Latin America's Surprising New Eco-Warriors

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

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.

Critics of that Catholic activism, including Pope John Paul II, feared that some in the clergy were flirting with godless Marxism. Rome assigned an enforcer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to rein in what it saw as renegade priests and bishops. Ratzinger's policy helped derail the movement and gave his career a solid boost. In 2005, the Roman Catholic Church elected him its Supreme Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI.

Logging is big business near Olancho, Honduras, above, and efforts to fight destructive practices there have been met with violence. Since 1998, six environmentalists have been killed, and Father Andrés Tamayo, below, must now travel with armed bodyguards.

Today both Guatemala and Honduras are embroiled in particularly contentious struggles over resources. I arrive in the spring, during the otherworldly ceremonies of Semana Santa -- Holy Week -- and just ahead of Benedict's highly publicized visit to Brazil, his first as pope to this part of the world. Drumbeats echo from village walls and tangy incense clouds the streets, along with an air of danger and possibility.

I've been in the region two weeks and traveled more than 1,500 miles on rough and scary roads by the time I visit Tamayo. A confession he makes confirms my impression that the stakes are high in this place where fragile economies and ecologies intertwine.

Tamayo, 51, is short and wide-shouldered and reminds me of the images of Mayan warriors chiseled into vine-covered temples. Yet his hands tremble as he speaks. "Sometimes I get so scared I can't think at all," he says. "I get paralyzed. I just wait for death to come."

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Preparing for this trip, I consulted an old friend, a former priest who had lived for years in Mexico and now works at a parish in North Philadelphia. He sent me essays by American poet and farmer Wendell Berry.

In one, Berry contrasts the disembodied "rational mind" of industry and economy with a "sympathetic mind" that is moved by "affection for its home place, the local topography, the local memories, and the local creatures." The sympathetic mind believes that "landscapes should not be used by people who do not live in them and share their fate."

Central Americans have always mined and logged. Mayans adorned themselves in gold and silver jewelry and used the precious metals to decorate their temples. For centuries, though, foreigners have seen the region's resources as booty. "Our wealth," Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galleano writes, "has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."

The transnational companies that now have a corner on Central American timber and metals -- most of them from Canada and the United States -- are part of a lineage dating back to the 16th century, when conquistadors began sending ships loaded with New World gold and silver back to Spain's Catholic rulers to fund the Inquisition.

Today a new breed of clergy is more inclined to side with people like Quintin Miranda, a shopkeeper I met in western Honduras. Miranda had the good fortune to grow up in the lovely highland town of San Andrés.

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