Sweet waist of America - national parks in Central America

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Mary Jo McConahay

Park-makers need that clout, and any other help they can get. Central American parks are often so small that, without cooperation from those who live on their borders, they are sure to be poached, planted, and smothered to death. "If we gain the hearts of those around the' parks we have a good chance," Ugalde notes bravely--but his expression says that the outcome is far from certain.

This is my land--there is no way they can take it from me," says Catarina Jimenez, a peasant squatter on park land in El Salvador. We are spending the afternoon on wooden chairs placed to catch the breeze outside her two-room adobe house "which cost us so much to build." She and her husband, Jose Maria Rodriguez, have lived here 30 years, since Catarina was an 18-year-old bride. Of seven children, three died in this house. As we speak, it becomes clear she has resigned herself to the passing of her children (who died of "whatever it is children die from") and to the poverty that makes her laugh incredulously when I ask when she last ate meat. But when I mention the long-standing decision by park authorities that 40 families, including hers, be relocated, Catarina Jimenez digs in her heels. "No," she says simply.

The desperation in her voice is heard throughout Central America. In Guatemala, in the words of Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano, the Indian majority subsists on plots "the size of a corpse." When politicians look to the vast Peten forest in the north they do not see a national treasure, but a safety valve for the land-hungry poor. Land takeovers are increasing in Costa Rica, and Honduran peasants regularly lay claim to the unused land of big owners at the start of the planting season, sometimes with violent consequences. In Nicaragua, as one conservationist told me, "peace is hell for the environment"; the end of war means that vast tracts of the biggest primary forest in Central America--near the recently conflicted border areas with Costa Rica have become fair game for homesteaders, including ex-combatants for whom the bankrupt government has no employment alternatives. Why should Catarina Jimenez move away from her one chance at survival for the sake of conservation, a concept that she doesn't even understand?

Homesteading, after all, is an honored tradition in Central America; the squatter who "improves" land (that is, who clears it for planting by cutting down trees) increases the legal weight of his claim. If parks are to grow in number in Central America, or even remain part of the scene, the questions of land and the rural poor high among the issues that led to the wars of the 1980s--must finally be faced.

But there is no consensus. There are those, like the U.S. conservationist whose organization has spent millions here to save species, who bristle at the idea of "making sure peasants are happy."

"Conservationists can't be expected to take care of everyone on Earth," says this hard-liner, who asked not to be identified. "In our social and human concerns we've abandoned the goddamn parks, and we've still got unhappy campesinos and disappearing plants and animals."