Source: Washington Post Contact: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Pubdate: 31 May 1998 Author: Molly Moore, Washington Post Foreign Service Related: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98.n365.a04.html MEXICO'S UNQUENCHABLE FIRES Ecological Disaster Unfolds as Ancient Forest Burns On SAN ANTONIO, Mexico97Antonio Juarez is a foot soldier on the front lines of firefighter hell. His weapons against southern Mexico's worst fires in a century are a machete and five gallons of water in a rubber backpack. The peasant farmer, 51, charges into burning rubble clad in sandals, a straw cowboy hat and a tattered bandanna. His futile mission: to help hold back the raging wildfires that are gobbling Mexico's last remaining virgin cloud forest, torching the trees that are home to nesting toucans and quetzals, charring tens of thousands of acres of hunting territory of endangered jaguars and pumas, and creeping beneath the thick blankets of lichen and mosses on the forest floor to consume the roots of rare flora. "It's so tragic," said Miguel Angel Garcia of the People of the Southwest Woods, one of the most prominent environmental watchdog groups in southern Mexico. "You can replant a burned pine forest; you can't replace a tropical cloud forest that's taken two thousand years to form." The fires ravaging this mystical forest, called the Chimalapas, which has been the physical and spiritual reserve of Indians who have lived on its fringes for centuries, are so massive and so remote that until last week Mexican authorities couldn't even count all the blazes. Smoke from these fires in the southwestern state of Oaxaca, the largest and most uncontrolled in Mexico, has drifted as far north as Wisconsin and South Dakota and across the U.S. Gulf Coast to Georgia. The blazes of the Chimalapas -- a mountainous subtropical area where under normal conditions clouds continually linger -- have not only sent jungle cats, monkeys and birds fleeing for their lives but have reignited long-smoldering feuds between the Mexican government and environmentalists, between rich landowners and indigenous peasants, and between isolated mountain villages that have been waging agrarian wars for decades. The causes of the blazes, as well as the inability to curb them, involve tales of revenge, government indifference and a national pride that may have led to waiting too long to seek help. But for even the most advanced firefighters, these are no ordinary fires. They burn as no other forest fire. Much of the flame is subterranean, with smoke seeping from cracks and crevices, disguising the true location of the underground conflagration. When the fires do burst into the open, they often are obscured by the jungle's thick canopy. That same canopy has prevented water dumped by small helicopters from reaching the flames. "It's a lot worse than what I had envisioned," said Paul Weeden, who is coordinating the more than 30 U.S. firefighting experts dispatched last week to assist Mexican authorities. "I didn't realize there were so many large fires burning -- that the areas were so remote, so inaccessible." Many of the fires in the Chimalapas are now virtually unreachable. They are a 10-hour hike into a forest so obscured by smoke that Mexican reconnaissance aircraft have been unable to fly near them since the fires began three weeks ago. It was only last week, when the U.S. government provided a King Air plane equipped with sensitive infrared sensors that can detect heat beneath the thick veil of smoke, that firefighters discovered the extent of the fires. Because the cloud forest is such a unique environment -- with 22 ecosystems and 62 varieties of reptiles -- firefighters have been unable to employ many of the most effective methods of combating wildfires. There is no "back burning," setting controlled fires that consume potential fuel around the wildfire; no "herding" of smaller fires into one large blaze that burns itself out; and no bulldozers and tractors for building fire breaks. "We're in an environment that's unique to the world," said Mike Conrad, a supervisor from the U.S. Forest Service. "We don't want to lose any more of this than we have to." Already an estimated 16,800 acres have burned. The arrival of U.S. experts has not been without problems. Mexican military officials were suspicious of the infrared heat detection system that would be mapping every square mile of the army's most sensitive area -- the southern state of Chiapas, adjacent to Oaxaca, where Mexico has deployed tens of thousands of troops since the 1994 rebel Zapatista uprising. After landing at a Chiapas airfield last week, U.S. authorities decided to move the airplane to a more secure airport in a neighboring state for fear that drug traffickers -- who favor King Airs -- might try to steal it. Environmentalists report more than 230 fires are now raging across Mexico, 49 in the Chimalapas. Since January, Mexico has reported 10,000 blazes nationwide that have devoured an estimated 700,000 acres, an area larger than Rhode Island. "This is the biggest ecological disaster of this century in Mexico," said Homero Aridjis, one of the nation's most prominent environmental activists. "The government can't control this number of fires." There are nearly as many accusations over the outbreaks as there are fires. Unquestionably, it has been an unusually hot, dry year across Latin America, from Brazil's Amazon to Mexico's northern deserts. While virtually every state in Mexico is suffering its worst fires in seven decades, environmentalists say the blazes are far worse in the normally humid jungles of Oaxaca and Chiapas, where fires like these haven't been seen in at least a century. Government officials have laid the blame for most of the fires on peasants who use slash-and-burn techniques to clear their land for the planting season. But the farmers and many environmentalists say the fires are the byproduct of years of government neglect of its poor and indigenous populations. "They have been abandoned by the government," said environmentalist Miguel Angel Garcia. "That's why they're obligated to use these agricultural techniques in the year 2000." The region flanking the west side of the Chimalapas has been the site of decades, if not centuries, of conflict. The Zoque Indians have claimed the virgin forest region as their reserve since before the Spanish conquistadors arrived five centuries ago. But in the past 30 years, the Mexican government has promoted a policy of colonizing less populous areas to relieve overcrowded areas. As a result, entire villages of Mayan Indians -- many of them converted to evangelical Christianity -- and mixed-blood Mexicans have settled on the fringes of the forest. And each year, ranchers, farmers, loggers and, more recently, drug traffickers have inched deeper into the cloud forest, setting off vicious land disputes. To aggravate matters, Oaxaca and Chiapas can't even agree on where their border slices through the Chimalapas. Some villages are now accusing rival communities of setting fires to expropriate more of the jungle, or as revenge against neighbors. In one of the more sinister scenarios, many environmentalists believe developers may have set fires intentionally to help bolster their efforts to complete a trans-regional highway through the forest, a project long fought by environmentalists. Meanwhile, villagers like Leonardo Hernandez, 64, continue to trek daily into the burning fires, spraying water on flames and embers with backpack pumps that must be refilled every 10 minutes. From distant hillsides, the village volunteers and the army troops on firefighting duty appear as little more than ants scurrying at the edges of a vast, blackened wasteland. "It's not that we don't know what to do," Hernandez said. "We just don't have the equipment." As for when the fires will subside, "many people are praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe for miracles," said environmentalist Aridjis. "But the saints haven't answered." Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company - --- Checked-by: Mike Gogulski