Huayacocotla, Veracruz – “Those trees have been there forever,” says Cristano Lechuga, the man in charge of guarding the radio and telephone antennas planted on the highest mountain in Huayacocotla, Veracruz, as he points to a deeply green peak, the highest on the rim around the Sierra Madre Occidental. This area in the mountains of northern Veracruz (and Puebla) is threatened today on all sides, not just with the killing off of its proverbial forests.
For many, this is only a prelude to the true devastation to come. The imminent extraction of gas and oil will be brutal (and intensive, thanks to Enrique Peña Nieto’s so-called energy reform). It will take place in the northern-most mountains of Veracruz (and also of Puebla) and the always-coveted lowlands of the Huastecas.
Lechuga, a forest ranger and electrician, indicates a point that lies on the edge of the horizon, a mountain vividly green and covered in original pines like the ayacahuite [Mexican white pine], and oak and white cedar. Beyond that lies the state of Hidalgo. You can see the semi-desert lowlands, called “the shadow of the mountain”. You can see cultivated fields surrounding them, and the woods, already very sparse. Not satisfied with staying at the twenty-eight hundred meters [9,200 ft.] of altitude we have reached, we climb to a watchtower which, in spite of the fog, permits us a distant view of the mountain peaks over which lays an ocean of white clouds.
“Since they’ve cut the forests down, nothing grows,” says Lechuga. He admits there are degrees of the destruction. Nonetheless, what the loggers and authorities call “reforestation” means replanting the cut areas with a single species of pine that “isn’t even good to use as Christmans trees”. This has been accompanied by the disappearance of hundreds of plant and animal species that used to live in the woods when they were protected. And this was not because there was no tradition of logging. Rather, it is because the reasoning that there should be an equilibrium between exploitation and conservation—a rationale honored by indigenous and mestizo [mixed indigenous and Spanish] communities for decades—-has been lost.
Alfredo Zepeda is coordinator of Radio Huaya, the oldest community radio station in the country. The year 2015 marks a half-century of its existence, and it has been rooted in the region since the 80s. Zepeda emphasizes “the brutal increase” in the cutting down of the forests. He says that the devastation is overwhelming. In 1980 “there were two power saws in the entire area. Now there are thousands.” On the main street of Huayacocotla you can see at least four large stores specializing in power saws from Switzerland, China, the United States. The horse is out of the barn.
With dismay, Zepeda says that care of their forests is “engrained” in the identity of the people. The annual limit for harvesting used to be 18,000 cubic meters [636,000 cubic ft]. The new government permits are for 87,000 cubic meters [3 million cubic ft.]. “It’s said that the government intends to go for 500,000 thousand [17.7 million cubic ft.].” Trees forty and sixty years old are being felled. The government promises to replant them, “but it won’t. Greed plays with the numbers.”
More worrisome is the growing vulnerability of the water sources that these mountains protect. In danger is the level of the rivers providing water to the Huasteca region to the north and east, as well as the Vinazco and the Chiflón Rivers. “Deforestation threatens the springs” [which are the rivers’ sources]. In the wake of the government program, PROCEDE [Program for Certification of Ejido Rights and Entitlement of Vacant Land, which aims “to give legal certainty” to indigenous communal land titles], and the laxity of SAGARPA (Secretariat of Food and Agriculture) the ejido forests have been giving in to development pressures. Also, land in private hands has been gobbled up, as happened in Viborillas, near the municipal seat of Huaya.
Within two years, “they stole the countryside,” lamented Zepeda. In the past, it was considered a crime to level the forest. Today it is a common practice.
“They have bribed the ejidos. It appears that no one is interested in caring for the forest.”
Another of the region’s resources is caolin, the “white mineral” [used in making porcelain]. Its extraction is also accelerating. Moctezuma (an offshoot of Cemex cement company) is among the businesses mining it. In the ejido of Carbonero Jacales where there are mines, a kind of rural town has taken root on the wetlands where the Río Chiflón begins. The channels of waste water from the mines and from the new town are contaminated, and the precious wetlands are on the edge of extinction. Today there are no woods left. Where once there was a sawmill, they put a giantcaolin processor.
Zepeda warns that
“with fracking in the region, with the oil and gas, what happened with the wood will happen again. We don’t know how to prevent what is coming.” He continues, “The neoliberal whirlwind arrived and swept us away.”