This is the second in a seven-part series on Central America. We asked Paul Jeffrey, a United Methodist missionary and photojournalist who has lived in the region since 1984, to chronicle some of the ways the region has changed since it was daily headline fare in the 1980s. — The Editors
The howler monkeys scream down at Dan Heiner as he wades up the river, the thick jungle canopy overhead filtering out most of the morning light. Heiner looks up and yells, "Good morning!" Then he continues up the river, stopping occasionally to help Fernando Maldonado use a hand-held computer to take a reading off some satellites sailing 11,000 miles overhead.
A United Methodist missionary forester, Heiner is bringing high technology down to earth in a last-gasp attempt to save Central America's remaining rainforest. Heiner wants to protect both the biodiversity of the forest and the survival of the poor peasants who have become its nemesis. He's also nourishing a fragile process of reconciliation in a region long torn by fratricidal violence. Such dedication doesn't impress the monkeys, however. For several minutes, they follow Heiner from above, bellowing at the lanky foreigner as he splashes up the river.
The forests of Central America are disappearing. In some places, like neighboring El Salvador, the battle is all but lost; only 2 percent of El Salvador's original forests remain. About 40 percent of Nicaragua is still covered by forest; but, during the last decade, tree cover has been shrinking by 3 percent per year—12 times the world rate. The region hosts some 7 percent of the world's biodiversity, but that treasure is imperiled by humanity's insatiable appetite for wood.
Deforestation in the region has several causes. For decades, logging companies from abroad have raped huge stretches of the isthmus. The profits from this exploitation of nature have not been used to serve the majority by building broad-based educational or health systems. Instead, the concessions paid by foreign loggers flowed into the bank accounts of national elites. For example, the Somoza family, which ruled Nicaragua for more than four decades, made millions of dollars between 1945 and 1960 when the US-owned Nicaraguan Long Leaf Pine Company cut all the commercially valuable coastal pines in a 1160-square-mile area in northeast Nicaragua.
Vast sections of forest were cut down during the cotton boom of the 1950s and 1960s. And the rapid expansion of cattle raising in the 1960s and 1970s was a major culprit in turning large tracts of jungle into monotonous landscapes of grassland—a few graceful trees remaining like museum exhibits.
Yet the principal cause of deforestation throughout the region is the hunger that drives poor peasant families into the forest. It's the landless poor, denied access to the fertile plains of agribusiness, who are forced into the forest with their machetes. This migration accelerated in the 1960s, when the United States government's Alliance for Progress began providing billions of dollars in military and economic aid throughout the region to promote the rapid expansion of export agriculture.
With the best lands under the control of wealthy landowners and transnational corporations, the poor majority had no choice but to migrate onto steep surrounding hillsides or into interior rainforests.
After slashing and burning a section of forest, the peasants plant corn, beans, and squash in the ash-laced soil and reap a decent harvest for two or three years. Then the soil wears out and they move on. The cattle raisers come along behind and take over what is now grassland. In Nicaragua under the Somozas, the National Guard could always be called upon to move peasants along when the cattle raisers grew impatient to take their land.
The practice of slash-and-burn agriculture dates back to prehistoric ages. In his 1874 journal, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, the English mining engineer Thomas Belt observed the practice in more recent times in southeastern Nicaragua, near where Dan Heiner works today. Belt described "a scattered settlement of many small thatched houses, close to the borders of the great forest, on the edge of which were clearings, made for growing maize, which is cultivated entirely on burnt forest land. At some parts they had already commenced cutting down trees for fresh clearings. These [trees] would be burnt in April, and the maize sown the following month, in the usual primitive way, just as it was in Mexico before and at the Spanish conquest. "
What Belt's book describes is rendered disastrous by today's demographics. With most of the good land unavailable, peasant hordes have migrated to fragile lands of marginal quality, ill-suited for agriculture—provoking massive soil erosion, habitat destruction, and watershed deterioration. The persistent use by the poor of firewood for cooking exacerbated the deforestation. Dust storms, mudslides, and flash flooding began to ravage the countryside. Thousands of miles of hillsides lost their arable layer of soil. This ecological collapse forced tens of thousands of families to leave the countryside and move to the burgeoning slums ringing Managua and other large cities. Often these migrants located their shacks on riverbanks, steep hillsides, and other environmentally vulnerable areas. When Hurricane Mitch flooded the region in 1998, the resulting thousands of deaths were an indictment of the exploitative economic structures that laid the foundation for disaster.
For a brief while, Nicaraguans tried to change their ecological destiny. After the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza dynasty in 1979, the government implemented environmental protection laws, established national parks, began reforestation programs, and banned many dangerous pesticides. Most importantly, the Sandinistas' agrarian reform— which gave over 5 million acres (one-third of the country's farmland) to more than half the country's peasant families—brought immediate benefit for Nicaragua's rich tropical rainforests. By redistributing land to peasant families so that they could grow their own crops, the government halted most migration from the Pacific coast to the agricultural frontier on the Caribbean side of the country. The rate of deforestation of Nicaragua's tropical rainforests dropped from 386 square miles per year in the late 1970s—the highest rate in the region—to 194 square miles by 1985—one of the region's lowest rates. This dramatic reduction in rainforest destruction was unprecedented in the Third World.
Yet by the mid-1980s Nicaraguans were terrorized by a CIA-sponsored army of contras invading the country from camps inside Honduras. In spite of an International Court of Justice ruling condemning this aggression, the war continued until the end of the decade, when war weary Nicaraguans voted to throw the Sandinistas out.
Although the contras targeted environmental workers for assassination and set several massive forest fires to damage the economy, the war ironically was beneficial to the forests. The presence of armed troops in the jungle discouraged new migration there.
At the war's end in 1990, however, a major rush to the forests began. The government, wanting to motivate former contras and government soldiers to return to peaceful activities, gave them large plots of land in untouched areas of forest. One of the major resettlement zones was in the southeast of the country, where lowland rainforests stretch farther than the eye can see. Combined with similar forests across the river in Costa Rica, the area comprises the largest and wettest lowland rainforest remaining on the Caribbean rim—and the largest tropical rainforest north of the Amazon.
In the middle of this region sits the town of Sábalos, located along the edge of the San Juan River. In addition to the humidity, the area drips with history. Just downstream are the ruins of a castle the Spanish built to defend their side of the isthmus from the British. Upstream toward Lake Nicaragua can be found the half-submerged remnants of ferryboats used by Cornelius Vanderbilt to transport miners to California during the gold rush of 1849. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was one of those travelers. He described the river as "an earthly paradise" in his journals. In 1909, two US mercenaries working for antigovernment rebels were executed in the shadow of the Spanish castle after they were caught mining the river.
The last time I visited Sábalos was in 1987. The town was abandoned and mortar fire echoed down the tributaries of the San Juan. A CIA base camp was not too far away, and the pilot of the dugout canoe in which I traveled ran the boat as fast as he could down the middle of the river.
Today, Sábalos is thriving as a logging and fishing village and a commercial center for the small farmers who have colonized the nearby forestland. Some 18,000 people have moved into the jungle here in the last decade, and Sábalos is where they get off the small, flat-bottomed river ferry and start walking. Stores are stocked to the ceilings with machetes and axes and fertilizer. The bars along the river are full of patrons; alcoholism seems an inevitable part of the violent frontier culture.
Sábalos is Dan Heiner's home. He has an office in a wooden building on stilts, its rooms crowded with environmental and agricultural experts. Heiner's office has the best computer equipment and a huge color printer for producing maps. A phone sits on his desk, mute, serving only as a paperweight. The jungle outpost's diminutive phone system is hooked up to a microwave tower outside Heiner's window. Every six months, a Bell South technician comes to Sábalos and makes the system function, then takes the boat back up the river to the regional capital of San Carlos, from there to fly back to Managua. Heiner says the phone usually quits working before the technician's plane returns home.
Heiner works with a Danish government-funded project trying to protect the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve, one of two major natural reserves in Nicaragua. Indio Maiz is home to more than 600 species of birds, 300 species of reptiles, and some 200 species of mammals. There's a plethora of monkeys, jaguars, giant anteaters, crocodiles, toucans, and parrots and a rainbow of orchids and butterflies. Several endangered species persevere inside the park's 1900 square miles. Yet they are at imminent risk from the inexorable march of the agricultural frontier.
The reserve's only salvation is an adjacent buffer zone created by the government. It's an area where the Sandinista government awarded some property titles late in the 1980s. The real land rush came in the 1990s, however, when demobilized contras and army soldiers were awarded farm plots in the middle of the jungle. If history were to repeat itself, the new farmers would colonize the area and then move on.
To break the pattern, Heiner's team is working with the farm families to improve their quality of life. With sufficient improvement where they are, they shouldn't feel a need to move any farther into the reserve or to migrate to neighboring Costa Rica, where they're often mistreated and exploited. So Heiner's team helps villagers build potable water systems, install latrines, learn sustainable farming techniques, and discover ways to benefit from the forest without having to cut it all down. The team also helps villagers work on bettering their community organization, while at the same time raising awareness of gender issues—essential elements in establishing stable, healthy, democratic villages.
The isolated communities must fend for themselves since the central government practices "a policy of abandonment," according to Maldonado, a rural development specialist. "The government institutions that are supposed to provide services to the population simply aren't present here," he says. "The few schools in the zone have been built by villagers and nongovernmental organizations, not by the government. The government has no policy of providing credit or any other services out here, no matter what rights people have."
Besides distance, there is politics. "We're a very polarized society. Although the war was over years ago, we're still suffering the consequences," says Lucia Miranda, a sociologist on the team. "In the villages you'll find people of all ideological backgrounds, yet they're all people with a recent history of fighting, of always solving their problems with violence. This is a fruit of the war, and it's going to be with us for a long time."
Heiner's principal task is training local staff in how to use geographic information systems (GIS)—a combination of traditional mapping, demographic studies, and satellite data. He helps staff members combine the three into hard data that benefits the buffer communities and protects the reserve. GIS is useful in accurately redrawing property boundaries, for example. When the government awarded titles in the buffer zone, it often did so in a haphazard way; properties often overlapped. "The good news is that people got land," says María Eugenia Parales, the director of land titling for the municipality. "The bad news is that it was done without accurate surveying. People arrived and staked out their farms with just a compass and some string."
By equipping and training surveyors to use hand-held global positioning units, Heiner and Parales have helped rural farmers mark accurate boundaries to their fields. That reduces conflicts between neighbors, lets farmers use their land to get agricultural credit, and helps local governments plan taxes and services more efficiently.
Heiner also uses GIS tools to help identify and locate fires in the reserve, as well as to study the changes in population patterns year after year. Heiner and his team watch the pixels change on satellite photos as the agricultural frontier moves through the jungle. When a farmer slashes a plot out of the jungle, Heiner spots it and alerts forest guards who can hike into the affected area and persuade colonists to go elsewhere.
Heiner insists that all the technology in the world won't mean anything unless combined with observations on the ground. That's easier said than done. I hiked through the jungle with Heiner for two days—our sweaty journey punctuated by the cries of giant green macaws—in order to reach an isolated homestead inside the reserve where a former contra leader and his family have lived for a decade. Although they're supposed to leave, they claim the government first gave them their land and then later changed the boundaries. Heiner went to ask questions and listen. As we climbed wearily into our hammocks on their homestead—the sound of the surrounding jungle a magnificent symphony—Heiner fell asleep talking about the difference between seeing the family as two or three pixels on a satellite map and seeing them as real people.
"Although a central part of our mission is to save the wilderness, we can't do it unless we can convince the peasants that it's in their interest to protect the reserve," Heiner says. "Economic development and environmental protection are not opposites. If this part of the country has any future, we've got to figure out a way to do both. That means we have to discover alternatives with the poor so that they won't just move into the jungle and burn it down."
Although he's a forester by training, Heiner is a peacemaker at heart. He moved to Nicaragua in 1986. During the war, he helped an ecumenical development group and the government's forest service with a variety of sustainable forestry projects. Then, when the war ended in 1990, he thought about returning to the United States. "Yet I decided I wanted to stay a little longer," Heiner says, "and help the country as it wrestled with the post-war period. I knew we were going to discover that peace was much harder than war."
He ended up in the jungle around Sábalos. "This was an area where both former soldiers and former contras were arriving, and we had to find ways to bring them together in the least conflictive manner," Heiner recalls. "It also was a place where I could bring high tech down to earth to serve people—get it out of the hands of foreign experts and train local folks in how to make it work to help build reconciliation. It was one thing for the politicians to sign papers declaring that the country was at peace. It was another to make that peace really happen at a local level."
Other organizations have helped Heiner share that vision. He took six Nicaraguans to Atlanta, where they stayed in housing provided by the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) while learning from the US Forest Service how to read satellite images. He took two coworkers to a United Methodist-sponsored conference in Guatemala, where they networked with other Latin Americans working for sustainable development. And he initiated contact between a group of local pastors and some Methodist pastors across the border in Costa Rica. Together, they are forming a network to train pastors in eco-theology. "This is a task in which everyone needs to be involved," Heiner says. "And pastors have a key role in shaping how people think about themselves and the world in which they live."
It's too soon to know if the effort to save the Indio Maiz Reserve will be successful. European governments have criticized the Nicaraguan government for lacking the political will to protect the environment. And Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman seems interested only in personal gain. He recently purchased a huge tract of land alongside the San Juan River in hopes that a new inter-ocean canal will be built there. Such a canal, Heiner and his colleagues assert, would be an environmental disaster.
Later this year, Parales is taking over Heiner's job. Having trained a competent Nicaraguan staff to carry on the work without him, Heiner is heading for the north of the country, where another reserve is threatened by the swiftly moving agricultural frontier. In addition, someone is contaminating underground water sources with dangerous pesticides, and local activists want Heiner to train them in how to use high-tech tools to track down the source of the contamination.
The future of the forests in Central America, as throughout the world, depends on finding solutions to pressing social and economic problems. Dan Heiner is on the front line of a battle to find solutions that will celebrate all of God's creation by encouraging sustainable agriculture and building grassroots democracy while protecting what still remains Central America's wilderness.
Text and photographs copyright 2001 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. For reprint permission, contact New World Outlook by E-mail at nwo@gbgm-umc.org.