Copyright © 1999 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

Chiapas, Mexico - In the last five and a half years, since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, various reports in the national press have spoken of important petroleum reserves in the Lacandon Jungle. This contradicts the scanty reports from Pemex and certain North American geological exploratory institutions which recognize the presence of oil in the Mayan Jungle (Chiapas, Guatemala, and Belize) but in very low quantities. However, numerous sources and data point to the existence of gigantic, perhaps super-gigantic, oil deposits in that area.

Clarifying this point is essential because of the way in which the much-desired privatization of Mexican oil fields implies the violent expulsion of tens of thousands of indigenous campesinos from their land. The privatization of Pemex, partially administered, but secretly and systematically promoted by the federal government, and openly offered to world capital by Vicente Fox and Roberto Madrazo (Financial Times, August 9, 1999), implies not just pawning the main source of wealth and national sovereignty to foreign buyers, but also the violent expulsion of Mexicans who live on top of oil strata.

In some documents, Pemex recognizes two vast and important petroleum regions (Ocosingo and Marques de Comillas), although their persistent search in Prospecto San Fernando (located near Yaxchilan and Bonampak) also stands out. This should be seen in view of the accurate predictions made between 1953 and 1986 by Pemex prospecting brigades along the numerous anticlines and faults in the north, center and south of the Lacandon Jungle. Corresponding with that information, or adding new information to them, are reports from the Oil and Gas Journal, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the General Accounting Office, as well as those of George Baker. Equally interesting is a working paper by Ecosur, geared towards promoting the private and tri-national management of the Usumacinta River basin, as documented in their map entitled "Project Salinas," in which seven enormous oil deposits are described with precision, though they do not always coincide with preceding reports. To all of this must be added the numerous testimonies of campesinos who have worked directly for the foreign exploration companies, as well as the intense exploration and development activity carried out by transnational companies during the last 20 years on the Guatemalan-Mexican border.

A map of all these petroleum areas would show how hundreds of indigenous communities of the jungle and numerous autonomous municipalities are located on top of, or very close to, these oil deposits or new wells. But the Amador Valley, located to the north of Miramar lake, is exemplary not just because of its oil. For the CFE, it is also one of the 74 points in the state of Chiapas in which new privatizable hydroelectric dams could be built, while for Semarnap it is one of the entry ways into the strategic Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, curiously administered by Conservation International, which today is also enthusiastically promoting world-wide privatization of protected natural areas.

While the pre-candidates of the official party devour each other with mutual tenacity, and Vicente Fox applies himself to the cosmetic cover-up of his uncomfortable proposals to sell off the deposits and/or Pemex, the current military operation in the jungle has been unfolding (La Jornada, Juan Balboa, August 15, 1999). Besides protecting the future privatization of the deposits and punishing the EZLN for the solidarity it is offering to various social struggles in the nation, the military offensive is designed to open up a new political crisis which momentarily diverts attention from the serious fracture threatening the PRI today. It could function to bring Secretaries of State (and the national and transnational interest groups that accompany them) to the negotiating table, around the spaces of oil mining and preservation of bio-diversity in the jungle. The unjustified new military occupation of the north and northeast of the jungle, as well as of Montes Azules, destined to open multiple highways crossing the last intact sector of our bio-diversity, could well serve Pemex (and all the oil companies that could come behind it) to renegotiate with Semarnap on the mining of deposits still unknown in the 80's, when the current boundaries of protected areas and the terms of oil-related activity were established with Sedue. The problem rests on the fact that anti-ecological oil mining--analogous to the Chiapan cattle ranchers of five years ago--corresponds to one technical pattern and an aggressive sector of world capital in frank decline, while bio-diversity (related to genetic engineering) represents the vanguard and future of world capital.

It is a complex mosaic of geo-economic and strategic political interests, which although they conflict with each other, would seem to coincide at the moment of requiring the expulsion of the indigenous population. Will civil society permit this new military and oil-based aggression against these communities and the jungle?