In rural Tabasco, a swampy state on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, a middle-aged farmer named Don Ramón* has spent the past three years organizing his neighbors to protest environmental damage from the oil industry. Don Ramón lives in a farming community near the municipal-ity of Cunduacán. As in much of rural Tabasco, area riverbanks and roadsides are lined with homes surrounded by fruit trees, which supplement family food supplies, along with small domestic livestock and locally caught fish. Also surrounding Cunduacán are installations maintained by Mexico’s national oil company Petróleos Mexicanos—Pemex.
The company separates crude oil from natural gas and waste products in sight of Cunduacán’s small landowners, who these days are harvesting the season’s watermelon. Avocados also used to grow here, but the trees can no longer withstand acid rain associated with the Pemex facilities. Pemex also used to dump wastewater filled with heavy metals into nearby rivers and unlined holding ponds. Community pressure forced the company to pump the wastewater back underground, but inadequate maintenance caused a pipeline to burst last year. Don Ramón believes 26 recent cancer-related deaths in his community and a neighboring one, with a total population of only about 800, may be the result of such pollution.
Environmental degradation is one way the government passes oil development costs onto Gulf Coast communities. Much of Tabasco contains oil wells, pipelines and separation stations. Pemex-built transport roads have caused flooding in some regions and drought in others. Pipelines leak and sometimes explode, causing injury and death. Constant gas flaring fills the air with sulfur, which rains back down, eating away zinc roofs, ruining crops and polluting water supplies. Abandoned offshore platforms release scraps and oil into the Gulf, and artificial breakers affect the salinity of coastal lagoons and rivers.
Oil’s social effects have been equally devastating. Many small farmers and fishermen live on communal ejido land or inside protected biosphere reserves, and many are indigenous Chontal. They report declines in productivity over the last few decades—fewer fish in the water, less fruit on the trees, and therefore less food and less income. While very few locals have gotten jobs with Pemex, the influx of highly paid oil workers has upped prices for basic necessities. Residents complain that there is more crime now, people have lost their culture and they have not seen the benefits of the wealth being pumped out of their state. Oil-producing states receive relatively generous government funding, but patronage politics often controls the distribution of such money, reinforcing traditional inequalities. Don Ramón’s community, for example, still has only one school and one teacher for all the primary grades. “Oil isn’t for the nation,” a campesino reports, “it is only for a chosen few.”
Since the 1980s, communities statewide have been calling for accountability for Pemex. One of the first and largest groups to organize, the Riverine Pact, mobilized tens of thousands of fishermen. Joining other organized sectors, they brought a complaint before the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, applying pressure until 1992, when the Commission mandated that Pemex and the state and federal governments pay damages. But procedures for filing claims—set up to comply with the Commission’s mandate—have been managed by agencies designed mainly to quell complaints. By 1997, only 6,000 of 63,000 claims against Pemex had been processed.
Much of the money earmarked for reparations has instead been employed to strengthen party-state-industry relationships. Corruption reportedly runs rampant: The reparations funds have financed large construction projects in Villahermosa, been stolen by Pemex and state officials, and become part of the web of electoral financing designed to keep the state’s ruling party in power. Past Tabasco Governor Roberto Madrazo, rather than supporting the rights of affected regions as other administrations sometimes did, subdued demonstrators, arrested and jailed protesters, and maintained armed guards at installations. Reparations, meanwhile, have focused on individual payments. These, in combination with preemptive bribes, have enabled Pemex to avoid the real issues of clean-up and future damage prevention, while undermining community organizing.
After over a decade of fruitless waiting for redress, citizens—often with active support from the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—carried out hundreds of blockades of Pemex installations. In February 1996, for example, protesters blocked a bridge to the productive Sen oil field. More than 30 police and military vehicles were sent in, and 100 people were arrested on charges that threatened to imprison them for up to 40 years. The following month, 30,000 marched in Villahermosa to protest the repression.
The state has responded in various ways. The poor have been bought off. Leadership has been silenced through brutality, jail time, and threats. In recent years hundreds of activists have been charged with crimes after protesting lack of attention to their claims. Joint police and military groups such as Bases for Mixed Operations (BOM) guard Pemex installations and break up protests.
The carrot and stick of reparations and repression has led activists to explore legal strategies for accountability. But attempts to use Mexican courts to enforce civil environmental law have faced serious challenges. Even the initial hurdle of gaining standing—recognition by the courts that one has the right to sue—has proved difficult. By 1999, only ten civil cases had gone before the Mexican Supreme Court, most of them focusing solely on standing rather than on substantive issues of environmental law. In 1996, Mexico created another legal avenue by enacting its first environmental criminal code. Yet obstacles still exist. Parties bringing complaints must still convince Mexico’s Attorney General to take on their cases. In addition, the fact that Pemex accounts for about a third of Mexico’s national income represents a significant conflict of interest for state prosecutors.
But some legal efforts have borne fruit. In April 1999, activists won indictments against four Pemex officials in the case of Ixhuatlán del Sureste, Veracruz, where residents had caught company subcontractors red-handed, dumping toxins in a marsh near the area’s main water source. Community members brought in local politicians and the staff of Tabasco-based Santo Tomás Ecological Association to pressure Pemex officials. They then recruited the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (CEMDA) and Greenpeace-Mexico, and filed a complaint with the Attorney General. Ixhuatlán is Mexico’s first environmental case to achieve the arrest of a polluter. Still, a year and a half later, locals await the sentencing of one convicted official. Meanwhile, in Tabasco, Santo Tomás is developing a legal organizing strategy with three communities—including Don Ramón’s—that have well-substantiated claims against Pemex. Santo Tomás’ goal is to restore faith in the legal system as a tool to protect the communities’ rights, teach their members about the laws and norms that govern the oil industry, train them to document claims and eventually take their cases to court.
The future for Don Ramón and his neighbors remains uncertain, but these legal strategies may bring their struggle into a new arena and produce far-reaching institutional changes. As Santo Tomás lawyer Javier Núñez says, “We are going to use all the legal mechanisms available: internal oil industry regulations, national and international environmental law. It’s not about giving a campesino 2000 pesos. It’s about saying [to Pemex]: ‘Gentlemen, your regulations state that there should not be a house, a health center or a school within 100 meters of an oil well. Comply with your own regulations.'”
*Don Ramón’s last name is being omitted to protect him from government repression against environmental organizers in his area.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sarah Town led a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation to Tabasco, Mexico in 1999, producing a booklet entitled Petrolización in Mexico: Oil Takes Over. She is currently a first-year law student at New York University. Heather Hanson is completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California at Davis and is currently writing her dissertation on citizen efforts to shape the course of oil development in Tabasco.
