Once again, there’s trouble in Chiapas. In recent months Native people have been threatened with evictions from the Montes Azules biosphere, cause for concern among observers who monitor events in Mexico’s most combustible state. The threats, as usual, are driven by factions that find Indian removal the easiest answer to tough questions about resource use and economic survival.
The exodus of Native people from any nature reserve is regrettable. However, it is in keeping with unofficial government policy across the world. From Uganda to Madagascar, from Kenya to Nepal to India, nations have long found common cause in removing Native or resident peoples from protected lands at the urging of the powerful conservation and travel lobbies.
In the Americas, the record has been shabby. Beginning with the lockout of the Sheepeater Shoshone from Yellowstone Park in the 1880s, the trend across the hemisphere has been plain. To the north, with few exceptions, First Nations have tussled with Ottawa over co-management principles and hunting rights in protected areas. To the south, for example, in Ecuador and Costa Rica resident peoples have been prevented from using resources, both natural and commercial, that many parks control.
And trouble brews closer to home. Tribes and feds are wary neighbors in U.S. parks like Glacier, the Everglades, the Badlands, and the Grand Canyon, to name but a few. The marginalization or removal of Indian people was achieved in each place at considerable social and moral cost. Some disputes with the National Park Service are still unresolved after more than a half century of negotiation.
Why are Native communities “dangerous” to parks? Since Yellowstone was established in 1872, preservationists have decided that people and “nature” don’t mix. The pristine ecosystem, their theory claims, must be protected from exploitation by human hands. This home-grown American park model has been adopted by most (though not all) countries, many of whose professionals have been educated in the U.S. and learned the standard conservationist line.
Of course, human societies have long been an integral part of almost every landscape. In fact, biological and human diversity usually overlap. Of the roughly 6,000 languages spoken worldwide, for example, a high percentage of them remain in the zone of forested belts that girdle the globe, rich in animal and plant life. This is precisely where tropical rain forests like the Lacand?n jungle – home to the Montes Azules biosphere – are located.
To deny these places a permanent human presence is, of course, to forget one of the things that made them a living landscape in the first place. But anyone who visits the “crown jewels” of America’s parks, like Glacier or Mesa Verde, is quick to see that the only communities permitted within them are for RV campers, park personnel, and the employees of for-profit concessions. Native communities, except perhaps to dance and tell tribal stories, need not apply.
Not everyone accepts the American model. Mexican scientist Gonzalo Halffter argues that the U.S. plan just plain doesn’t work in the Third World. When a park fences off land, he observes, it denies valuable resources to local people. The model only succeeds when population pressures are so low (and affluence is so widespread) that surplus lands can be set aside comfortably for backpackers, noisy off-road vehicles, and the next convoy of Winnebagos.
Such is not the case with Mexico, where the population has quadrupled in little more than 50 years. Land reform, promised by the constitution of 1917, has slowed to a crawl. The only way small farmers have been able to obtain decent land was to invade a primitive area, settle it with squatter communities, then submit to a long claims process while guarding turf against ranchers and big developers. In many cases, people were encouraged to squat by the government itself.
So it was that the Lacand?n jungle, in eastern Chiapas, became the haven of last resort for landless Indians. In the 1950s, historian George Collier has written, farmers descended on the Lacand?n from outside the region and introduced tactics like intensive milpa (cornfield) cultivation that, while viable at higher elevations, depleted the fragile soil and forced farmers to move further into the bush.
By the late 1960s, the government had decided to save the rain forest, ignoring that it was already inhabited by Indian settlers. When, in 1978, the biosphere was established, the government relocated hundreds, if not thousands, of Indian farmers, while about 400 Lacand?n Maya with long-term ancestral claims to the area stayed on as permanent inhabitants.
In 1992, the government amended policy on land reform for the worse; the fate of squatter communities was endangered. As a result, it was only two years later that the Zapatista movement gained international recognition with wide-reaching demands for political equality and agrarian land reform.
Today, Montes Azules has many factions. Logging companies are accused of illegally harvesting mahogany and, some allege, of sharing kickbacks with government officials. Conservationist groups decry the destruction of animal habitat. Zapatista rebels have settled in the jungle to escape government harassment and, they hope, bring the country much-needed reform.
Meanwhile, the oldest inhabitants of the jungle, the Lacand?n Maya, barely number in the hundreds. They have lost many traditional life ways and are even in danger of seeing their language disappear. The squatter communities have marginalized them further. The struggle for land has pitted Indian against Indian in the larger context of conservationist and national politics.
Whoever the heroes and villains are, one thing is certain: before successful conservation can go forward, there must be meaningful land reform. In Chiapas, 35 percent of farmers, many of them Indian and illiterate, own but 1 percent of the land. And the vast majority of farm plots grow only enough corn to eat.
The Indian plots, or ejidos, resemble, in some ways, allotments in the U.S., scattered through the country in subsistence-size parcels. Increasingly privatized, ejidos can now be sold or rented on the open market, a dubious development with a pro-business administration under Vicente Fox directing the country. With little access to loans for machinery and fertilizers, farmers are tempted to give up their land for a quick line of cash.
Perhaps we share more with our neighbors to the south than we think. For more than a century and counting, indigenous lands have been transformed into national commons – parks and reserves. From the ice packs of Glacier to the forest canopy of Montes Azules, land in tribal use has been placed in conservationist trust, usually without the consent or cooperation of Native peoples.
The pace of this trend may be accelerating. With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mercosur, and other trade alliances, barriers against commerce are falling away. As they do, the pressure to develop “marginal lands” will increase. Oil-drilling in the Arctic, or electrification projects in Chiapas, now hooked into the international grid, are more than just dreams. Globalization, if anything, will make the commons more suspect to damage, especially in poorer parts of the globe.
Mexicans have a lesson to teach their neighbors to the north. People who live in or near protected areas, Halffter argues, need the chance to practice a form of sustainable development. Unlike U.S. parks, biospheres (85 percent of protected land in Mexico) sometimes permit resident communities to practice eco-friendly projects, including berry production and game-ranching. Many more, due to power politics, never get the chance.
The interests of conservationists and campesinos often diverge. But national policies that encourage social injustice only aggravate the problem. The result can be tragic for everyone: parks without people, and people without land.
Philip Burnham is a freelance writer and historian based in Washington, who writes about indigenous and minority issues. He has a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in American Studies and was an instructor for several years at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. His second book, Indian Country, God’s Country (Island Press), recounts the history of American Indian tribes and the national parks.
