On February 16,
1995, a pipeline
belonging to
Pemex, Mexico’s state-
owned oil company,
one of 29 that criss-
cross the town of
Platano y Cacao, in the
southern state of Tab-
asco, blew sky-high.
Nine people were
killed outright and 23
injured. “There was a
house over there by the
Fired workers erect a dummy oil rig in Mexico City’s main plaza, the Z6calo, on August 8, 1992 as a
symbol of their struggle against Pemex, the state-owned oil company for severance pay and compen-
sation for the company’s despoliation of farmlands and marine life in the state of Tabasco.
pipeline,” says Ernesto Martinez, who survived the
explosion. “When the fireball struck it, six people were
reduced to ashes. The rest of us ran but some didn’t
make it. To deprive people of life has to be the worst vio-
lation of our human rights.”
In a precedent-setting recommendation issued this
past September, the governmental National Human
Rights Commission (CNDH) agreed with Martinez that
his neighbors’ human rights had been violated by the
explosion, and laid the blame for the calamity at
Pemex’s doorstep. The shattered pipeline, which had
been worn to half its thickness by corrosion and internal
pressure, had not been inspected for 27 years. The 148-
page CNDH investigation was carried out in response to
a petition filed by an independent Tabasco human rights
committee led by the parish priest of Platano y Cacao,
Francisco Goitia. Martinez is the group’s secretary.
“You see how green everything is now,” the leathery
farmer muses, “but the ground is poisoned with heavy
metals and our neighbors don’t know when another
pipeline will blow up.” For Martinez, the links connect-
ing environmental protection, human rights and the
struggle of farmers for the land are obvious. “We are
campesinos,” he says. “When the land is violated, our
rights are violated-our right to work, to feed our-
selves, to our health and the health of our children.”
Ecological activists increasingly agree that globaliza-
tion has elevated environmental conflict to a human rights
issue. “The struggle for survival is now an environmental
one and it is being fought out on a very fragile stage,”
says Greenpeace’s Roberto L6pez. “Farmers now go to
the National Human Rights Commission because no
other government agency will listen to them.”
Neocolonial countries “take our wood and our oil and
bring us toxic wastes,” says poet-ecologist Homero
Aridjis, the guiding spirit behind the prestigious collec-
tion of highbrow environmentalists called the Group
30NMITA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
John Ross is a freelance writer based in Mexico City. His most
recent book is Mexico in Focus (Latin American Bureau, 1996).
4
4
4
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30REPORT ON MEXICO
As the process of of 100. “As the world globalizes,” he says,
globalization “the active defense of
natural resources and
makes Mexico’s the issue of human
rights are coming natural resources together in dramatic
more easily ways all the time.”
In Tabasco, the horses
exploitable, of globalization are
hitched to Pemex. The
farmers and February 1995 Clinton
White House bailout of
indigenous the collapsing Mexican
peoples-for economy, issued just days before the Platano
whom land, y Cacao disaster, stipu- lated that Mexico’s water, forests export petroleum rev-
and mineral enues were to be
deposited in the New
wealth are linked York branch of the U.S.
Federal Reserve System
to culture and as collateral. Eager to
pay back the $12.5 bil- community-are lion it has drawn down
resisting such on the bailout, the
Zedillo administration
penetration with has upped Pemex’s daily production quota to 2.85
mounting million barrels, of which
more than half is
militancy. exported. The speed-up
in production has put oil
workers and communi-
ties that neighbor its pipelines and installations at risk.
This past July 26, an explosion of two natural gas
processors at the giant Cactus petrochemical compound
on the Tabasco-Chiapas border, about 12 miles from
Platano y Cacao, killed eight workers and injured 33. In
the last 18 years, about 40 Pemex explosions have killed
over 200 Tabascans. To Pemex, for which the loss of life
is best resolved by paying off the survivors, the blast
meant a lost processing capacity of 1.3 million cubic feet
of natural gas each day. Rather than shut down opera-
tions until the processors could be rebuilt so that highly
sulfurous natural gas could be separated from the light
crude oil with which it is extracted, Pemex decided to
burn the gas off in the open air instead. This, says Jos6
Luis Manzo of the international petroleum monitor
group OILWATCH, is an expediency that will greatly
increase acid rain, which has already damaged over
700,000 acres of Tabasco farmland.
Chontal Indians complain that 35,000 acres of land
are no longer productive because of the damage caused
by a group of highly productive wells called the Sen
complex. Led by leftist senator Auldarico Herndndez, a
Chontal poet and actor, 10,000 campesinos from the
region blockaded 60 wells last February, demanding
resolution of 61,000 compensation claims. Joint police
and military squads violently dislodged the ten-day
blockade, and 109 farmers, whose nonviolent resistance
was reminiscent of that of the 1960s U.S. civil rights
movement, were hauled off to jail. Several national and
international human rights groups protested the
Mexican government’s action.
In its press bulletins, Pemex insisted that the block-
ades were costing it $400,000 a day. So concerned was
the Clinton administration that oil production might be
diminished that it sent two State Department represen-
tatives to Tabasco-not, of course, to appraise human
rights violations, but, rather, to evaluate the impact on
Mexico’s ability to pay off the multibillion dollar
bailout loan.
Meanwhile, in Tepozthin, a Nahua Indian town in
the state of Morelos just south of Mexico City, the resource up for grabs is water. Throughout
this tiny state where Emiliano Zapata once rode against
the great hacienda owners, second-home development
for Mexico City residents has drained off enormous
amounts of water, leaving Zapata’s heirs high and dry.
In early 1995, the KS Corporation, a national firm
which has made its fortune acquiring Morelos farmland
for luxury developments, announced construction of
the Club Tepozteco, a half-billion dollar, 600-acre tract, to be located on communal lands granted to the resi-
dents of TepoztlIn as the fruit of Zapata’s revolution.
The club was to include 800 high-priced condominiums
and an 18-hole golf course to be designed by champion
Jack Nicklaus’ Golden Bear Corporation, a Florida-
based outfit that has built dozens of such water-sucking
greens around the world. Included among transnational
investors was GTE Data Systems. The corporation
planned to develop a corporate park to produce fiber
optics for its new joint Mexican long-distance opera-
tion. “We are proud to be a part of Mexico’s future,”
GTE president Don A. Hayes gushed when he
announced the $130 million investment, about a third
of what KS projected was needed to build the project.
But Hayes and his Mexican partners never got to real-
ize that future. The resistance of Tepoztlhn residents to
the golf club-dubbed “the Golf War” in newspaper
headlines-has become the stuff of corridos sung
throughout Morelos. KS, which had the support of
Morelos governor Jorge Carillo Olea, former chief of
Mexican national security, was able to obtain all but
one of the permits necessary to construct its dream-
houses. The one document outstanding was a “change
of soil use” permit. When Tepoztldn residents learned
Vol XXX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1997 31REPORT ON MEXICO
that the ruling PRI mayor had secretly granted the per-
mit, they ran him out of town. They replaced him with
a “free” municipal governing board headed by a local
tree planter, Lizaro Rodriguez-a Zapata look-alike.
What infuriated the town-even more than the land
issue-was the KS Corporation’s plans for draining
Tepoztldn’s limited water resource. Maintaining the
greens alone would have utilized 30 times the amount of
water now allocated to townspeople. On April 10, 1996,
the seventy-third anniversary of the assassination of
Emiliano Zapata at the nearby Chinameca hacienda,
members of the opposition Tepoztlin Unity Council
(CUT), dressed up their children as little “Emilianos”
and “Adelitas,” as is the tradition here, and boarded
buses to deliver a letter to President Ernesto Zedillo,
who was addressing a select audi-
ence of PRI farmers a few miles
away. Crack Morelos state police
units met the buses with bullets
and tear gas. CUT leader Marcos
Olmedo was shot to death. His
body, trussed up in a burlap bag,
was found on a vacant lot about 12
miles from the scene of the clash.
A fortuitous video tape demon-
strated police culpability beyond a
reasonable doubt, and Tepoztlin’s
citizens summoned the CNDH to
condemn the repression.
The violence shook up KS,
which had already lost GTE’s
investment because of the commu-
nity’s resistance. “Conditions do
not exist to guarantee further
investment,” KS president
Francisco Kladt told the press, Residents of Tepoztlan
declaring the project suspended. plans to build a golf c withdrew in the face c Today, community fury in
Tepoztldn is directed at the Quinta Piedra, a 115-acre
hacienda owned by the brother-in-law of reviled former
president Carlos Salinas, and built on what the
campesinos claim is illegally obtained ejido land. When
local farmers reclaimed the Quinta Piedra last May, they were astonished to discover that behind the estate’s
20-foot-tall stout stone walls were two swimming
pools, spouting fountains and an artificial lake. The
ejido itself has no irrigation system, and the colony that
borders the Quinta Piedra does not feature running
water.
Squatting at a campesino checkpoint outside the
Quinta Piedra-which has been renamed the “House of
the People”-95 year-old Pablo Garcia Ruiz spat into
the dust on a dry September afternoon. “I’ve got no
corn coming this year,” he says. “Without water, you
can’t grow corn.” Like many old men here, Garcia
claims to have ridden with Zapata. Tepoztlin controlled
a key corridor the Caudillo’s irregulars utilized to reach
southern Mexico City. “Many people died for this
land,” says the veteran. “Now we have it but we can’t
grow anything on it because they are stealing our water.
We are the campesinos; we have a right to this land. If
Zapata were alive, he would be here with us today.”
T he most notorious violation of human rights by
Mexican security forces in many years took place
at a lonely mountain wash above the conflict-
ridden Costa Grande of the state of Guerrero on June
28, 1995. Just outside the now-legendary village of
Aguas Blancas, motorized police opened fire on a
truckload of members of the Campesino Organization
took over the town’s municipal building this past April to protest course on communal lands. The Mexican firm behind the plans
f over a year of continuous community resistance.
of the Southern Sierra (OCSS), killing 17 farmers and
wounding 23, some of whom are permanently disabled.
Fallout from the massacre still reverberates in Mexico.
Hard-nosed PRI governor Ruben Figueroa, a close
friend of President Zedillo, was forced to resign as a
result of pressure applied by Mexican and international
human rights organizations (including the official
CNDH). On the first anniversary of the killings, the
Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), one of the nation’s
newest guerrilla movements emerged from the under-
brush to declare its existence at a memorial service here.
[See “The EPR: Mexico’s Other Guerrillas,” p. 33.]
The Aguas Blancas massacre was rooted in the same
nexus of environmental damage and land struggle that
underlie conflicts in Tabasco and Morelos. In early
1995, a Figueroa crony was awarded contracts to log
the forests in the sierra town of Tepetixtla, then an
OCSS stronghold. “We saw how the lumber company
was taking our forests without returning anything to the
people,” explains Rocio Mesino, a young OCSS leader
who is now accused of being affiliated with the EPR.
“We had to stop it.” In April, 1995, furious OCSS farm-
ers burnt two logging rigs and stopped trucks from car-
rying cut logs out of the sierra, returning the wood to
the community. The government issued arrest warrants,
and the motorized police-the force that would be
responsible for the Aguas Blancas massacre two
months later-massed down in the coastal county seat
of Coyuca de Benitez. Figueroa was kept informed by
cellular phone of the tense stand-
off in the sierra. On the very
same day, the governor signed a
five-year, $10 million agreement
with a leading U.S. wood-
products corporation to cut
adjoining sierra forests.
The deal cut with Figueroa
was a felicitous one for Boise
Cascade, one of North America’s
ten top timber corporations. The
biggest buyer of federal timber
sales in the Pacific Northwest,
Boise has been closing mills in
Oregon and Idaho because they
lack harvestable trees. Now it
had gained access to 2.5 million
acres of Guerrero white and
sugar pine, labor that is 30 times
cheaper than back home, and
environmental enforcement that,
even at its most vigorous, is far
more lax than in the United
States.
“We are farmers,” says OCSS leader Mesino, who has
since dropped from sight because of a Mexican govern-
ment investigation of OCSS-EPR ties. “For us, the
forests bring the rains and fill the rivers. For us, the
forests mean life.”
Globalization and the increased access to natural
1 resource exploitation that it encourages also
threatens a key southern Mexico forest and the
indigenous farmers who populate it. Their struggle to
stay on these lands has led to resistance, repression and
human rights violations.
Supporters of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) march in Tuxtla Gutierrez in December 1994, to protest fraudulent
state gubernatorial elections.
Under provisions of the reformed Article 27 of the
Mexican Constitution, which opened agriculture to pri-
vate ownership in preparation for anticipated NAFTA-
driven foreign investment, Boise entered into “associa-
tion” with 24 forestry ejidos that share the sierra with
the OCSS. The 200 million board feet Boise plans to
take out of the Tecpan sierra (and export to the United
States), will be replenished by reforestation that,
according to Boise Papanoa mill superintendent Carlos
Vega, will provide harvestable timber in ten years time.
But just down the coastal highway, at the El Balc6n
ejido mill, managers talk of a 35-year growing cycle.
The truncated harvest plans casts the Boise operation
as typical transnational rip and run. Mill sites are rented
from the state, and the company’s planer mill can be
taken apart and reassembled wherever a new resource is
available. Perhaps frightened off by the guerrilla threat
in the region, Boise has acquired a site in Oaxaca-
even though the EPR guerrillas have been active there.
The 4.4 million-acre forest called the Chimilapas,
ranging from lowland jungle to cloud forest, is the most
vital oxygen bank in Mexico’s south. Located at the
saddle of Mexico’s Tehuantepec isthmus in the states of
Oaxaca and Veracruz, the forest is alive with toucans
and tapirs, fabled quetzals and jaguars, and has been
kept intact for millennia by the 12,000-strong Zoque
people. After the Conquest, the Zoques, descendants of
the Olmecs, purchased the Chimilapas (“Gourd of
Gold”) from the Spanish Crown for 25,000 pesos to
fend off further invasion.
Since then, the Indians have fought off multiple
predators, including the Japanese, who, in the 1970s,
strung a pipeline over the hump of the isthmus to carry
oil from the port of Coatzacoalcos on the Caribbean
side to Salina Cruz on the Pacific. Japan currently buys
up to 14% of Mexico’s export platform. Now the
Zoques face global attack in the form of a transisthmus
commercial corridor that threatens to devastate their
turf, but has multinationals drooling.
NACI4A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 34REPORT ON MEXICO
The transisthmus project revolves around the privati-
zation and sale of government-owned railroads and
ports and the construction of an ocean-to-ocean super
highway. This megaproject is considered “the most
important strategic decision the Zedillo administration
will make” by Mexico’s financial daily, El Financiero.
Eighty transportation giants, including Burlington-
Santa Fe and Union-Southern are bidding on Mexican
rail lines. Also included in the prospectus is a
maquiladora zone on the sun-baked Tehuantepec plain
that a government planner tells the press could become
a “Taiwancito,” or “little Taiwan.” The assembly plants
For the Zapatistas,
indigenous
autonomy means
that indigenous
people themselves
should control
natural resources
found on or under
Indian lands–a
direct challenge to
the neoliberal idea
that the land
belongs to those
who buy it.
will draw power from
projected hydro-electric
dams in the Chimi-
lapas, the source of
southern Mexico’s
three largest rivers.
Andres Barreda, a
strategic resource inves-
tigator at the National
Autonomous University
of Mexico (UNAM),
places the transisthmus
project at the axis of
Mexico’s globalization.
Barreda explains that
the route-which would
compete with the
Panama Canal but
shave days off travel
time south-is de-
signed to bring Asian
Tiger exports through
Mexico for distribution
to prime consumer
markets on the U.S.
east coast. Midwest and
southern U.S. distribu-
tion would be handled through the developing inter-
coastal canal system which connects the United States
and Mexico.
The global scope of the project chills Miguel Angel
Garcia, who has spent years working locally, walking
the Chimilapas to bring agrarian communities together
on issues like a ban on slash-and-burn farming and the
establishment of a campesino-directed “biosphere” that
would allow Zoque farmers to manage the forests as an
integrated agricultural and ecologically-protected zone.
“Any road cut into the Chimis means a loss of valuable
resource and opens the forests to wood poachers,” he
says. “The transisthmus will bring us the neoliberal
pathology: prostitution, alcoholism, inflation, pollution.
They’ll probably even want to build a golf course here.
The corridor is a death sentence for the Chimilapas, and
Mexico cannot breath without this forest. I think that’s
an issue that involves human rights.”
perating “somewhere in the Lacandon Jungle of
Chiapas,” the Zapatista guerrillas have become
international icons in the growing movement
against the neoliberal economic model. The long strug-
gle of these Maya farmers for democracy and justice is
grounded in a landscape threatened by transnational
exploitation and environmental destruction. While the
pillaging of precious hardwoods is a century-old story in
the Lacandon, oil and gas exploration is a more recent-
and less open-one. “We do not even know how many
wells Pemex has perforated in the Lacandon-they
won’t tell us,” complains Ignacio March, director of the
San Cristobal-based Center for the Investigation and
Study of the Southeast (CIES), which keeps close tabs
on the jungle.
One drilling site that has been located is at Nazaret in
the Sierra of Corralchen, above La Garrucha, an EZLN
stronghold. It was on the road to Nazaret in May, 1993
that Zapatista rebels and Mexican army troops scrim-
maged for the first time, leaving a death toll of three.
Documentation obtained from Pemex indicates that
Nazaret, perforated in 1990 and capped the following
year, produced precious little oil (about 400 barrels a
day), but over one million cubic feet of natural gas.
Mexico needs natural gas as much as it needs petro-
leum. The country has pledged to convert major indus-
tries to the cleaner fuel by 1998 and the Zedillo admin-
istration anticipates much foreign investment in infra-
structure-mostly in newly privatized gas distribution
lines. It has not, however, been easy to install such
infrastructure in a rebel-controlled zone.
The EZLN has been in the forefront of the struggle
for indigenous autonomy, which incorporates concepts
of control over the exploitation of natural resources
found on or under Indian lands. This position directly
challenges the Mexican Constitution, which says that
the mineral wealth of the subsoil belongs to the entire
nation. It is an even greater challenge to the neoliberal
idea that the land belongs to those who buy it.
As the process of globalization facilitates access to
Mexico’s natural resources, farmers and indigenous
peoples, for whom land, water, forests and mineral
wealth are linked to culture and community, are resist-
ing such penetration with mounting militancy. If these
struggles against the depredations that globalized
resource exploitation inflicts upon rural lands and com-
munities are ecological ones, then Mexico’s environ-
mental movement is among the most dynamic in the
Americas. But regardless of definition, this emerging
constellation of struggles over the land, the environ-
ment and human rights is now a powerful engine of
social change in Mexico.
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