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Mexico Slow to Respond to Illicit Logging on Indian Lands: NAFTA Panel

pine and fiforests of tarahumara mountainsRogue loggers have been practicing illicit logging on Indian lands in the mountainous terrain in northern Mexico. Their anti-logging activities being threatened, they are up with their gloves, indiscriminately axing the last money out of the wood. They are taking advantage of slow-reacting authorities, activists and an international environmental commission said.

In a quarter-century battle over the pine and fir forests of the rugged Tarahumara Mountains, many Tarahumara Indian anti-logging activists have been threatened, imprisoned or killed. These forests are located about 400 kilometers (250 miles) south of the Texas border.

“The law isn’t being enforced. If you don’t pressure (authorities), they don’t listen to you,” said Maria Teresa Guerrero, who heads a nonprofit group in northern Chihuahua state that helped the Indians bring a complaint against the Mexican government before the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.

“The process has taken five years … people are tired, many of them don’t even want to file complaints any more,” Guerrero said of filings by several Tarahumara communities against loggers between 1998 and 2000.

Via: Environmental News Network

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