Mexico’s Prophets of Climate Change: Women Forest Defenders

“Celsa Valdovinos knew there was a serious problem when only about an inch of water trickled from the irrigation hose. In the mountains of southern Guerrero state where Valdovinos and her husband Felipe Arreaga lived during the 1990s, the small farmers were becoming increasingly alarmed about water supplies. “This was in January and by the next year it was gone,” Valdovinos recalls. As the rainfall diminished so did the prospects of the mountain residents. Animals died, crops withered, and the social fabric unraveled.

Valdovinos and her neighbors connected the environmental changes they were witnessing to deforestation. More and more forest cover was disappearing every year as farmers burned hillsides for corn patches and pastures, drug growers torched forest cover to plant their illicit crops, and contractors felled trees for a Boise Cascade Corporation mill that operated on the Pacific Coast at the time.

Long before climate change became a trendy cause, the Campesino Environmentalist Organization of the Sierra of Petatlan and Coyuca de Catatlan (OCESP), emerged as a grassroots group dedicated to saving Guerrero’s forests. Soon, however, the movement faced repression from loggers and the Mexican army. In 2001, jailed OCESP leader Rodolfo Montiel and his friend Teodoro Cabrera were released by Mexican President Vicente Fox after an international campaign was waged on their behalf by environmentalists and human rights activists. Mikhail Gorbachev and Hillary Rodham Clinton were among world leaders who raised their voices for Montiel and Cabrera.”

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