Destruction of the Lacandon Jungle, final season 2018-2025

The Lacandon Jungle is the greatest and most tragic failure of territorial governance in the history of Mexico. It is a testament to the destruction of invaluable natural capital, which has only led to the expansion of low-productivity economic activities and increased poverty, and has offered a fleeting and useless escape valve to agrarian, social, demographic, and political pressures originating primarily in the Chiapas Highlands. It is a tragic case of radical institutional failures and the extreme collapse of the rule of law. The destruction of the Lacandon Jungle did not begin with the 2018-2024 government, but it did find in it the almost deliberate culmination of a process that began around 1970.

What is known as the Lacandon Jungle covered more than 1.5 million hectares around 1970; today, probably less than a quarter of that area remains. The Lacandon Jungle is (was) one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in Mexico and Mesoamerica, comparable in biological richness to the Amazon, Indonesia, and the Congo. It is possible to identify at least four stages in the destruction of the Lacandon Jungle. The first begins in the 1930s, when the Mexican state promoted agrarian colonization to "populate" eastern Chiapas. The national lands under public ownership were essentially handed over to new ejidos and communities. Large concessions were granted to forestry companies, which penetrated the jungle with an extensive network of logging roads, inviting chaotic colonization. The destruction of the tropical forest began through peasant settlements, burning, and clearing to establish subsistence farming plots and extensive cattle pastures. In a second phase, the Agrarian Reform accelerated dramatically in the early 1970s, liquidating all of the Mexican state's territorial assets that existed in the form of national lands. In 1972, the government granted 66 families from the Lacandon Community (indigenous Lacandon natives) an area of ​​314,000 hectares. These lands were later declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1978, but maintained private ownership of the land (communal, private property) and without any budget, institutional framework, or oversight. The Biosphere Reserve was quickly invaded by the Tzeltal, Chol, and Tzotzil indigenous people of the Chiapas Highlands. During these years, a definitive catalyst for formal and anarchic colonization was the construction of the Transborder Highway parallel to the Usumacinta and Salinas Rivers. The third stage of destruction of the Lacandon Jungle was carried out by the so-called "Zapatista Army of National Liberation" beginning in 1994, which induced and accelerated the invasion of the Biosphere Reserve. At the time, the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) tried valiantly to contain the destruction of the Lacandon Jungle, particularly the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. All efforts were abandoned in subsequent years. The fourth stage began in 2000 and continues to this day with the Morena administrations. In 2018, CONANP's budgets were radically cut, conservation programs were dismantled, and even—due to ideological perversion—in 2019, SEMARNAT promoted the colonization of the Biosphere Reserve by indigenous groups. The Lacandon Jungle, which had attracted the attention of the media, national and international civil society organizations, and the federal government itself, simply evaporated. Worse, in 2018, the federal government established a massive clientelist subsidy program called "Sembrando Vida" (Planting Life), which incentivized the destruction of the tropical forest to make the land eligible for substantial handouts of up to 5,000 pesos per hectare per month, something irresistible to ejidatarios (communal landowners), community members, and individual landowners. Thus, in 2019, deforestation in the Lacandon Jungle reached its highest levels in history. Currently, as in many other regions of the country, the Lacandon Jungle has fallen under the control of organized crime. The fledgling ecotourism effort has been aborted. Deforestation is terminal, violence is rife, there is a total absence of the rule of law, neglect, extortion, drug trafficking, wildlife and precious wood trafficking, invasions, narco-ranching, and collusion between communities and criminals.

The population in the municipalities that make up the Lacandon Jungle has grown rapidly in the last two decades, due to immigration and very high fertility rates among the local population, between 3.5 and 4.5 children per woman (in Mexico it is 1.6). Finally, it should be noted that the destruction has resulted in massive emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, which have contributed to our country's total emissions: the destruction of more than one million hectares of evergreen tropical forest has generated cumulative emissions equivalent to the total CO2 emissions of Mexico in one year. Meanwhile, the National Guard, SEMARNAT, PROFEPA, CONANP, and CONAFOR, powerless or indifferent, look the other way. It is a faithful reflection of today's Mexico. It's over.