by Dawn Paley
Photo Credit: Jonathon Treat
In October of 2007, the people of Capulalpan De Mendez, Oaxaca blocked a main highway to Oaxaca City, the state’s capital, to protest a Canadian mining company in their forested territory. Inspired by uprisings in the city the previous year, they stayed at the blockade for almost an entire workday. Protesters didn’t leave until government representatives signed off on an order to shut the Canadian company down, which they did. Since that day, mining activity has ceased in the Indigenous Zapotec community nestled among giant Ahuehuete, pine, and oak trees in a
mineral rich mountainous area known as the Sierra Norte.
I first visited the village five years ago to report on the mine closure. Recently, I returned to Capulalpan with a group of Canadian and US professors, to meet with folks who have helped lead the resistance to open pit mining. We learned that community forestry helps provide economic sustenance, making it more difficult for the mining company to abuse the community or to advance their regular discourse about job creation and prosperity.
Decades of bad forestry practices led to the community fighting to take the forest resources back into their own hands. “In 1957, the federal government tricked us,” said Benjamin Luna Bautista, a member of the elders’ council of Capulalpan. “They told us we were going to benefit from a new highway between Ixtlán and Tuxtepec. But it wasn’t to help us. It was to benefit from our natural resources.” The federal government granted a 25 year concession to a nearby paper company, which cut trees along the 200-kilometre highway and pulped them. In the early 80s, when the concession came up for renewal, the people of Capulalpan fought hard to regain control over their forests, and they won. A community-run business called the Union of Zapotec and Chimantec Forest Producing Communities (UZACHI) now manages 22,000 hectares of oak and pine forests. “After having been tricked, the seed was planted that we could do it ourselves,” said Luna, a seventy-year-old man who is father of three and grandfather of seven. “It’s been a huge success.”
Community Forests
Today, there are 12 people employed as loggers and another 12 in the community-owned mill. All proceeds from the operations go towards community infrastructure projects, and the operation of the mill and the forestry projects are overseen by assemblies, which are the highest decision making body in the village, which is ruled under customary indigenous law. Local authorities, chosen through votes at assemblies, plot out land use in the village, together deciding what will be cut, and where there will be no logging at all. When the assemblies (there are two, a land management assembly and a municipal assembly) stall over an issue, they call in Luna Bautista and the elders’ council to lend experience and advice.
In all of Mexico, Capulalpan has become a model for progressive forest management. Small scale operations dominate in many areas. Mexico’s rugged terrain, scarcity of roads, and the fact that about 80 per cent of forested land is owned by ejidos (communal landholder groups), combine to create barriers for full scale forest exploitation at the levels witnessed in Canada or the United States.
However, these community forest projects do not necessarily represent forest practices nationally. Mexico’s forests are home to approximately 13.5 million people, who live in or beside forested areas, which is consdiered to be a high level of human presence. There exists a large unlicensed logging sector, by which individuals cut trees without any kind of permits and sell them onto the market.
According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Mexico produces about 43 million cubic metres of roundwood timber a year, less than a third of Canadian timber production. Forestry products makes up less than 1 per cent of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product, compared to 2.7 per cent in Canada. This is where the Canadian government and multinational corporations come in, sensing a land of opportunity ripe for exploitation.
“National Security”
Only about 15 per cent of Mexico’s forests are privately owned, with another five per cent classified as national land. According to a document produced by Foreign Affairs Canada, “This ‘ejido’ system of land management is considered very inefficient as any development decisions require approval of all the interested parties, resulting in an approval process which can often drag on for many years.”
Foreign Affairs Canada lauded former President Felipe Calderón’s move to include forestry development as part of Mexico’s National Security Agenda, as well as the Mexican government’s proposals to privatize communally held land.
Constitutional changes in 1992 allowed communal land to be transformed into fee simple land and sold or leased to private interests. Thousands of collective landowner groups, farmers and foresters in Oaxaca and elsewhere in southern Mexico, refused to enter into the privatization scheme. Canadian forestry and mining companies continue to see the people of Capulalpan de Mendez as barriers to investment. But the people in Mexico wouldn’t have it any other way: Their water and the sustainability of their local economy depend on the careful use of resources.
Late one afternoon in Capulalpan, we climbed up between small adobe and concrete houses towards a grove of Ahuehuete trees, ranked among the largest trees in the world by diameter. Under whispering leaves and branches rustling softly in the breeze, we met with Francisco Gómez López, a local small business owner who formerly presided over the land management assembly. Gómez explained how his community organized through assemblies to keep the Vancouver based mining company Continuum Resources out and how, in every assembly, they reaffirm their opposition to modern mining in their lands. The council representing communal land holders has declared the area where we sat, which is of particular interest to the mining company, sacred.
Much has been learned since the community mounted a successful blockade against mining in 2007, but it was the experience of forestry struggles, according to Gómez, that taught the community that they could fight and win against companies wishing to exploit their lands. “If we could do it once, we could do it again,” quipped Gómez.
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Dawn Paley is a Vancouver journalist, who has written for The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Nation, The Tyee, Counterpunch, and other periodicals; she is a contributing editor with The Dominion independent news cooperative, and a co-founder of the Vancouver Media Co-op.
