Missing the Forest for the Trees
The bus trip to Guarayos was full of sounds that I remembered: the cacophonic sing-song of “cunapé caliente” at the bridge over the Rio Grande, where women take advantage of the logjam of trucks and buses to hawk their famous gooey yucca pastries. The bridge was built in the 1950s by USAID as a railroad trestle over the river. It is now shared by trains and traffic. Because the bridge is still only one lane, everyone has to take turns. Long turns, given that the bridge is a mile long. The wait can be five minutes or two hours.
When we finally started rolling, the calls for cunapés faded under the clankety-clank-clank-boom as we roll over wood planks; boards are laid between the rails for truck and bus tires. They are temporary and wobbly. The bridge is a terror; it strains to support the economic flow of the main artery of the agricultural heartland of Santa Cruz: cattle, soy, rice, and wood travel from the north day and night. Then a surprise to my right: a new bridge under construction.
A man gets stands up and hawks a miracle cure-all for diabetes, gout and stomach aches. A child laughs, then bawls. The bus grinds along.
After about three hours, the dry flat plain breaks into the rolling hills of Guarayos. Sunflower fields become cattle pasture, peppered with palm trees. We make a few stops; in Yotau the children call out “aceite de cusi!” and wave bottles of the local palm oil at the passengers. They sell well: the oil is supposed to make thick hair supple and shiny.
As the sun falls into the horizon, swollen and red, we arrive in Ascension de Guarayos, the provincial capital. I try not to spend too much time in Ascension. I visit a few friends, hug the families that adopted me when I was there as a volunteer, buy a bicycle and climb on the next bus to Urubichá. Formerly a sleepy village on a dirt road, Ascension has become a filthy, loud highway town. Karaoke machines blast out of chicken joints. Drunks stumble along the road into teenage whorehouses. Motorcycles whine, trucks roar. And the sawmills scream all night as they turn the trees into dust and money.
Ten years ago, Guarayos was 95% forest. Now, forest cover is about 70% and declining rapidly. The agricultural frontier is chasing the forest away: Russians, Mennonites and Brazilians are flocking to the region to rent or buy land, deforest it and satisfy the global demand for soy and rice. (Land is cheap because corrupt indigenous leaders are selling it under the table.) The global maw is also chewing wood. When I arrived in Guarayos in 2002, there were four sawmills. The machinery was rickety and old, held together with paper clips and spit. Now there are nineteen well equipped sawmills running twenty four hours a day.
It was a shocking transformation since last year. Everywhere people are cutting down mahogany trees and selling them for a pittance. I heard prices as low as $7 per tree (a legal sale would be $300-$500 per tree, depending on the size). Logging trucks rumble through Urubichá all day. In Salvatierra, where motorized vehicles were a rarity– the whine of a motorcycle would bring kids running out of their houses to see it – I was startled almost every night by logging trucks passing through the village.
There had always been some illegal logging in Guarayos, but a fabric of control had been holding most of it back. That fabric had ripped in only a year. What happened? When I was Guarayos this past week, I asked many people. The communities blame the small-time illegal loggers, called pirateros or pirates. “They come into the communities and take advantage of poor people.”
The pirates say the big logging companies are at fault: “We get all of the blame, but the big companies are the ones who are really stealing all of the mahogany because they have the money to take it out fast, and hide it behind legal logging. They are making money; why can’t we?”
Others blame the government forestry agency: “When we go there to ask for their help, they tell us that we have to pay to fill the gas tanks in their trucks and find people to help them. Are we supposed to do their job for them?”
Some point fingers at the development agencies who financed community forestry projects: “They built logging roads and trained people how to cut down trees. Then they abandoned the projects. They set the stage for illegal logging.”
Everyone blames the law: “Legal logging is bureaucratic and expensive. It requires thousands of dollars just to get a forestry engineer to write a forest management plan. Who can afford that?”
These are all problems that have been mounting. But the underlying force that is catalyzing the illegal logging is a wrenching transition in the local economy from subsistence to consumer. This transition was catalyzed when electricity came to Urubichá in 2004 (Urubichá is the closest town to Salvatierra). With electricity came TVs. And all the other stuff that you can buy if you have electricity. People wanted that stuff. They wanted it immediately. How to pay for the stuff? How to pay the electricity bills? With few jobs and little industry in the region, the only way to get money fast was to sell their trees. And once a few people started -- and no one stopped them -- everyone else did too.
Salvatierra is twenty kilometers past Urubichá, at the end of the road. Salvatierra doesn’t have electricity, but the stuff cycle is spinning there too. A year ago everyone traveled by bicycle in Salvatierra. Then the first motorcycle appeared (one of the corrupt leaders of the forest management plan used the community’s money to buy a moto for himself). So everybody else wanted a motorcycle too. People don’t make much money in Salvatierra; it is mostly a subsistence economy. So the only thing to do was to sell the only thing of value: the mahogany. On the black market. For a fraction of the legal price.
The same thing is happening all over Guarayos. Trees are turning into motorcycles.
Obviously people should be able to choose how they make a living and what they do with their money. But the money won't last long, and it is being wasted on cheap consumer goods. Josefina told me a story about an elderly woman in Salvatierra who passed away a month ago. The sawmill in Urubichá was so busy cutting mahogany that it wouldn’t stop to cut the cheaper wood used for coffins (ochoo). Her family had to bury her in an old hammock. “It was shameful. People are too busy thinking about making money. What are they going to do when the mahogany is gone in a couple of years? They will be just as poor as they were before. They’ll have nothing. They won’t even have any wood left for chairs to sit on.”
