The Tzotiles, people of the bat, call the devil, “Pukuj”.  In recent years, they formed alliances with the Tzeltales, the Choles and the Tojolabales to stop him.  He was trying to steal plants and genetic materials as he had done for many years.  [i]   Hundreds of samples adorn the laboratories of the University of Georgia in the United States and the large pharmaceutical companies.  Brent Berlin deceived the Indian peoples and in exchange for crumbs* he received genetic material from the rich regions of Chiapas.  He also received thousands of foreign dollars for his services.  However, through struggle, opponents managed to have the ICBG Maya project suspended, at least apparently so, because pirates and corsairs live once again.  In the Montes Azules (Blue Mountains in English), the spirit of Pukuj is still present.  Television Azteca and Conservation International have, through the news, intensified their campaign against the Zapatista communities that inhabit Montes Azules but they are silent about the stealing of genetic material, the intentions of Ford Motor Company, the interests of Coca-Cola with respect to water, Monsanto and the thousands of tonnes of wood that leaves in large trucks with the support of the military and the corrupt authorities that are finishing off the Lacandon Jungle. 

Miguel Angel Garcia, the General Co-ordinator of Maderas del Pueblo de Sureste (“Woods of the People South-East), confirms that for the past years in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve there has been, “systematic work to extract strategic natural resources – such as, without doubt, genetic resources – by corporations and foreign governments, without the government – federal or state – nor public opinion nor policy doing anything to stop this plundering.” [ii]   According to Garcia this work is carried out every day, silently, under the supposed activities of “ecotourism” or “adventure tourism” which facilitate genetic mapping and plundering.  It also happens “under the juridical protection of the rules of the anti-constitutional “Natural Protected Areas” (ANPs in Spanish) – issued at the end of Ernesto Zedillo’s six years in office, and which allows the activities and results of “scientific” research carried out in ANPs to remain secret – which looks even more underhanded given the scientific discourse that at any rate all of this research, collection and the removal of jungle flora and fauna work is done by unselfish academics. 

The central objective of the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and agri-food transnationals such as Pfizer, Pharmacia, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Syngenta, Glaxo, Dupont, Ford Motors Company and General Motors, among others, is “to take possession of territories with wide-ranging diversity – particularly regarding their immense “genetic banks” character – and of the large volumes of fresh water still in existence in poor countries,” according to Garcia who added that these corporations, “operate with the conscious or unconscious complicity – the case and results being the same regardless – of local partners and counterparts, such as research centers like Ecosur and, above all, pseudo-conservation NGOS (non-governmental organizations) such as “Natural Spaces and Sustainable Development, A.C. (ENDESU in Spanish) or those that are directly and openly linked to multinational companies, especially American ones, such as Conservation International (CI).”

Water and biodiversity are presently the center of the agenda of the neoliberal circuit made up by its main players (transnational businesses); their representatives (such as the G-7); their operating instruments (multilaterial banks such as the WB, the IDB, the IMF and commercial banks); and their negotiation-imposition stages (such as the WTO, FTAA, PPP, etc.).  Businesses assault the structures of state power and disguise themselves in civil society.  Curiously, Israel, the country ranked fourth in the world with respect to “water stress”, has not only offered scholarships to Chiapas for people to study in their country but it has demonstrated interest in the state’s water.  As Miguel Angel Garcia explains it, the “adventure tourism” rally called, “Izuzu Challenge – Ruta May 2002”, carried out in November of that year, started at the “La Esmeralda” “ecotourism” center located in front of the military zone of Tonina in Ocosingo.  This rally, which circled the Montes Azules Reserve, was made up of 38 Izuzu jeeps (now property of General Motors of Israel), each one with Israeli flags and sophisticated information systems displaying all of the sources and volumes of water found in their path:  rivers, waterfalls and lakes.  According to Garcia, “the person in charge of the “rally” was Israeli Major General Avihu Ben Num, doctor of political sciences, expert in war telecommunications and who was the chief commander of aerial defence in Israel during the Gulf War (1991-1993) and later, president – among others – of the “Disk” company with headquarters in California which was in charge of developing and supplying the American and Israeli armies with technology and software for war telecommunications.”

According to the co-ordinator of “Maderas del Pueblo Sureste (Woods of the People South-East), it is important to analyse this in the context of the pseudo-NGO, “Natural Spaces and Sustainable Development A.C.” (ENDESU), which was founded by biologist, Javier de la Maza, who was the general director of the Protected Natural Areas of SEMARNAP, with the help of Julia Carabias, president of the National Ecology Institute during the six years of rule by President Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) and later Environment Secretary during the six years of Ernesto Zedillo’s rule (1994-2000).  According to Miguel Angel Garcia, “Since the end of 1999, ENDESU has been operating and administering what was the Biological Station of UNAM located in Boca de Chajul in the southern portion of the Reserve.”

The former biological station, located on the banks of the Chajul and Lacantun River near the border with Ixcan, Guatemala and which was for public research, “has been converted by ENDESU into a private hotel for scientific tourism at high levels, where, by paying $90 daily and with prior reservation by internet, researchers from foreign private universities carry out sampling and bioprospecting of the wealth of Mexican jungle flora and fauna, without control and we are not talking about control by communities but rather by the government of our country”.  This hotel uses 80 hectares of high jungle that the so-named ‘lacandons’ leased to ENDESU for 25 years, “in exchange for a payment of 65 000 pesos annually”, stated Miguel Angel Garcia.

To avoid conflicts with the communal land owners of Chajul the station made agreements with the state universities to offer medical and dental attention to the inhabitants of the ejido (communal lands); and at the same time, justifying it as an offer of employment and benefit to the community, they are paying children for each live butterfly that they deliver.  At any rate, not just anybody can cross the river to the station, first they need the consent of the station’s personnel.

According to Maderas del Pueblo, in 1999 a Technical Co-operation Agreement was made between the Mexican government and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for $7 427 700 pesos (seven million four hundred and twenty-seven thousand and seven hundred pesos) for the Lacandon Jungle.  Carabias and De la Maza gave themselves all of these resources transferring them to ENDESU, “to improve the existing infrastructure at the Chajul biological station and to begin the construction of another station on the Tzendales River” increasing the big “Conservation” business, concluded Maderas del Pueblo.

Later, in 2002 an agreement was made between ENDESU-PROFEPA-SEMARNAT/CONANP in which the federal government authorized ENDESU to build, operate and administer another new Biological/Watch Station (and a scientific-tourist hotel) where the Tzendales River flows into the Lacantun River in the heart of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve (REBIMA), “with millions in additional resources granted by the Ford Motors Company multinational business (in exchange for which the company received from environmental authorities the “National Conservation Award 2001” and the right to hang panoramic signs with its logo inside the reserve)”.

Maderas del Pueblo South-East also documents that in a text by PROFEPA-SEMARNAT entitled, “Priority Actions to be carried out in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, January 2004,” on page 7 it is noted:

“On January 5^th, 2004, PROFEPA met with ENDESU in the Chajul Biological Station agreeing to take the necessary measures in the presence of the General Staff of the Mexican Armada, with the objective of having the following authorized:

a)      Continuation of the inspections and watches via water routes on the Lacantun River in the stretches of: the Chajul Biological Station, the Colorado Canon and the Mouth of the Lacanja River.

b)      Daily transfers of members of the Mexican Armada from the ENA in Flor de Cacao to Chajul to carry out the watches by water routes. 

c)      That marines spend every third night at the Ixcan Station installations.

d)      That when the watch routes are not carried out, members of the Armada will set up a revision post along the Lacantun River in front of the Ixcan Station.”

This negotiation by a minuscule ‘Lacandon’ indigenous group that conceded protected natural areas into private hands, is one of the causes explaining the violence against indigenous Zapatista communities located there, accompanied by intense misinformation campaigns by Television Azteca.  Speaking on this, Miguel Angel Garcia says that, “ten days after PROFEP presented this document to Secretary Alberto Cardenas, the surgical removal of eight indigenous Chol families from the community of Nuevo San Rafael, located some ten kilometers upstream from the Chajul scientific-tourist hotel, was carried out.”

The General Co-ordinator of Maderas del Pueblo South-East concludes:  “Mexico ranks fifth in the world with respect to biological diversity and second with respect to cultural diversity.  This biodiversity-cultural diversity relation is not coincidental.  If we still have – given everything – a wealth of and variety of natural ecosystems, it is precisely because the large majority of these are found in indigenous territories, whose ancestral knowledge regarding how to use this biodiversity is, with equal ambition, plundered and expropriated by multinationals through the system of world patents, known world-wide as TRIPS.”

THE LEGAL ONSLAUGHT

It is in this context that the proposed Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Protection Law in the state of Chiapas proposed by the government of Pablo Salazar Mendiguchia should be read (this can be consulted at www.ciepac.org).  Next we present the declaration formulated by participants at the Third Chiapas Conference Against Neoliberalism held from March 19^th to 21^st, 2004 in the municipality of Huitiupan, Chiapas.  Approximately 600 people from 80 organizations or institutions from 9 states and 10 different countries participated in the conference.  We’ll leave the analysis and diagnostics in the voice of the participants: 

PROTESTS AGAINST THE STATE LAW.

Spring 2004
To the People of Mexico
To the People of the entity of Chiapas
To the campesinos and indigenous people of Chiapas
To the Bodies of State Deliberation

PRESENT

The participants of the Third Chiapas Conference Against Neoliberalism held in Huitiupan, after analysing and discussing the proposed Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Protection Law in the state of Chiapas made by the government of Chiapas through the Natural History and Ecology Institute, agree by consensus to its complete rejection based on the fact that:

1.       It violates diverse principles and constitutional provisions substantial to our project as a nation as well as Convention 169 of the O.I.T., the Biological Diversity Convention and the General Law for Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection;

2.       It uses and abuses campesinos (small-scale farmers), manipulates indigenous peoples and fails to consider women;

3.       It imposes sanctions on indigenous peoples and campesinos at the discretion and convenience of government interests and to the benefit of big business that are destructive to the environment or greedy for our natural resources, leaving authorities with impunity and without sanctions or corresponding accountability.

4.       It promotes representation that is distant from our peoples and our own forms of making choices, to make decisions regarding the resources of our lands;

5.       It does not impose any restriction on the open trafficking of or experimentation with genetically-modified organisms;

6.       It proposes the privatization, paramilitarization and “foreignization” of protected areas;

7.       It orders that, all resources, all actions and all words (spoken and written) made and said in the lands of the campesino be made and even imposed, at the discretion of authorities and the convenience of big business.

We ask, as citizens representing the People of Mexico and Chiapas, that meaningful and serious analyses of the social, environmental, economic and cultural implications and the constitutional violations incurred in the proposed Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Protection Law in the state of Chiapas be carried out.  It is the indigenous and campesino people who are legally entitled to debate, define and give first approval to the contents of any law, measure or government action that affects or could affect the use, enjoyment and utilization of the resources of their lands.

YOURS TRULY:  attendees (state) of the Third Chiapas Conferences Against Neoliberalism.

The Little House of Peace; Las Abejas; Alianza Cívica; AMAP; ARIC Independent and Democratic; Antzetik yu-un Cañadas; Arrieros de Chalchihuitán; the Interdisciplinary Association of  Chiapas; Boca de Polen; CAPISE; the "Digna Ochoa" Human Rights Center; the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center; the Santa María de Guadalupe Educational Center; CEDIAC; CEPACOMAC; CEPAZ; CIAM; CIEPAC; CIRSA; CLAEES; COCIDEP; CODIMUJ; CODICH; the Feminine Collective of UNACH;  Huitiupán Civil Society; COMPITCH; the Highlands Co-ordinator; CORECO; DESMI; the Mayan Revival; Diaconía Region Jitotol; Diaconía San José Buena Vista; Diaconía San Juan Chamula; EDUPAZ; the D. H. Chenalhó Tzotzil Team; the Chiapas Front Against Dams, Border Region; the Indigenous Ecological Federation of Chiapas; Feminario; Flor de Pantelhó; Flor de los Altos, Food First, the Fortitude of Mayan Women, the 15^th of September Popular Struggle Front, the Young Student’s Union Front, the Forum for Sustainable Development; the León XIII Foundation; the Group of Indigenous Communicators; INESIN; Jolo´m Mayaetic; Jlumaltic; Kinal Antzetik, Lunatik; Woods of the People South-East; Mayavinic; MELEL XOJOBAL; the Independent Women’s Movement; the  Kölping Act; OMIRS; the Parish of San Andrés; the Parish of Santo Domingo; the Parish of Huitiupán; Pastoral Social Chenalhó; Pastoral Social Tuxtla Gutiérrez; the Parish of Altamirano; the Parish of Santo Tomás Apóstol; Pastoral Social Chenalhó; Peace and the Third World; Pueblo Creyente; the National Network on Gender and the Economy; Sna Tzibajom; the Cooperative Society of Tzeltal-Tztotzil Producers; the Maya Winic Cooperative Society; the Tzotzil Union of Productive Diversification; the Witzilton Community; Yamtel Ach Winik; YOMBLEJ; Amber Mines, the Sacred Heart Missionaries of the missions of Guadalupe and San José, ODEMICH, the Organization of Organic Growers, the Teachers’ Democratic Block of the SNTE-CNTE (teachers’ unions) Section VII and students of the Rural Teaching School of MACTUMACTZA, OCEZ, CIOAC and CNC Democratic.  As well, individual members, political party militants, university students and/or organizations and institutions of CIESAS, UNAM, UNACH, the PRD, the PT and the PRI participated.

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!

Note: If you wish to be placed on a list to receive this English version of the Bulletin, or the Spanish, or both, please direct a request to: ciepac@laneta.apc.org and indicate whether you wish to receive the bulletin in plain text or as a Word 7 for Windows 95 attachment.

Note: If you use this information, cite the source and our email address. We are grateful to the persons and institutions who have given us their comments on these Bulletins. CIEPAC, A.C. is a non-government and non-profit organization, and your support is necessary for us to be able to continue offering you this news and analysis service. If you would like to contribute, in any amount, we would infinitely appreciate your remittance to the bank account in the name of:

CIEPAC, A.C.
Bank: Banamex
Account number: 7049672 Sucursal 386
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México.
You will also need to use an ABA number:
BNMXMXMM

Thank you! CIEPAC

Telephone:
in México: 01 967 674 5168
from outside Mexico:: +52 967 674 5168