Traffickers threaten Honduras’s forests (English version)
Mahogany trafficking threatens Central America’s largest tropical forest reserve
May 22, 2007
Brus Laguna, Honduras — In his half-finished office in a wooden hut, Snyder Paisano, one of the six forestry technicians that protect the 800,000 hectares of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, in the Honduran forest, lists his resources to fight illegal wood trafficking: two tables, two chairs, a motorboat with a broken engine and a computer with no batteries.
“I feel bad and I have expressed these feelings to my bosses,” says Paisano, a 35-year-old Miskito Indian born in Brus Laguna, in the northeast of Honduras.
A few days before, Honduras’s president, José Manuel Zelaya, had visited the town to inaugurate a canal. Paisano and the indigenous leaders had written a letter asking him for help to curb ecological destruction, but Zelaya left a little after posing for reporters from the capital, and they could never give him the letter.
Paisano and the indigenous leaders say that, in the past four years, they have impotently seen the flourishing of illegal mahogany and drug trafficking, which is using up Central America’s largest tropical forest reserve, recognized by Unesco as a World Heritage site and where more than 40,000 indigenous people live.
Although last year Zelaya’s new administration sent 100 militaries to the reserve to help in control tasks, the institutional presence is insufficient, they say.
“Here is only me and four militaries, who do cooperate, but not much,” Paisano says.
Ever since 1996, Unesco has had the biosphere reserve in their list of “endangered” sites. A 1999 study, requested by Honduras’s Congress, indicated that the Buffer Zone of 200,000 hectares, which surrounds and protects the Nucleus Zone, where human presence is not allowed because the most valuable species live there, was completely logged and burned.
Delbert Bendles, one of the Miskito leaders that wrote Zelaya, asserts that illegal loggers have accessed the Nucleus Zone, “They access through everywhere, even the nucleus, it’s a constant coming and going.”
Das Gevrson, the forestry technician of Palacios, a town near Brus Laguna that borders the Sico-Paulaya valley, one of the main wood trafficking routes, remembers that, when he came to that office last year, there were “a guard and a cleaning lady.” “Since there was no one here, people used to cut without caring for anything,” he explains.
Gerson says that the reserve’s situation “is critical,” but what he can do is very little. In a region where renting a small plane to overfly the forest costs around $150 an hour, the technician has a budget of about $50 a month, which many times is not even enough to pay for food during an inspection.
“Wherever I go, I owe an awful lot of money,” he says. “I get to a community and, since I don’t have money to eat, I have to come back because people there don’t know me so they won’t sell on credit.”
Enrique Flores, the presidential advisor, says that, in the past two years, the government has assigned $5.3 million annually to protect the forests, “one of our priorities,” but the environmental prosecutors say that they also suffer a lack of resources, with the aggravation of having to have an escort during the inspections since they are threatened by wood traffickers.
Prosecutors are shot at
Environmental prosecutor Aldo Santos says that he has only six prosecutors to fight illegal logging and other crimes in a country where half the lands are forests (around 6 million hectares).
“Illegal loggers have satellite phones, we have radios that can barely cover 10 kilometers and, from time to time, there’s not even coverage,” explains the prosecutor, who says his employees have been shot at by wood traffickers.
Santos says that corruption in the police force and the forestry agency Cohdefor, created in the 70s to regulate the forests’ exploitation, has worsen the deforestation problem in the reserve, allowing the cutting of three times the annual mahogany volume authorized by the government (15,000 m3).
A large number of Cohdefor’s employees have been prosecuted for environmental crimes, for illegally favoring logging companies and other irregularities.
“During my term, three Cohdefor’s managers were prosecuted for irregularities of all types,” says Clarissa Vega, environmental prosecutor from 1994 through 2003.
Fito Steiner, president of the Pico Bonito Foundation, an environmental NGO, explains that policemen’s and forestry agents’ low salaries — about $260 and $450 respectively — and the difficulties of the job make them an easy prey for bribes or “mordidas.”
“Most of them do it out of necessity, to be able to eat. People that give them 50,000 lempiras ($3,200), that’s the problem,” Steiner says.
Members of the reserve cooperatives, who are allowed by the government to harvest mahogany, say that they are afraid of reporting illegal loggers to the authorities because they do not trust the authorities. Adan Ramos, president of one of the Sico-Paulaya valley cooperatives, says that four people have been murdered in that region in the last three years for reporting illegal logging. “One of them went to report it to Cohdefor and, when he was on his way back home, he was killed,” he says.
Helmut Dotzauer, director of a German project that helps the Honduran government with the reserve’s conservation, with an annual budget of around $2.7 million, says that the Nucleus Zone is “virtually intact” and that annual deforestation in the Buffer and Cultural Zones has decreased from about 5,000 hectares when the project began in 1997 to less than 3,000 hectares in recent years, “but illegal logging is a problem we haven’t been able to solve.”
Accused American companies
A large part of the mahogany illegally logged in Honduras is exported to the United States, so environmental groups point to large American furniture companies as the ones most responsible for the ecological disaster.
Last November, the Office of the Environmental Prosecutor confiscated more than 80 m3 of illegal mahogany (with a value over $94,000) in the facilities of Millworks International, one of the two main mahogany exporters to the United States, in San Pedro Sula.
The Marvin Windows & Doors company in Minnesota, which owns Millworks International, said in a release that the company had not broken the law because none of its employees authorized the mahogany delivery. The Minnesota company says that they have witnessed “many attempts by suppliers to falsify documents” in Honduras and have requested the United States Embassy to assist them in identifying illegal sellers.
An Office of the Environmental Prosecutor’s employee, who asked not to be identified, says that some export companies know that they are buying illegal wood, since some studies estimate that up to 85 percent of the mahogany sold in the Honduran market is illegal.
“I’ve seen mahogany shipments arrive at their facilities and, with their industrial capacity, they quickly turn them into furniture,” the employee said.
Although the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) requires that mahogany be exported with a special permit that guarantees its legal and sustainable harvesting, this permit is required only for sawed wood, not for furniture. Companies selling mahogany in the United States export doors, windows and furniture. A mahogany door can cost more than $3,000 in the American market.
Merardo Caballero, who coordinates a Rainforest Alliance program seeking to find a market in the United States for the product of the 12 cooperatives of the reserve, says that Millworks International does not want to buy mahogany from them “because they buy it from ‘coyotes.’” Caballero said that, since it is illegal, a large part of the wood provided by coyotes or middlemen “is cheaper.”
Ricardo Wood, a member of the Brus Laguna indigenous cooperative, explains that, since illegal wood saturates the market, they usually get $1.5 for half a cubic meter of mahogany because traffickers sell it for 50 cents.
Paisano, who has tried to help this cooperative, is pessimistic about its future, not only because of the “meager prices” but also because he estimates that, in 15 years, “maybe less, there won’t be any mahogany to log.”
INFO-BOX
Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve
The Río Plátano Man and the Biosphere Reserve was created in 1980 and occupies 832,000 hectares in the northwest of Honduras (7 percent of its territory). In 1982 it was recognized by Unesco as a World Heritage site, and since 1996 this institution has kept it in the “endangered” sites list due to the degradation caused by deforestation and illegal logging of precious woods. More than 40,000 indigenous people live in this area, some of whom have been there for more than four decades, but most of them do not have property deeds, which makes them especially vulnerable to degradation. The reserve is home to species like jaguars, pumas and macaws.
More from this Reporter
- Video: Bosques de Honduras en guerra (War in the Honduran forests)
- War in the Honduran forests (English version)
- Guerra en los bosques de Honduras
- Traficantes amenazan selva de Honduras