Latin America's Surprising New Eco-Warriors

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from Sierra Mag., via AlterNet:


Latin America's Surprising New Eco-Warriors

By Marilyn Berlin Snell, Sierra Magazine. Posted August 29, 2007.


As North American companies raze the forests and mountains in Latin America, defense for the land is coming from an unlikely place.


I hear Father Jose Andres Tamayo Cortez before I meet him, his voice crackling over a public-address system, warning a young groom that in the 21st century it is not OK to come home drunk and abuse his new wife. It's a steamy day, and the small cinder block church is packed with wedding-goers. Women fan themselves. Babies wriggle and fuss. The priest's camouflage-clad bodyguards stand at the chapel door and windows, their M-16s pointed at the dirt.

I've traveled to Olancho, a lawless logging region known as the Texas of Honduras, because Tamayo has an international reputation for standing up to the logging interests, legal and illegal, that have been chainsawing their way through mountains rich in pine and tropical hardwoods. He and a growing number of Catholic clergy throughout Latin America have come to see protection of the land and water as God's work, their duty to the region's 500 million Catholics.

Although few North Americans seem to have noticed it yet, in the past few years a "liberation ecology" movement, with the church at its spiritual heart, has been taking shape from Chile to Mexico. Will the Vatican, I wonder, encourage or stifle it? Latin American Catholics have, after all, taken on what they saw as forces of injustice before.

The liberation theology movement that began to gain strength in the 1970s sided with the poor during a time when military regimes, supported by the region's oligarchs, ruthlessly suppressed social reform -- killing more than 200,000 people in Guatemala alone, most of them indigenous. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/61019/

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