- Poverty and political violence are driving Hondurans into Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage site holding some of the region’s largest tracts of old growth rainforest.
- Local conservation and agroforestry organizations say the settlers are contributing to deforestation in the reserve. However, research indicates illegal ranching is the biggest deforestation driver in the area.
- Locals say many illegal cattle ranchers maintain ties to the drug business. They claim government corruption and apathy are also contributing to the situation.
- An investigation found criminal groups are able to operate with impunity in Honduras because of an ineffective justice system and corrupt security forces.
While many people from Atlantida, Honduras, are attempting to escape desperate poverty and deepening political violence by traveling some 3,000 miles to reach the border of the U.S., a few years back, Julia* left Atlantida heading just around 100 miles east until she and her family reached the thick forested mountains of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve.
“We arrived because of necessity,” said Julia, who sits on her front porch that looks out on a river valley littered with cut, burnt logs representing the remnants of a rich forest that once stood here. Julia, who lives with her husband and two daughters, said the trees were cut down to create pasture for the family’s dairy cows.
“Before we left [Atlantida], we were hungry and sick,” Julia said. “My father worked at a plant nursery and his health was deteriorating from the chemicals he used on the job. A lot of the time we only had enough to eat one meal per day. Now we milk the cows, produce our own cheese to eat; we’re not hungry anymore.”
Before Julia’s family settled the land, the forest provided supplemental income to local communities located five hours away by horseback in the Sico Paulaya valley below. The communities operated a forestry cooperative called MIRAVESA that was supposed to protect a section of the forest to allow for the harvesting of mahogany wood as well as provide water for drinking and a community-driven micro-hydroelectric project. Initial funding was provided by international groups such as GreenWood, a U.S.-based organization focused on sustainable development of timber economies.
The sections of forest that protect water sources remain but the productive areas where mahogany wood was once harvested have been mostly cleared. MIRAVESA cooperative associate Maria* said the agroforestry project is “about to fall apart” because the forests have been invaded and cut down by families who want to turn the land into cattle pastures.
“Today, we’re barely holding on because the forest where we used to harvest the mahogany wood is now populated with settlers,” said Maria. “What was once pristine forest has been deteriorated and destroyed.”
Honduras is home to a number of valuable hardwoods that are targeted for logging — both legal and illegal. The cooperative associates explained that their legal wood harvesting operations are different from illegal operations because they reportedly do not remove any more wood than the forest can naturally regenerate during that same year. Only documented wood approved by government agency Forestry Conservation Institute (ICF) is allowed to be exported to countries such as the U.S., which is the main destination for the country’s timber exports.
The MIRAVESA cooperative representatives claim that high taxes and drawn-out bureaucratic processes, make it hard to compete with illegal logging operations. Legal mahogany-harvesting only provides work for a few months of the year, which means the majority of the families, even those associated with the cooperatives, operate small cattle and dairy farms to provide food and income for their families.
A scourge of cattle
The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve sits near the eastern border of Honduras with Nicaragua in La Mosquitia, the largest contiguous rainforest region in Latin America north of the Amazon Basin. The reserve houses a complex ecosystem of densely forested mountains, cut with abundant rivers and creeks that drop down into particularly species-rich tropical lowland rainforest, wetlands and savannah. In 1982, the reserve was the first protected area in Central America to be included in the UNESCO’s World Cultural and Natural Heritage program.
Parts of the reserve’s buffer zone were first colonized in the early 20th century by non-landed campesino settlers who set up commercial banana farms alongside large rivers for U.S.-based United Fruit Company. After the banana-growing operations shut down due to banana disease, the settlers stayed behind, often living off the land through subsistence agriculture. However, large-scale migration to the reserve started in in the 1950s, as settlers began opening roads to extract wood. Cattle ranching operations moved into the region by the 1980s, leading to a greater scale of deforestation.
Research by U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society indicates illegal ranching has caused 90 percent of the deforestation in 8,100-square-mile La Mosquitia, which has lost 30 percent of its forests in the past 15 years.
Honduras is one of the poorest, most unequal and indebted countries in the world. The remote region of La Mosquitia is largely lawless. For many years, drug traffickers have used the region as a transhipment point for cocaine headed toward the U.S. The traffickers have built airstrips to land drug shipments in the middle of the remote jungle.
Sico Paulaya valley resident Jorge* said the authorities are virtually non-existent in the remote regions of Río Plátano where, for the most part, ground transportation is only possible on foot or by horseback.
“Here’s it like the wild west where everyone needs to own their own gun,” Jorge said. “The military will only come in on invitation. The police don’t like to get out of their cars or off the motorcycle, so we don’t ever see them come around. There are no laws other than the ones we make ourselves.”
Extending over 2,000 square miles, the reserve is divided into three zones: buffer; cultural and core. While regulated commercial activity and human settlement is permitted in the buffer zone, no extractive activity is permitted in the core zone where the greatest biodiversity is found, including jaguars, giant anteaters, scarlet macaws and the endangered Baird’s tapir. Río Plátano also home to the Miskito, who make up nearly half the human population in the reserve, as well as small populations of Pech and Garífuna indigenous groups.
Deforestation appears to be on the rise in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. According to satellite data from the University of Maryland, the reserve lost more than 10 percent of its tree cover between 2001 and 2017. More than a third of this clearance happened in just the last three years. Initial data from 2018 show large spots of deforestation in some of the deepest parts of the reserve that had been covered in intact old growth rainforest only a few years ago.
Emilio* is a native from La Mosquitia who has traveled extensively in the region, including the core zone of the reserve. Emilio said illegal cattle ranching is behind the vast majority of the deforestation, although illegal logging, hunting and gold mining has also contributed to the problem.
“The poor people are used to clear the land for the cattle ranchers,” Emilio said. “Once the forest is gone, the ranchers move their cattle in through paths in the forest to the cleared pastures. There they rent out the land from the poor families as they rotate the herds of cattle to new grasslands on a continual basis.”
Emilio has witnessed firsthand the decline of the wildlife within the reserve, including the core area, over the years as the settlers and cattle herds have pushed deep into the park, particularly in lowland areas that are particularly biodiverse. He said the same species are still there, but their abundance has declined dramatically over the last 10 to 20 years.
“In the past, the rivers flowed full of fish and there were many more animals in the forest. I used to see tapirs all the time, and now I almost never do,” Emilio said. “The Indigenous people used to be able to catch Cuyamela fish (Juturus puchardi) by simply throwing their spear into the flowing water current and they’d come out with something. Now, they must swim around underwater to catch each fish, one at a time.”
Additionally, Emilio said a neighboring protected area known as the Tawahka Asangni, home to the Tawahka indigenous group, has been hit hard by settlement and deforestation.
“The settlers are having children with the Tawahka indigenous people,” he said. “This is a problem because the next generation of children will grow up and declare legal rights to live and carry out their activities within the reserve. When it comes to conservation of the plants and animals, the mentality of the colonists is different from the indigenous.”
The Tawahka estimate their numbers at about 2,000, making them one of Honduras’ smallest Indigenous groups. The group is endangered by ongoing settlement in their ancestral lands as well as the construction of a 104 MW dam known as “Patuca III,” which is being built by Chinese company Sinohydro and is almost fully completed. Mongabay reached out to Sinohydro for comment, but had received no response by presstime.
Drugs and corruption
Emilio, as well as other sources who wished to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, said that the illegal cattle ranchers who are behind much the deforestation maintain ties to the drug business.
“There has been cocaine trafficking going on in this region since the 1980s with the Contra war in Nicaragua,” Emilio said. “Most of these cattle ranchers made their money through the drug business, and they’re connected with powerful politicians.”
According to a report by Mongabay Latam, the families of two former Honduran presidents, Manuel Zelaya and Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who represent the country’s two main liberal and conservative parties respectively, maintain large territorial holdings and cattle ranching operations in the Olancho department that borders the reserve.
In the lowland areas of the neighboring Sico Paulaya valley, oil palm plantations have taken over many areas that were formerly cattle pastures, according to a local municipal government Development Plan report. The agribusiness industry in Honduras has been linked to political corruption, military and paramilitary abuse and drug trafficking.
President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s National Party took power from the Liberal Party in a 2009 military coup. According to a report by International Crisis Group, a drug lord extradited to the U.S. testified that there were connections between National Party President Hernández, former President Porfirio Lobo and drug trafficking groups. The two politicians have rejected the accusations and neither has been charged. The brother of President Juan Orlando Hernandez was arrested in November on drug-trafficking charges in Miami.
An investigation by Insight Crime titled “Honduras Elite and Organized Crime” argued that large criminal groups are able to operate with impunity in Honduras because of an ineffective justice system and corrupt security forces. The report suggested the Honduras elite view the state as “an enabler of business enterprise” where systemic corruption is “endemic, widespread and infused.”
Can things change?
President Hernandez visited the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve last month. On Nov. 8, the president announced a program called “SOS Honduras” as an emergency measure to stop illegal deforestation and restore degraded areas. Accompanied by a committee of experts, government officials, and the military, Hernandez accused organized crime operations for the rapid clearing of forest.
“We’re are responding with an emergency plan that includes monitoring, operations, evictions, and captures,” said the narrator of an SOS Honduras promotional video approved by the president. “But above all, we aim to recuperate the lands that have been affected.”
Local Environment and Production Board President Osman Euclio Alvarado works with the agroforestry cooperatives to promote environmental conservation and social development projects in the Sico Paulaya river valley. He says that while the cooperatives have had some success building micro-hydroelectric projects that create an incentive to protect forests, it’s been a challenge to get the authorities from capital city Tegucigalpa to take concerted action to stop the deforestation.
“It’s difficult for us here to have our voices heard by the government ministers,” Euclio Alvarado said. “They don’t come here so we have to go to them, and that is expensive. We can sense their disinterest when we bring up our problems.”
In addition to problems with the central government, Euclio Alvarado said that environmental consciousness is generally lacking among the local population.
“We need to be more conscious, he said. “We need to realize that without nature, we cannot survive.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identities of those interviewed.
Banner image: The Mosquitia region is largely lawless, which means residents generally carry firearms for protection. Image by Taran Volckhausen for Mongabay.
Editor’s Note: This story was powered by Places to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time satellite data, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data.
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