The Mexicans

Bam, Bam Bamba, Bam, Bam
You were drowning my darling
And I saved you
Dominating the waves with my love for you

Pero arriba y arriba y arriba ire yo no soy
Marinero por ti sere por ti sere
Por ti sere bam, bam bamba bam bam

On the sand you did write
I will always love you
Then the sand blew away
And your love did too

Pero arriba y arriba y arriba ire yo no soy
Marinero por ti sere por ti sere
Por ti sere bam, bam bamba bam bam

Oh, the crab it is said
Walks in reverse
For your true love, my darling
I'd walk on my head

Pero arriba y arriba y arriba ire yo no soy
Marinero por ti sere por ti sere
Por ti sere bam, bam bamba bam bam

Tu estabas ahogando Tu estabas ahogando
Yo te salve domimando Las olas
Domimando las olas por tu querer
pero y'arriba y'arriba per o'arriba y'arriba,
y'arriba ire yo no soy mari nero
Yo no soy Mari re porti sere

Bam, bam, bamba bam, bam

haha the irony...
well songs say so much they say
but some songs say too much eh
so you know edgar do you letty...
well me n edgar got off to a bit of a shaky start in our relating due to an over-reaction on my part to a reaction on edgars part to a song i posted
however thankfully we settled our differences after i apologised for my wrongdoing and we now seem to be harmonising smoothly

i also read your article about the regions in africa ed i must say that was cool especially the bit about the 2.6 billion year old continental bit..but i noticed you had only done southern africa....
are you going to do the north as well?
i suppose i shud post this there really eh
ah yes the joy of peace and love

It's a jig-saw puzzle I'm putting together. I'm learning about Africa as I go.

*Bump*

Learning about Africa, edgar? How interesting . Have you read 'Things Fall Apart' by Chinua Achebe? I think that it's the essential piece of fiction re colonialism...

Sorry. I was discussing Africa at about the same time I last visited here. Somehow my response got on the wrong thread.

No, I haven't read the book. Thanks for suggesting it.

Chuahua, Mexico

Oops - spelled it wrong. Forgive -eb
This is but one feature from this wonderful site. Please open the link and I promise you will not be disappointed.



Pancho Villa as a German Agent?
To most of us, the term "German agent" conjures up the image of a heel-clicking Bundist swilling beer and sieg heiling as he attends his monthly meeting at Camp Siegfried. If his vintage is pre-WWI rather than pre-WWII, then the Sieg Heil! will be replaced by something like Kaiser Hoch!

What the terms do not evoke is the roistering figure of Pancho Villa, who would be as out of place among a group of spike-helmeted Prussian militarists, as Jesse Jackson at an Aryan Nations rally. Yet today there is strong circumstantial evidence that Villa was not only financed by the German imperial government, but that some of his military actions were explicitly designed to aid the Kaiser's cause.

Before going into further detail, it is useful to examine the sequence of events that propelled Villa toward wishing to do maximum damage to the United States, and therefore being susceptible to German blandishments.

In the early days of the revolution, Villa had very good relations with Americans. On Christmas Eve of 1912 he escaped from the military prison of Santiago Tlatelolco in Mexico City. He had been imprisoned after being reprieved from a death sentence handed down by General Victoriano Huerta, the usurper who would overthrow Francisco Madero in February 1913.

That same month, Villa found himself in El Paso, living there in complete freedom and enjoying countless friendships with gringos. On March 9 he crossed the border with just 15 men and began a rising against the Huerta dictatorship. As noted, Villa has always liked Americans and the feeling was mutual. Among the many who swelled his ranks was a "foreign legion" composed of as colorful a group of adventurers as has ever been assembled under one standard.

Among them was the legendary John Reed (whose book, Insurgent Mexico, was about his service with the villistas), Oscar Creighton, a San Francisco bank robber called the "Dynamite Devil," Sam Drebben a/k/a "the fighting Jew," a Spanish-speaking machinist named Ben Turner, and Edward S. "Tex" O'Reilly, a hard-bitten rancher turned soldier-of-fortune, who would later serve in the Philippine Insurrection and the First World War.

Americans also manned Villa's primitive air force, made up of four planes. The pilots, ex-barnstormers and every bit as colorful as their compatriots on the ground, answered to names like Mickey McQuire, Wild Bill Heath and Farnum T. Fish. It has even been claimed that the legendary Hollywood cowboy Tom Mix served with Villa's forces, though this was denied by El Paso Journalist Dale L. Walker. According to Walker, the version of Mix being a "villista" was the invention of a flack in his studio's public relations office.

With the aid of these volunteers, Villa was able to team up with Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregón and drive Huerta into exile in July 1914. But the fall of Huerta did nothing to solve the turbulence plaguing Mexico. Before the end of 1914 Villa had fallen out with Carranza and Obregón. Mexico was again plunged into civil war.

Carranza was installed in Mexico City as provisional president but it was Obregón who furnished the muscle.

Obregón, a self- made but highly skilled general, had studied the trench warfare tactics then prevailing on the Western Front of France. Armed with this expertise, he inflicted a series of defeats on Villa, driving him from central Mexico back into the northern sierra of Chihuahua. On October 19, 1914, the United States extended de facto recognition to Carranza.

To Villa, this was the vilest sort of betrayal. He had always been a friend to the gringos and this is how they were repaying him. A simple man, he didn't understand the realpolitik which mandates that you recognize whoever seems to be more effectively in control of a country in chaos.

Villa's anti-Americanism was further inflamed on November 2, 1915, when carrancista troops were allowed to cross U.S. soil to attack him in the rear at Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, Arizona. To add insult to injury, U.S. searchlights were deliberately focused on the villistas to make them easier targets for their enemies.

At least one influential American sympathized with Villa and understood his feelings. General Hugh L. Scott, who had many dealings with Villa, wrote that "The recognition of Carranza had the effect of solidifying the power of the man who had rewarded us with kicks and making an outlaw of the man who helped us."

Though Villa sent Scott a telegram saying that he was the one honest man north of the border, that didn't stop the villistas from killing 16 American mining engineers captured when they held up a train near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, on January 10, 1914.





On March 9 came the infamous villista cross border raid into Columbus, New Mexico. The Mexicans attacked the 13th Cavalry, bringing back more than a hundred of its horses and mules, along with a heavy load of rifles and machine guns. The raiders also killed 26 civilians in Columbus.

What part did the Germans play in all this? At this point we must focus on the shadowy figure of Felix A. Sommerfeld, described by the prize-winning German historian Friedrich Katz as "one of the most interesting members of the shadowy army of agents, double agents, and lobbyists who swarmed like locusts over Mexico once the revolution had begun."

Sommerfeld was a con man extraordinaire. Though he had fought against the revolutionary Boxers in China, he came to Mexico and convinced Madero that he was a revolutionary democrat. At the same time he was establishing close relations with the German government and certain U.S. business interests.

The latter were represented by a shady lobbyist name Sherbourne Hopkins, who was closely allied with Carranza. In what was undoubtedly a union of kindred spirits, Sherbourne befriended Sommerfeld, gave him money, and told him to go to Mexico and place himself at Carranza's disposal. In Mexico, the fast-talking Sommerfeld so completely won Carranza's trust that the latter delegated him to go to Chihuahua and spy on Villa.

This he did, but not for Carranza. All information gained on Villa went directly to the German government. In addition, he so ingratiated himself with Villa, that Villa game him an exclusive concession to import dynamite for his forces. For this activity, Sommerfeld pulled down a commission of 5,000 dollars a month.

In late 1915, a few months before the attack on Columbus, the U.S. Justice Department ascertained that 340,000 dollars had been paid into an account that Sommerfeld maintained in a St. Louis bank. The money came from an account in New York in the name of the German government.

Shortly after these transactions came to light, Sommerfeld closed the account. Where did the money go? Treasury sleuths learned that every penny of it had been paid to the Western Cartridge Company - arms suppliers for Villa.

When confronted by agents of the Justice Department, Sommerfeld demonstrated that he'd lost none of his gift of gab. Piously insisting that he had severed all relations with Villa after the U.S. recognized Carranza, he even sent Villa a telegram protesting the massacre of the 16 mining engineers.

At the same time, he was unable to explain why 340,000 dollars deposited in his account by the German government had ended up in the hands of Villa's arms supplier. In addition, according to Carranza's agents in the U.S., Sommerfeld continued to buy arms for Villa even after his interrogation by Justice Department agents.

The question inevitably arises as to who was using whom.

Pancho Villa was a revolutionary first and foremost and the fact that he may have received arms and financial aid from the Germans doesn't transform him into an adherent of Kaiserism. Between the dominant Carranza-Obregón forces and the now hostile United States, Pancho Villa was in a very difficult spot. And if somebody offered to help him, he wasn't about to require the would-be benefactor to submit to an ideological litmus test.

On at least one occasion he resisted the blandishments of the Germans. The German consul in Torreón, which Villa had recently captured, gave a lavish banquet for him and urged him to march on the Tampico oil fields.

With the capture of Tampico, German ships would land in the port and bring him money and arms. Villa appeared to consider the offer - then changed his mind and marched on Chihuahua.

In the final analysis, it appears that Pancho Villa was not so much a "German agent" - with all the sinister connotations that the term implies - as a man engaged in the age-old game of playing both ends against the middle.

You continue to do excellent work with this thread, EB . . . thank you . . .

Corrido de La Punitiva

Part I

Nuestro Mexico, febrero veintitrés,
dejó Carranza pasar americanos,
veinte mil hombres, doscientos aeroplanos,
buscando a Villa por todito el país.

Y Carranza les dice afanoso.
que si son hombres y saben perseguir:
?-Les doy permiso de que busquen a Villa
y que se enseñen también a morir.?-

Cuando entraron los güeros de Texas,
fatigados de tanto caminar,
con siete horas que llevaban de camino
los pobrecitos se querían regresar.

Ya comenzaron las expediciones,
los aeroplanos comienzan a volar,
se repartieron por distintas direcciones
buscando a Villa que lo querían matar.

Francisco Villa, al ver las fuerzas punitivas,
luego al momento también se preparó,
se vistió de soldado americano
y a sus tropas también las transformó.

Los aeroplanos, al ver la bandera
con las estrellas que Villa les pintó,
se equivocaron y bajaron a la sierra
prisioneros Villa los agarró.

Francisco Villa ya no anda a caballo,
ni su gente tampoco andará.
Francisco Villa ahora es dueño de aeroplanos
que los consigue con facilidad.

Part II

Si porque semos poquitos mexicanos
dicen los güeros que nos van a acabar,
nada importa que traigan mil cañones
Si en la sierra los vienen a dejar.

Cuando entraron al estado de Chihuahua
toda la gente azorada se quedó
de ver tanto soldado americano
que Pancho Villa en los postes les colgó.

Cuando entraron los güeros a Parral,
buscando harina. galletas. v jamón,
hombres, mujeres y niños les decian:
?-Ahí hay pólvora y balines de cañon.?-

Porque dicen que en México se muere
y que de diario se matan por allá,
Con un solo mexicano que nos quede
nuesstra bandera en sus manos flotará.

Francisco Villa era un hombre guerrillero,
Sus artilleros al pie de su cañón.
quemarian hasta et ültimo cartucho
pero en defensa de nuestra nación.

¿Qué pensaban los americanos,
que combatir era baile de carquis?
Con la cara cubierta de vergüenza
se regresaron de nuevo a su país.

Nada importa que tengan los güeros
acorazados y buques de a maizal,
aeroplanos y automóviles blindados,
pero les falta lo que al carrizal.

Part I
In our Mexico, on the 23rd of February,
Carranza let the Americans cross over:
20,000 men, and 200 airplanes
were looking for Villa throughout the country.

Carranza tells them earnestly,
if they are men enough and know how to track him down
I give permission for you to find Villa
and you can also learn how it is to die.'

When the Texas ?'blondies' arrived
exhausted from so much walking,
after seven hours on the road,
the poor souls wanted to go back home.

The expeditionary searches began
and the airplanes started to fly,
they took several different directions
looking for Villa in order to kill him.

When Francisco Villa saw the punitive forces
he immediately got ready, too,
he dressed as an American soldier,
and he also transformed his troops.

When the planes saw the flag
that Villa had painted with stars
they made a mistake and came down,
and Villa took them prisoners.

Francisco Villa no longer rides a horse
and his people need never ride again:
Francisco Villa is now the owner of airplanes
which he very easily acquires.


Part II


If because we are so few Mexicans
the "blondies" say they can finish us off,
it doesn't matter if they bring a thousand cannons
because they end up leaving them in the hills.

When they entered the State of Chihuahua
all of the people were just amazed
to see all those American soldiers
that Pancho Villa left hanging from the poles.

When the blondies entered the city of Parral
asking for flour, crackers, and ham,
men, women, and children would tell them,
"There's only gunpowder and cannon balls.'

They say death stalks in Mexico,
and that people there kill each other every day:
as long as there is one Mexican alive
our flag will be waving in his hand.

Francisco Villa was a fighting man
and his artillery was always prepared,
they would have burned the last cartridge
in defense of our nation.

Just what were the Americans thinking,
that combat was like dancing a carquis?
With their faces covered with shame
they returned to their country once again.

It doesn't matter that the ?'blondies" have
battleships and vessels by the score,
and airplanes and armored cars,
if they don't have what it really takes.


-----

The version I know changes a little in the 6th paragraph of Part II

The original says:

¿Qué pensaban los americanos,
que combatir era baile de carquís?

The one I know says:
¿Qué se creían esos gringos bolillos,
que la guerra era un baile de carquís?

"What did does bread coloured gringos think?
That war was a carquis dance?"

The last verse too is different:

Pero les falta lo mero principal

"They lack the main thing".

This must have been an old clip, drom. Rosario Green was Foreign Minister until november 2000. Now she's ambassador in Argentina.

Sadly, the data must still be valid today.

I enjoyed that fbaezer.

Thank you for that, Fbaezer. I liked reading it too. (and Edgar's article.) It's sad to think that I can hardly see it all ending.

Threatened Sanctuary
A steady onslaught of clearing in North America's largest rain forest likely will lead to its demise.

The Past

The Lacandon Forest, or Selva Lacandona, once was home to powerful Maya city states. But Spanish invaders drove the Indians out, and the area became known as the Desert of Solitude. The Maya eventually returned.

At Odds

Two groups of Indians face off along a fragile green line. One struggles to keep what's left of the forest as it was. The other battles for land to clear and plant. The winner may define the future of the forest.

Nature's Way

Countless life forms, air and water are threatened by the destruction of the rain forest.

Few Options

Oil and gas, fresh water and tourist-drawing ruins all offer potential for development of the Selva Lacandona. But many villagers remain skeptical of the grandiose plans.

Family Perspective

Medical workers in the rain forest encourage residents to practice family planning to control the threat of overpopulation.

Four Views

Tales of the forest: The ants keep coming; an airplane soars over plowed fields; a village joins the tourism tourney; a deluge brings out plump toads.

The Fated Forest

A steady onslaught of clearing in North America's largest rain forest likely will lead to its demise

Christobal Perez / Chronicle
From atop a charred tree trunk, Jose Cruz, 10, surveys the cleared hillside where his father, Santiago, has planted corn and other crops. Tzeltal Maya farmers, the Cruzes are among the nearly 400,000 mostly poor people who have colonized the Selva Lacandona in the past four decades, threatening Mexico's largest remaining tropical forest.

By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
of the Houston Chronicle in Nueva Esperanza, Mexico
From half a mile away, the whole mountain seems afire.

A voracious crackling echoes off the slope and across the flat fields below. Burning vegetation throbs reddish-orange. Flames flick at the trees above. Heavy smoke surges heavenward, blends with that of other fires set for miles around, feeds the gray-white haze that blankets everything.

Another conquest of nature.

Jose Cordoba, 14, and his younger brother, Doroteo, stand transfixed alongside the two-lane highway that encircles the jungle like a noose. The boys watch the fire in silence, straw cowboy hats pulled tight on their heads.

"People keep burning more every year, even though they are told not to," says Jose, a rancher's son who lives across the road from the fire. "They do it out of necessity, perhaps. But this is a dead end. "The whole forest will be gone soon," he says, "the way things are going."

It almost certainly will. And humanity may be the less.

The Lacandon Forest, or Selva Lacandona, on Mexico's southern frontier could disappear in less than a generation under a steady onslaught of land-hungry peasants and resource-craving businesses, advocates for the forest and those who colonize it say.

Similar destruction eats away at the once-vast tropical woodlands farther to the north, east and south in the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala and parts of Belize.

Altogether, this fated forest has cradled human settlement for more than 5,000 years. It once nurtured Palenque, Tikal and the other kingdoms of the ancient Maya civilization.

But during the past four decades, hundreds of thousands of poor farmers, all but a few of them ethnic Maya, have migrated into the forest, relentlessly chopping and burning it.

By some estimates, the Selva Lacandona alone has shriveled from nearly 6,000 square miles -- bigger than the state of Connecticut -- to scarcely one-third that size.

Although the rate of deforestation has eased, the farmers push still. Now, as the Maya's forest falls, it bares both the starkness of their choices and the uncertainty of their horizon.

For even as they finish off one of the world's most biologically diverse and important woodlands, the farmers of the Selva Lacandona, in conflict-ridden Chiapas state, fail to thrive.

Their once-flourishing farms have splintered into untenable parcels as families have grown. Their livestock and crops fetch an ever-shrinking pittance in the market. Their fields' fragile soil has played out. Their faith in the future has evaporated.


Christobal Perez / Chronicle
Preparing for planting, Guatemalan refugee Oscar Pacham struggles through a recently cleared patch of forest with a 110-pound sack of seed corn. Thousands of Maya refugees who fled Guatemala's civil war in the 1980s joined other settlers in the Selva Lacandona whose population stands at 400,000.

Running harder but falling behind, the farmers grasp for more and more forest.

"Destroying the forest doesn't solve their poverty," says Ignacio March, the Chiapas director of Conservation International, which is working to preserve the forest. "The answer isn't to exhaust the resources. It's not smart. It offends one's intelligence.

"It's obvious that the main problem is overpopulation," March says. "The children of the farmers don't have any land. They can't all be peasants."

The fight for this forest has turned Maya villagers whose ancestors roamed the Lacandon for centuries against other Maya farmers who arrived just a few decades ago. It has set armed Maya rebels against a newly democratic government. It has cut to the soul of some of the most troubling issues facing Mexico today.

What does it mean to be Indian? What place do poor farmers have in an industrializing economy? How can natural resources be preserved in a country where a largely poor population will grow by 30 million in the next three decades?

"Unfortunately, we don't yet have in our hands the formula for showing how to both live better and better protect the forest," March says.

The dismantling of the Selva Lacandona is mirrored throughout Mexico, where loggers, cattle ranchers and peasant pioneers raze as much as 2,300 square miles of forest each year. Mexico's forestry crisis echoes across the Tropics -- from Brazil to Ivory Coast, Burundi to Indonesia.

Until recently, most tropical deforestation was wrought by companies exploiting timber, oil and minerals or by governments funding projects such as dams and highways. The companies continue to take their toll in Mexico and elsewhere.

Many experts now say desperate farmers pose the greatest threat, citing poverty and exploding demographics as the roots of the problem. At more than 3 percent annually, population growth in and near tropical forests is double that of the overall global rate.

"There are all these different aspects, but agrarian issues and peasant colonization is at the heart of the problem," says geographer Karen O'Brien, who wrote a book on the social ferment behind the Selva Lacandona's deforestation.

"Colonizing the forest is a very rational response to economic realities," O'Brien says. "They're trying to make a living, and they're not earning anything from having a forest there."

The assault on the Selva Lacandona, O'Brien says, "is really a microcosm of the deforestation problem worldwide. If we can figure out a solution here, we may figure out a solution for other areas."

About 630 million of the world's poorest people live in and around 16 of the Earth's most biologically important areas, according to a study by the World Conservation Union, a Geneva-based environmental group, and Future Harvest, a Washington think tank.

The study concludes that teaching more environmentally friendly farming practices and providing more options for peasants hold the best hopes for saving the remaining forests.

For decades, environmentalists have championed the cause of indigenous people, many of whom live in rain forests or survive by farming, believing that to be the best way to protect natural resources from the industrialized world.

But the Selva Lacandona crisis, spurred as it is by Maya farmers, has turned such logic on its head. Environmentalists and indigenous advocates here have found themselves bitter opponents.

"It's just a complete mess. They should be on the same side," says O'Brien. "What it really comes down to is balancing environmental goals and social goals. They're not the same."

The destruction of tropical woodlands will lead to soil erosion and flooding, to global warming and fouled rivers, scientists say. Deforestation threatens the very existence of a huge percentage of the Earth's plant, animal and insect species.

"A lot of species are not going to be able to survive over the long term," says Sara Scherr, a University of Maryland agricultural economist who co-wrote the Future Harvest report.

The Maya farmers and their defenders accuse environmentalists of valuing plants and animals over the needs of human beings. They charge that the real villains are Mexican and foreign companies that exploit the forest's resources as well as government policies that persecute Indians.

Many indigenous leaders and their supporters say they see a conspiracy behind efforts to save the forest. The campaign's real purpose, they say, is to drive the haggard peasants from their lands to benefit business.


Christobal Perez / Chronicle
A Maya girl makes her way through the ruins of Tonina. The site has become a favorite destination for Maya schoolchildren wishing to learn more about their culture and history.

"What they want to create is a great, green wall to keep the resources in the hands of the multinational companies," says ecologist Miguel Angel Garcia, who advises the Indigenous Affairs Ministry of the Chiapas state government. "What are they going to do, expel people? Why do they always go after the weakest people? Why don't they go after the powerful?

"Biodiversity and the forest are going to be destroyed," says Garcia, who works in community development in the less populated Chimalapas Forest of neighboring Oaxaca state. "Yes, it's a problem of overpopulation. But it's also a problem of underdevelopment.

"The fact we are driving our cars and living the way we do also contributed to all of this," Garcia says. "What are we doing about it?

"With what moral right are we squeezing the Indians out?"

Garcia and other advocates for indigenous people point out that the Maya farmers were pushed into the forest in the first place because unequal land ownership elsewhere had given them no chance to rise from poverty. The advocates say that businesses plan to do everything from turning peasants into low-wage employees to patenting the herbal medicines the Indians have long used.

Many point to Grupo Pulsar, the conglomerate owned by Monterrey industrialist Alfonso Romo, as an example of a company that concerns them.

Pulsar, which produces everything from cellulose to genetically modified seeds, owns tree plantations in neighboring Tabasco state and a seed facility on the fringes of the Selva Lacandona.

The company has raised some local suspicions by contributing about $3.5 million to Conservation International, one of the most active environmental groups trying to preserve the forest. Conservation International officials insist that neither Pulsar nor Romo, who is a member of the organization's board, has influenced their activities or policies.

Company officials say Pulsar's activities in the Selva Lacandona reflect Romo's support for nature conservation rather than his quest for profit.

"The only interest was to protect the Lacandon jungle," says Jorge Fenyvesi, the Pulsar executive in charge of the company's agronomy operations in Mexico. "Our focus was to develop sustainable projects managed by the people."

The company manages a vanilla production operation involving 50 families in one forest community. But Pulsar, which declared bankruptcy this past summer, no longer contributes to Conservation International.

The Selva Lacandona's travails began in the early 1960s, when the Mexican government encouraged landless Maya and non-Indian peasants to colonize it. Promised up to 50 acres each in the forest's government-owned lands, families whose ancestors had slaved for generations as low-wage laborers on coffee plantations and cattle farms tore into the wilderness with abandon.

The settlers saw the forest as a barrier to their success.

"They are peasants," says Belgian historian Jan de Vos, who has written about the communities in the Selva Lacandona for 30 years. "They don't see Mother Earth as some romantic space to look at. They see it as the sustenance of their families, as the means to live.

"The older Indians still talk about how horrible it was to live with the tigers," de Vos says, using the local slang for the forest's jaguars, panthers and other wild cats. "The forest for them is a dark and unknown thing."

Villagers today recount tales of their parents and grandparents having walked for days, even weeks, to reach their new farms. They wax poetic about the early days: how high the corn grew in the fields, how heavy the fruit hanged from the trees, how many deer and other game roamed the forest.

The bonanza proved too brief, lasting less than a generation.

Most tropical forest nutrients are contained in vegetation, so the soil quickly depletes once trees are cleared. When yields drop in the exhausted fields, farmers often replace crops with cattle. Livestock grazing makes it all but impossible for a forest to rebound, environmentalists say.

For years, new fields could always be cleared. But the Selva Lacandona has become crowded. In four decades the local population has exploded from about 400 people to nearly 400,000. Much of the remaining forest has been set aside as nature reserves, joining other large, protected parcels in Guatemala, Belize and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

Now there simply isn't enough forest to go around, environmental experts and indigenous advocates agree.

Porfirio Encino, the secretary of Indian affairs for the Chiapas state government, estimates that the forest's population could reach 1 million people by 2015.

"It's a very serious situation," says Encino, a Maya peasant activist who joined the government this year. "If this isn't resolved, this will cause serious problems among all the Indians, problems between brothers, between cousins, between villages."

It already has.

Enraged by their withering prospects, many Maya villagers supported the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which staged an uprising in 1994 that continues to rattle Mexico. The Zapatistas demanded land and price supports for peasants, greater rights for Indians and an end to 71 years of one-party rule.

The rebellious Maya unleashed a political whirlwind that helped achieve democracy in Mexico with the election last year of President Vicente Fox. The Maya gained widespread recognition of the Indians' plight, which led to congressional passage of a limited indigenous rights law this year.

But the Maya failed to resolve the land shortages and poverty that sparked their revolt in the first place.

Although the Zapatistas have not posed a military threat since the Mexican army occupied the forest more than six years ago, they have refused to make peace. They have rejected the indigenous rights law on grounds that it is inadequate and have labeled the Fox government a dictatorship in democratic garb.

The simmering rebellion and the ongoing social turmoil in the Selva Lacandona hamper efforts to stop the deforestation.

"It has been a paper war more than one of bullets, but the communities are as bad off as ever," Alejandro Lopez Portillo, director of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, the largest unspoiled chunk of Selva Lacandona, says of the Zapatista conflict. "What is being lost is the future."

The Fox government has taken a hard line against deforestation in much of Mexico this year, sending heavily armed police and soldiers to arrest illegal loggers and evict squatters on forestlands. But such tactics have not been used in the Selva Lacandona for fear of fueling support for the Zapatista cause.

"Obviously the strategy is being applied differently in each area," says Raul Arriaga, a senior official of Mexico's environmental ministry.

Fox has proposed a sweeping economic development project aimed at Chiapas and other impoverished southern states. But the Zapatistas, and many other indigenous groups, have rejected the plan, saying it benefits only the wealthy and foreign interests.

For now, with local education levels abysmally low and non-farm jobs largely nonexistent, Maya farmers will seek more land to till. The forest will continue to fall.

"The only solution open to them is to invade what is left," says Jan de Vos, the historian. "In the long run, it's a crime against themselves and against all humanity.

"That's why it is tragic," he says.

Edgar, that's a very complete article.

It should be read by all romantic left-leaning environmentalists who have never tried to convince poor land-demanding peasants that they cannot take forest land to burn and turn into a corn field, because in the medium run, it's bad for them and for their children.

There are hundreds of vegetable species in the different forests in Chiapas that can be used for medical and other purposes, while at the same time keeping the ecological habitat. Many of them have been used by indigenous people. But the land-demanding peasants want to raise their freaking corn who will last only for a decade. Try to convince them to use their cultural heritage and "wisdom", to build their own pharmaceutical enterprise. Tell them they can have soft credit. Tell them they got buyers of the herbs if they don't want to risk making their own company. They'll look at you suspiciously. It's a very hard task.

Yes, it's very hard to tell a desperate breadwinner to let his children go hungry. I don't know how the problems can be resolved under the present realities.

I found it a good article to read to help me understand more.

Just two more things about the Chiapas Lacandon forest problem.

1. Lacandones don't demand land for crops. Legally the forest is theirs, and they want to live there their traditional way. The land-demanders are from other ethnic groups: Mayan descent and mestizos.

2. Any way you turn it, the media blames the government. If it allows new settlers, it has no respect for ecological balance or the law that gave the forest to the Lacandones. "Genocide against the Lacandones, who live off the forest". If it doesn't allow new settlers, it takes away the chance for desperate breadwinners to make a living and feed their children. "It's repressive and not democratic".

Film ?- and heritage ?- on wheels
Mexican legends of 1940s cinema used in traveling snack promotion
By T.A. BADGER
Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO - Javier Ruiz Galindo wants to sell tortilla chips. His vehicle for doing that is famous Mexican movies from the 1940s.


Actually, his vehicle is a semitrailer tricked out to become a mobile 90-seat cinema, right down to the mini-concession stand.

The so-called "Cinetransformer" will cruise the United States, stopping along the way to introduce audiences to silver screen legends from south of the border, like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete.

Ruiz Galindo, who runs a San Antonio-based marketing company, says musicals and romantic comedies like Los Tres Garcia (The Three Garcias) and El Seminarista (The Seminarian) remain very popular in Mexico.

"It's like Clark Gable, it's like Casablanca in the United States," he said, adding that Infante "is venerated like a saint in Mexico."

Infante, a singer-actor who died in a plane crash in 1957 at age 39, plays the lead in three of the first four films to be featured, while Negrete, who died in 1953 at age 42, stars in one.

Indeed, five decades after their deaths, both men are ardently remembered and by some even worshipped.

"What can I tell you about Pedro Infante?" wrote Denise Garcia in her 2001 novel Loving Pedro Infante. "If you're a Mexicana or Mexicano and don't know who he is, you should be tied to a hot stove with yucca rope and beaten with sharp, dry corn husks."

Ruiz Galindo, whose company has been hired by a large Mexican tortilla chip maker, wants Hispanics throughout the United States to know who Infante is.

From San Antonio, the film tour heads to Florida and the Southeast before passing back through Texas in the fall en route to California, he said.

One side of the Mexican-made Cinetransformer, which Ruiz Galindo says cost $800,000, pops out to allow six seats across, each with a beverage cup holder, and an aisle down the middle.

Along with a concession stand at the entrance, it's outfitted with a high-definition projector, digital surround sound, air conditioning and rest rooms.

Ruiz Galindo says the brightly painted vehicle will park in supermarket parking lots for a day and that shoppers at those stores will get free tickets when they buy the sponsor's tortilla chips and flour.

"We can go any place and bring this modern theater," he said.

The features will also change over time, Ruiz Galindo said, as his company has the rights to more than 600 Mexican movies from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Our Pedro Pedrito:



If you want to know more about him (but he's not dead, they say, he faked the plane crash), here's a link in English:

Pedro Infante: singer, actor, icon, idol

He and Elvis are somewhere in the mountains.

The English version of my newspaper column of August 12 (it has to do, among other things, with Pedro Infante):

From the Ranch to Television

There are persons whose influence is much greater than their fame. Ismael Rodriguez, the man responsible of the sentimental education of two generations of Mexicans, died on August 7th.

He was a prolific director and scriptwriter. he directed 59 movies and wrote the script for 45 of them. Many of those films picture the values that marked the collective subconscious of a nation in the process of swift, but unwilling, modernization.

The best know of his works is the trilogy of the adventures, and mostly misadventures of Pepe el Toro ("We, the Poor", "Them, the Rich", "Pepe el Toro") A great melodrama, centered in the noble carperter interpreted by Pedro Infante. Rodríguez presents us a divided world. On one side, the poor, who live among adversities and who are capable of going from tenderness to violence in an instant; from laughter, suddenly, into crying. Popular sentimentalism is opposed, in Rodriguez view, by rich people conducted by forms and norms, always self-controlled, always self-repressed. Three very effectist, but effective films, where he shows us a world in which happiness visits only the poor, but only by little drops.

Another two pairs of films view machismo from a very peculiar perspective. "A.T.M." y "¿Qué te ha dado esa Mujer?" are centered in the ambigous relationship between Luis Macías y Pedro Chávez (Luis Aguilar and Pedro Pedrito), the love-prone motorcyclists whose most important sentimental link is their male to male friendship/love, disguised as rivalry.

The other pair, "The Black Sheep" and "Thou Shall Not Covet Your Son's Wife" can be seen by the new generations as caricatures of machismo and fatherly domineering, expressed in the despicable deeds done by Cruz Treviño (Fernando Soler) to his son Silvano (the eternal Pedro Infante). On their time, they stated that patriarchy, no matter how defective, had to be respected. The political message is perhaps lost today: it was, then, an indicator of the "natural" order of things.

Perhaps the best film of Ismael Rodríguez was "Los Hermanos del Hierro", a dark western he co-wrote with Ricardo Garibay. The thirst of vengeance and the slavery towards passions, generate a violent spiral in which stupidity, disguised as loyalty, takes all characters as victims. A terrific allegory of what could happens to us as a society.

The last films of Ismael Rodríguez were Z class flicks. Perhaps it was because Mexican cinema lived 15 years of darkness. since the mid 70s. Perhaps it was because Don Ismael's time was gone. Mexico moved from the ranch to TV. Society changed and the values that Rodriguez championed (machismo, but sincere friendship; hierarchy, buy honesty; the inevitability of unjustice, but the dignity where money isn't everything; extreme patriotism, but the value of a smile) were substituted.

So it's fortunate, but it's also a disgrace that, even if we keep on whistling "Amorcito Corazón", us Mexicans identify less and less with him.