ENVIRONMENT-MEXICO: From Prison to Awards Ceremony for Indigenous Activist

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Apr 19 2005 (IPS) - In the past two years, Isidro Baldenegro, an indigenous activist from Mexico, went from prison and death threats to posh hotels and award ceremonies.

On Monday, he received the Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the “Nobel prize for the environment”. “I can’t believe what has happened to me, but this has all been a learning experience that will help me continue the struggle,” he told IPS from San Francisco, California in a telephone interview.

Baldenegro, 38, said the award, which brings a cash prize of 125,000 dollars, is “an enormous support on a personal level, but above all is a huge boost to help the community to continue pressing on.”

The activist, a member of the Tarahumara ethnic group (who call themselves Rarámuri), taught himself to read and write, and has been fighting the destruction of the forests in the mountains of the northern state of Chihuahua by illegal loggers from a young age.

He said that now the loggers “will surely feel they have an enemy with more power.”

Just when he was enjoying some success in blocking logging operations around his local community of Coloradas de la Virgen, Baldenegro was arrested in March 2003 on what leading international environmental and human rights groups termed “trumped-up” drugs and weapons charges.

From prison, he told IPS soon after his arrest that the entire case against him was a fabrication put together by his enemies.

After a broad international campaign in which environmental and human rights organisations declared him a “prisoner of conscience” and denounced irregularities, he was released in June 2004.

“I never thought I would live these kinds of experiences,” said Baldenegro. “Everything has happened so fast, but it has been good in the end – and they have even brought me to the best hotel in San Francisco.”

He said that with part of the prize money he would open a small office where the local campesinos (peasant farmers) of the rural district of Coloradas de la Virgen, a 50,000-hectare area in Chihuahua, can meet to plan their anti-logging activities.

The money will also be used to create “some means of income for my community, which is poor and disadvantaged,” he added.

The Goldman Prize is awarded annually to grassroots environmental activists from Africa, Asia, Europe, island nations, North America, and South and Central America.

The North America prize went to Baldenegro this year, while the South and Central America award was received by Honduran priest José Andrés Tamayo, the head of the Environmental Movement of Olancho, a group that practices subsistence farming and also fights logging.

For the island nations, the winner was agronomist Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the founder of the Peasant Movement of Papay in Haiti, a network of people dedicated to sustainable agriculture and organic farming.

Botanist Corneille Ewango of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took the prize for Africa for his work protecting endangered species of animals and plants in the Okapi Faunal Reserve during a time of civil war.

In Asia the prize went to Kaisha Atakhanova, a biologist who specialises in the genetic effects of nuclear radiation and led a successful campaign against the import of nuclear waste into her country, Kazakhstan.

And in Europe, the Nobel prize for the environment was awarded to Stephanie Roth, the former editor of the magazine The Ecologist, for her work organising an international campaign to block the opening of a gold mine in Romania.

“It is an honour that they considered me for this global prize. This represents a huge responsibility for continuing to forge ahead with the struggle,” said Baldenegro.

He is the third Mexican to receive the Goldman Prize. In 2000 it was awarded to Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera of the Organisation of Campesino Environmentalists of the Sierra de Petatlán and Coyuca de Catalán in the western Mexican state of Guerrero.

Montiel and Cabrera also spent time in prison on fabricated charges, as a result of their activism in defence of the forests.

Baldenegro was arrested after police planted evidence against him on orders from unidentified individuals, who the indigenous activist referred to as “the logging mafias.”

The activist, one of the leaders of his community, said he was framed and thrown into prison because of his work against the destruction of the surrounding forests by colonists.

His father, Julio Baldenegro, also a community leader, was shot and killed by a sniper in 1986. His murder was never solved.

In the violence and harassment to which the Baldenegro family has been subjected, testimony from several sources point to Artemio Fontes, whose family has led the Coloradas de la Virgen community for years, and has won authorisation for the extraction of lumber in community assemblies.

According to investigations, the groups involved in logging operations in the mountains of Chihuahua have ties to drug traffickers.

The state is on the border with the United States, the world’s largest market for drugs.

In Chihuahua, 4.5 percent of the population, or 150,000 people, belong to indigenous groups, mainly the Tarahumara (Rarámuri), the vast majority of whom live in poverty or extreme poverty.

In addition, 50 percent of the state’s indigenous inhabitants are illiterate, compared to an overall illiteracy rate of just six percent for the entire state, while nearly 65 percent of indigenous adults over 15 have no formal schooling, and 46 percent of children between the ages of six and 14 do not attend school.