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA),
and Taiwan.
Appreciative of the IDB's stand, the Maya nevertheless are nervous the
highway's other backers will step in and provide the financing needed to
complete the project. The Belizean government is understood to oppose the
IDB's conditions.
"Our clients are not against paving the road," ILRC director Steven
Tullberg told IPS. "They're not against change, but they're very serious
about not being pushed aside or run over."
Over the past five years, several of Southeast Asia's largest forestry
conglomerates have sought out forest-rich countries that, like Belize,
need investors and largely are unable to monitor logging operations.
These firms "are going global because they have already logged through
most of the quality forest in their countries, and their governments have
put in place policies to protect what remains," according to the ILRC.
In Belize, they are particularly interested in Mahogany trees, which
grow throughout the forest now under attack. Studies estimate that 3,000
sq. feet of forest is leveled for logging roads and machinery to harvest
each mahogany tree, environmentalists say.
Belizean officials insist the logging will remain small-scale and
selective, and will be governed by a 1994 forest management plan which,
they say, was written with the help of the British government to
widespread acclaim.
However, many of the national forest inspectors charged with supervising
the logging themselves have fallen to the budget axe, say
environmentalists and journalists who visited the area in September.
The national forest plan is being violated under the government's nose,
according to environmental groups' action alerts on the Internet and press
reports. Prohibited species and untagged trees in prohibited areas have
been cut down; roads have been bulldozed through prohibited areas; and
logging has continued through the rainy season, accelerating environmental
damage.
Deforestation claims some 7.5 million hectares a year in Latin America
and the Caribbean and the forests remaining in Central America and Mexico
are being destroyed at "the highest rate of any subregion in the world,"
according to the IDB's latest annual report on the environment and natural
resources. The major reasons for this include "weak timber concession
allocation resources."
COPYRIGHT 1996 IPS/GIN
Copyright 1996
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