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 Editorials | Environmental | July 2005 
Anti-Logging Activists Besieged
 James C. Mckinley Jr. - NYTimes
| | A logging war continues between farmers who have seen their hills stripped of trees and wealthy landowners who have reaped profits from lumber sales. |
Zihuatanejo - Guerrero Felipe Arreaga, a farmer-turned-environmentalist, has been sitting in a cramped, squalid jail here for eight months, charged with murdering the son of his nemesis, a wealthy landowner who brokered the sale of much of the lumber in the nearby mountains.
Arreaga, the 56-year-old leader of a peasant anti-logging organization, said he believed his real crime was trying to stop the destruction of the forests in his state and stepping on the toes of a local political boss, Bernardo Bautista Valle.
Arreaga and his lawyers argue that he has an airtight alibi. He was a three-day drive away from the scene of the 1998 attack on Bautista's sons and being treated for a bad back. The doctor who treated him has told prosecutors that Arreaga could hardly move, much less shoot a gun.
"I was accused of a crime I didn't commit," said Arreaga from behind a chain-link barrier in the jail's concrete visiting room. "It's fabricated. If they are going to condemn me, they should condemn me for what I have done."
Arreaga and other farmers in Guerrero state have been locked in a violent battle with loggers and powerful landowners for years. Under his leadership, the farmers won a crucial victory in 1998, when Boise Cascade pulled out of the state after more than 100 local peasants lay down in front of the lumber trucks to stop them.
THE STUGGLE CONTINUES
But the struggle goes on. It pits farmers who have seen their hills stripped of lumber, and their rivers dry up as a result, against big landowners and political bosses like Bautista who have reaped profits from lumber sales.
Satellite images show about 40 percent of the pine and hardwood forests that covered the Sierra Petatlan in 1992 are gone now, Alejandro Calvillo, the director of Greenpeace Mexico, said.
The conflict has often turned bloody. Bautista's two sons were ambushed in a car by gunmen May 30, 1998, a few weeks after the roadblock crippled logging. One son, Abel, died at the scene, but a second, Presciliano, now 19, survived. For reasons unexplained, he waited six years to identify his attackers, and it was based on his testimony that prosecutors arrested Arreaga last November and are seeking at least nine other anti-logging activists.
More often than not the forces of law and order end up arrayed with the loggers against the peasants in Guerrero, where old political bosses, known as caciques, can still manipulate the legal system for their own ends, human-rights advocates say.
SIMILAR CASES
Arreaga's case is not the first time the authorities here had gone after the leaders of the anti-logging movement. In 1999, the army arrested two other members, Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, torturing them until they confessed to weapons and drug possession charges. President Vicente Fox pardoned them in 2001 and they have since fled the state, fearing for their lives.
Now Arreaga's imprisonment is drawing howls of protest from Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and other groups in the United States. The judge reviewing the case, Ricardo Salinas Sandoval, said on Monday that he would make a final ruling in August. He said the Bautista family had not pressured him to convict.
'TENSIONS LEAD TO VIOLENCE' The tensions, some claim, continue to lead to violence. On May 18, Albertano Peñalosa, another of the prime leaders in Arreaga's group, came home to his small house in the woods near Banco Nuevo about 8:30 p.m. It was pitch dark. Someone had cut the power lines. His wife, Reyna Mojica, 39, was in the kitchen with their smallest boy and her pregnant daughter-inlaw.
Three of Penalosa's sons had gone to town with him for supplies and were in the pickup. He had just opened the driver's door when the shooting started. Gunmen in the woods rattled off dozens of rounds from an AK, a .22-caliber rifle and a .380-caliber pistol.
Peñalosa's wife said she heard the shooting and ran with her daughter-in-law across a wood bridge over the creek in front of her house. She was trying to make her way across their garden to where the pickup was parked, when she saw two bloodied figures dragging themselves along the ground. One was her husband, shot three times. One slug grazed his head, one lodged in his shoulder and one in his leg. The other figure was her second son, bleeding badly from the left side and right leg.
She struggled through her fear and the dark toward the pickup. Her 20-year-old son, Armando, who had recently married, and her 9-year-old, Abatuel, never made it out of the truck. "Their faces were gone, pecked to pieces by bullets, and their chests ..." she trailed off, her hand circling her heart. "I saw my sons and they were dead."
So far, the state attorney general's office has made no progress in solving that crime, a spokesman, Miguel Betancourt, said. He said one line of investigation was that loggers loyal to Bautista ambushed Peñalosa, though he said other motives and suspects had not been ruled out.
VENDETTA?
The newly elected governor, Zeferino Torreblanca, a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who some human rights advocates had hoped would rein in the power of landowners, has said only that the attack appeared to be a vendetta. "It's clearly a case of hatred and quarrels, because of the logging dispute, because some want logging and others don't, as well as the meddling of drug dealers," he said.
For his part, Peñalosa has no doubt who sent men to attack him. The next day, while he was still bleeding and burying his sons under his patio, the Army arrested three more members of the Campesino Environmental Organization of the Petatlan Sierra and Catalan Coyuca in connection with the killing of Bautista's son in 1998.
Peñalosa, who used to work for Bautista as a lumberjack, said the landlord had accused him of complicity as well.
"I have no other enemy who would do this," he said, talking about Bautista. "There is no other. The life of the campesinos is very hard because he walks with the law on his side. He can have us arrested or he can send people to kill us."
Bautista and his son could not be found for comment Monday in the towns where they are known to have residences. Neither have they responded to requests by the judge to appear before the court in recent months.
For now, Peñalosa is in hiding in this seaside town. His face shows shock and he moves with great pain. He says he does not believe he can return to his home near Mameyal.
A mile away, Arreaga shares a 15-by-foot cell with 10 other men, sleeping on cardboard with no blankets and eating tortillas with salt, or, sometimes, a few beans. He limps when he walks from back pain. Even if the judge frees him, he acknowledges that he too may be a target of assassins.
"My life is not so important," he says, smiling shyly. "For me it's very important to leave something for those who come after us." |
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