Lawlessness Is Undoing Effort to Save Honduran Forests

Elisabeth Malkin has a new article on Lawlessness Is Undoing Effort to Save Honduran Forests for the New York Times.

COPÉN, Honduras — Nine men were harvesting mahogany deep in the woods here when Alonso Pineda and his son appeared, carrying shotguns. An arrest warrant hangs over the two for clearing the forest illegally, but on that day they posed as its protectors.

“This is private property, and that tree is contraband,” Mr. Pineda shouted, witnesses recalled.

Mr. Pineda’s claims were not true, presumably part of a ruse to seize the wood for himself. In fact, the men cutting the timber that day belong to a legal cooperative that has been managing the forest for almost 15 years under government agreements that include permits to collect valuable mahogany while leaving the rest of the woods virtually untouched.

“You’ll have to take me out of here dead,” replied one man. Someone else buzzed a chain saw, recalled another member of the group, Luis Ruiz, and the outlaw pair vanished among the trees.

It was just a fleeting glance of Mr. Pineda, who has led settlers into the woods to cut down trees and replace them with corn plots and pastureland, which can eventually be sold, forestry experts and residents say. The communities conserving the forest, which is owned by the state, say they are losing their livelihood because of such incursions.

Okay, this is embarrassing. In 1998, I went for a nice Chinese dinner in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and then on to the movies to see Titanic. There were not many choices. In fact, there might not have been any other choices. Anyway, by coincidence, I ran into Rob from Colorado who was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras. Rob and I actually studied abroad together in Argentina in 1995 and just so happened to see each other at the theater on the one weekend that he had to go into the city for a meeting.

Rob was working with local communities on conservation issues, mainly preventing deforestation. However, he complained that most of his job was involved helping various Honduran communities organize against US corporations involved in tearing down the forests. I just mention all this because big business was absent from the article. Are the clearing of forests by legal big businesses, domestic or foreign, not a concern?

And the second thing that I wonder is whether the Chinese are involved here too. Belize has been having difficulties managing the illegal harvesting of rosewood that is mostly sold to China.