Rainforest logging disrupts deep cultural rhythms in tiny Belize

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 27, 1996 by Mary Jo McConahay

SAN PEDRO COLUMBIA, Belize - Asian lumber companies have begun logging one of Central America's last great tropical rainforests, home to Maya Indians whose cries of protest are going unheard.

As precious aged hardwoods fall, indigenous farmers like Leonardo Acal sit heavily outside their simple houses in the shade of hibiscus bushes at the end of a day, and ask defining questions: "Our rain forest is something we want and need. How can the government just sell it? How can they allow the Malaysians to come in and take it away from us?"

At stake are ethical issues that affect the continued existence of Maya life itself, a culture whose roots go back 3,000 years. Also in the balance are environmental issues that reach far beyond this country to the future of the most important living lung of the hemisphere north of the Amazon.

The picture comes alive in this village. of 1,200 inhabitants alongside the Columbia River Forest Reserve, 103,000 acres of limestone hills and low mountains, nearly all covered by pristine old-growth tropical forest. Recently the government permitted Malaysian-backed companies, led by Atlantic Industries Limited, to log selected areas in the reserve and elsewhere for the next 20 years. Over a dozen other concessions have been made on "national" lands, most to Asian companies; over half the 1.1 million acre Toledo district is now under license to loggers. Most of the area's 30,000 inhabitants are Maya Indians, like Leonardo Acal and his neighbors: they hold no deeds to their homesites, or corn fields and hunting areas around villages like this one, where they have lived for generations.

"The implications of the logging concessions are complicated and dramatic, and no one outside the Toledo Maya has done all they can do about it," said University of Minnesota economic geographer Joel Wainwright, who lived alongside indigenous opponents as a Fulbright scholar studying environmental conflict this year.

Like other poor countries, said Wainwright, Belize (population: 210,000) seeks to earn foreign exchange by marketing natural resources to repay "tremendous" international debt. But costs could be high: the loss of the forest itself and, in a country known for racial and political harmony despite its location among Central American countries torn by recent wars, there is dissension brewing here in the south.

"This may be the beginning of a process where the Maya of Belize are increasingly disenfranchised - politically, economically and socially - and as a consequence begin to challenge the legitimacy of the state," said Wainwright.

Near dusk, a flock of green parakeets bursts from the jungle and swoops low over the troubled village, then returns smoothly into the deep wall of trees. Acal and neighbors go silent as naturally as city dwellers might at the passing of a noisy train. It is a moment to consider how deeply residents here depend on the forest. On all sides, housetops are thatched with gathered palm, 3,000 fronds per roof, built to last a lifetime in a method unchanged since the days of the ancient Maya.

An elderly local "bush doctor," Jose Cho, examines the hand of a small child, yesterday riddled with fever and rash from insect bites, but cured today with poultice and tea Cho made from bark gathered from the deep forest. "They cannot afford store medicine or a town doctor and I cannot charge much because the capacity to learn to cure is a gift God gave me to use with them," Cho had said earlier.

Another neighbor, a 50-year-old musician of national fame, Florencio Mass, gazed toward the "high bush" where he has always found cedar to craft his harps.

Mountain is off limits

The young generation want to know what is in the mountain," he says when the birds have passed. "But now. our government puts a line between here and there and says, don't cross because that part is now for the man who paid so much money."

Maya such as these in southern Toledo's 34 villages are subsistence farmers, using slash and burn methods and rotating fields in a manner one international soil expert calls "sensible, logical and environmentally friendly" for local conditions. They are cash-poor, and depend on the forests not only for necessities such as housing materials and medicine, but for the only protein most eat: captured fish and game. Children attend school now and speak English. Adults vote in elections. But residents insist participation in national life does not mean Maya are willing to sacrifice their own culture and identity - and that of their children - for someone else's idea of eco@ nomic development. So interwoven are their lives with the forest, says Acal, that to him the massive logging concessions feel like an attack on Maya themselves.

"The government considers us anomalous," he says darkly. "But we didn't come from nowhere and we don't want to scatter and disappear."

Opposition is spearheaded by Julian Cho, a Mopan Maya who grew up in San Antonio village. During years as a Jesuit scholastic at the University of St. Louis and Creighton University, Cho says, he visited Indian reservations in the United States and saw there a warning for his own people.