MEXICO'S UNQUENCHABLE FIRES

Ecological Disaster Unfolds as Ancient Forest Burns On

SAN ANTONIO, Mexico97Antonio Juarez is a foot soldier on the front lines of
firefighter hell. His weapons against southern Mexico's worst fires in a
century are a machete and five gallons of water in a rubber backpack. The
peasant farmer, 51, charges into burning rubble clad in sandals, a straw
cowboy hat and a tattered bandanna.

His futile mission: to help hold back the raging wildfires that are
gobbling Mexico's last remaining virgin cloud forest, torching the trees
that are home to nesting toucans and quetzals, charring tens of thousands
of acres of hunting territory of endangered jaguars and pumas, and creeping
beneath the thick blankets of lichen and mosses on the forest floor to
consume the roots of rare flora.

"It's so tragic," said Miguel Angel Garcia of the People of the Southwest
Woods, one of the most prominent environmental watchdog groups in
southern Mexico. "You can replant a burned pine forest; you can't replace
a tropical cloud forest that's taken two thousand years to form."

The fires ravaging this mystical forest, called the Chimalapas, which has
been the physical and spiritual reserve of Indians who have lived on its
fringes for centuries, are so massive and so remote that until last week
Mexican authorities couldn't even count all the blazes. Smoke from these
fires in the southwestern state of Oaxaca, the largest and most
uncontrolled in Mexico, has drifted as far north as Wisconsin and South
Dakota and across the U.S. Gulf Coast to Georgia.

The blazes of the Chimalapas -- a mountainous subtropical area where under
normal conditions clouds continually linger -- have not only sent jungle
cats, monkeys and birds fleeing for their lives but have reignited
long-smoldering feuds between the Mexican government and environmentalists,
between rich landowners and indigenous peasants, and between isolated
mountain villages that have been waging agrarian wars for decades.

The causes of the blazes, as well as the inability to curb them, involve
tales of revenge, government indifference and a national pride that may
have led to waiting too long to seek help.

But for even the most advanced firefighters, these are no ordinary fires.
They burn as no other forest fire. Much of the flame is subterranean, with
smoke seeping from cracks and crevices, disguising the true location of the
underground conflagration. When the fires do burst into the open, they
often are obscured by the jungle's thick canopy. That same canopy has
prevented water dumped by small helicopters from reaching the flames.

"It's a lot worse than what I had envisioned," said Paul Weeden, who is
coordinating the more than 30 U.S. firefighting experts dispatched last
week to assist Mexican authorities. "I didn't realize there were so many
large fires burning -- that the areas were so remote, so inaccessible."

Many of the fires in the Chimalapas are now virtually unreachable. They are
a 10-hour hike into a forest so obscured by smoke that Mexican
reconnaissance aircraft have been unable to fly near them since the fires
began three weeks ago. It was only last week, when the U.S. government
provided a King Air plane equipped with sensitive infrared sensors that can
detect heat beneath the thick veil of smoke, that firefighters discovered
the extent of the fires.

Because the cloud forest is such a unique environment -- with 22 ecosystems
and 62 varieties of reptiles -- firefighters have been unable to employ
many of the most effective methods of combating wildfires. There is no
"back burning," setting controlled fires that consume potential fuel around
the wildfire; no "herding" of smaller fires into one large blaze that burns
itself out; and no bulldozers and tractors for building fire breaks.

"We're in an environment that's unique to the world," said Mike Conrad, a
supervisor from the U.S. Forest Service. "We don't want to lose any more of
this than we have to."

Already an estimated 16,800 acres have burned.

The arrival of U.S. experts has not been without problems. Mexican military
officials were suspicious of the infrared heat detection system that would
be mapping every square mile of the army's most sensitive area -- the
southern state of Chiapas, adjacent to Oaxaca, where Mexico has deployed
tens of thousands of troops since the 1994 rebel Zapatista uprising.

After landing at a Chiapas airfield last week, U.S. authorities decided to
move the airplane to a more secure airport in a neighboring state for fear
that drug traffickers -- who favor King Airs -- might try to steal it.

Environmentalists report more than 230 fires are now raging across Mexico,
49 in the Chimalapas. Since January, Mexico has reported 10,000 blazes
nationwide that have devoured an estimated 700,000 acres, an area larger
than Rhode Island.

"This is the biggest ecological disaster of this century in Mexico," said
Homero Aridjis, one of the nation's most prominent environmental activists.
"The government can't control this number of fires."

There are nearly as many accusations over the outbreaks as there are fires.
Unquestionably, it has been an unusually hot, dry year across Latin
America, from Brazil's Amazon to Mexico's northern deserts.

While virtually every state in Mexico is suffering its worst fires in seven
decades, environmentalists say the blazes are far worse in the normally
humid jungles of Oaxaca and Chiapas, where fires like these haven't been
seen in at least a century.

Government officials have laid the blame for most of the fires on peasants
who use slash-and-burn techniques to clear their land for the planting season.

But the farmers and many environmentalists say the fires are the byproduct
of years of government neglect of its poor and indigenous populations.

"They have been abandoned by the government," said environmentalist Miguel
Angel Garcia. "That's why they're obligated to use these agricultural
techniques in the year 2000."

The region flanking the west side of the Chimalapas has been the site of
decades, if not centuries, of conflict. The Zoque Indians have claimed the
virgin forest region as their reserve since before the Spanish
conquistadors arrived five centuries ago.

But in the past 30 years, the Mexican government has promoted a policy of
colonizing less populous areas to relieve overcrowded areas. As a result,
entire villages of Mayan Indians -- many of them converted to evangelical
Christianity -- and mixed-blood Mexicans have settled on the fringes of the
forest. And each year, ranchers, farmers, loggers and, more recently, drug
traffickers have inched deeper into the cloud forest, setting off vicious
land disputes.

To aggravate matters, Oaxaca and Chiapas can't even agree on where their
border slices through the Chimalapas.

Some villages are now accusing rival communities of setting fires to
expropriate more of the jungle, or as revenge against neighbors.

In one of the more sinister scenarios, many environmentalists believe
developers may have set fires intentionally to help bolster their efforts
to complete a trans-regional highway through the forest, a project long
fought by environmentalists.

Meanwhile, villagers like Leonardo Hernandez, 64, continue to trek daily
into the burning fires, spraying water on flames and embers with backpack
pumps that must be refilled every 10 minutes.

From distant hillsides, the village volunteers and the army troops on
firefighting duty appear as little more than ants scurrying at the edges
of a vast, blackened wasteland.

"It's not that we don't know what to do," Hernandez said. "We just don't
have the equipment."

As for when the fires will subside, "many people are praying to the Virgin
of Guadalupe for miracles," said environmentalist Aridjis. "But the saints
haven't answered."

Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski