Electronic Version, All Stories Copyrighted. Feel free to copy this or reprint articles, but please inform me if you do so. This magazine is aimed at conscientious travelers who are interested in Latin America. Most of its stories feature environmental issues. I welcome your feedback, suggestions and literary contributions. Ron Mader, Publisher. (RonMader@aol.com and Ron@txinfinet.com)
El Planeta Platica
Keeping the Amazon Green
Volume 1, Number 1
(Debut Issue!) Winter 1994
Electronic Version, All Stories Copyrighted 1995. I am slowly becoming accustomed to the idea of preparing both an electronic and paper version of this small newsletter. It fills a relatively lonely niche in the English language by providing environmental and enviro tourism information regarding Latin America.
Feel free to copy this edition or reprint articles, but please inform me if you do so. I welcome your feedback, suggestions and literary contributions. Ron Mader, Publisher. (RonMader@aol.com and ron@txinfinet.com)
El Planeta Platica (The Earth Speaks) is brought to you from those globally-minded folks at Talking Planet in Austin, Texas. This newsletter is printed quarterly, bringing environmental information to travelers heading to Latin America.
Online, the newsletter is accessible at the web site http://www.txinfinet.com/mader/ecotravel/ecotravel.html.
Please support this effort at improving our hemispheric dialogue. Annual subscriptions are just $10. Planeta supporters contribute $25. Your literary contributions are welcome and rewarded. Want to advertise your connection to Latin America? Join a select and cherished club. Please ask for our rate sheet.
Everyday brings us closer together - whether we're ready for it or not. Let's crank up the North-South dialogue here on Turtle Island.
Ron Mader, Publisher
El Planeta Platica
P.O. Box 1044
Austin, TX 78767
E-mail: ron@txinfinet.com and RonMader@aol.com
Note: Mader also moderates the Mexico/Latin America conferences on Texas InfiNet, an Austin-based BBS which can be reached via telnet at 204.96.111.157 3000.
Electronic Index
Bridges and Borders: Editorial
Keeping the Amazon Green
Pusanga: Making the Forest a Home
Resource List for Amazonian Organizations
La Olla Latinoamericana: Plantains For Any Occasion
Dangerous Coffee
What Price Java
Traveling South?
Poetry
Resources
bridges and borders: Won't NAFTA Solve Everything?
by Ron Mader
In Mexico last year I had the opportunity to experience the NAFTA hysteria first hand. At The News, an English-language daily newspaper, we joked that if there were a NAFTA poll taken of the White House custodial staff, it would be on the front page of every D.F. (Federal District) daily.
NAFTA has always been more important for Mexico than to the United States, and it was instructive to learn how bored the U.S. public was about the topic. In the summer of 1993, less than half the adult U.S. population could define NAFTA. It was prone to sound bites and heavy-handed rhetoric. One could hear the channel grazers click rapidly in response.
This is a shame because there were no clear answers in the discussion, and the "debate" between Perot and Gore was as informative as a latenight infomercial.
What needs to be brought up are the questions that presently don't have answers. What will happen to traditional Mexican agriculture? Will border residents have more to say about the state of their immediate environment?
"Won't NAFTA solve everything?" is a question which is simply off base. The agreement exacerbates tensions just as surely as it may provide some solutions. The Chiapas uprising is a clear example of how much people fear what NAFTA will do to their home territories.
The 1990s promise to be a decade of hemispheric integration. This does not solely take place in the economic sphere. No animal less a duck has come to symbolize transnational migration. Also, remember that computer communication is on the upswing, especially in countries where the mail service is "iffy."
Ready to travel south? Take our best wishes and as the proverb says, Vaya con Dios.
Keeping the Amazon Green
By Ron Mader
With apologies to a certain British travel writer, "the Amazon is in trouble again."
New roads are forging ahead into virgin rainforests, the destruction of which is subsidized by governments keen on boosting oil production and oil exports. Indigenous people are being attacked or lured into the cities where they work as poorly paid servants. International companies are extracting plants for medicinal uses without compensating the inhabitants of these territories.
A movement toward sovereignty for indigenous peoples is on the rise throughout the Amazon basin. Careless extraction of oil deposits has led to a new sense of emergency. The Amazon's fragile environment has fueled Ecuador's economy since the oil boom began in the 1970s. After 1986 the government tried to compensate for lower oil prices by increasing the volume of oil exports.
Judith Kimmerling paints a disturbing portrait of how the petroleum companies have acted in Amazon Crude. Her book documents the wide range of effects drilling has produced, including respiratory and skin diseases.
Lawyers Byron Real and Marcela Enriquez, founders of the environmental law firm CORDAVI, have filed suit against the Ecuadorian government for not protecting Ecuadorians' quality of life.
The government has responded by vocally supporting the environment and indigenous people's human rights, but so far little has been carried out.
Interest in this area is growing, as well as the number of groups fighting for its survival. There are hundreds of groups in Ecuador alone, according to a document by the United Nations.
Unfortunately, this is not a good sign, because it shows that many people prefer to work alone. As long as the environmental movement remains bitterly divided, the government has reason to abandon the status quo.
Pusanga: Making the Forest a Home
In the town of Baûos, Ecuador, where the Amazon and the highlands Sierra meet, the air is tinged with a tropical humidity several hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean.
The nearby Amazon forest is present in this corridor, constantly breathing and infusing the village with life-giving air.
Backpackers and cyclists base their journeys into the forest here. And it's not uncommon to find Indians who have made their own journeys, by foot, canoe and light aircraft into the land of the mestizo.
Cooperative Pusanga is a collective effort to find a market for handmade ceramics of women who live and work in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
"There has to be a way to preserve traditions as well as the forests," said Pusanga member Elena Montefierro.
Ceramics are used for religious ceremonies as well as for cooking. Only women make the exquisite objects because the soils are high in salt peter
"It makes men dysfunctional," said Clara Cuji, who added that men are charged with making baskets and spears.
Pusanga also functions as a battered women's shelter, one of the few in the country
"Our neighbors don't know what to think," Montefierro said. "We're single, but we're not prostitutes. Helping abused women is a new concept here in Ecuador."
For more information on this group, contact them directly:
Pusanga
Casilla 1994
Baûos, Tungurahua
Ecuador.
Amazonian Organizations:
Contact the following organizations for more information on how you lend support to local efforts in protecting the Amazon:
Acciùn Ecologia
12 de Octubre 344
Quito, Ecuador
Centro de Investigacion de los Bosques Tropicales/ Rainforest Information Centre
Sucursal 17-21,
Apartado 841
Quito, Ecuador
FUNDESIN (Foundation for the Education and Development of Indigenous Communities)
Casilla 17-17-92
Quito, Ecuador
Fundacion Natura
Avenida America 5663
Quito, Ecuador
CONAIE (National Indigenous Conferation)
Cassila 92-C, Sucursal 15
El Batan
Quito, Ecuador
La Olla Latinoamericana: Plantains For Any Occasion
By Melissa Biggs
Patacones
(Fried Plantains)
3 plantains
vegetable oil
salt
Plantains are not your regular banana. They aren't sweet and they can't be eaten raw. With that in mind, chose plantains that have yellow skin, yet are firm to the touch.
Peel them - you might have to cut the stem end off to get the peel started. It's thick and tends to adhere to the fruit. Slice the plantain into rounds one-half to three-fourths of an inch thick
Pour three inches of vegetable oil into a skillet. Heat the oil over a medium flame until it sizzles. While the oil heats, fill a shallow pan with two of salted water.
Test the oil by dropping one of the plantains slices in. When it immediately sizzles, the oil is ready.
Fry the slices a few at a time, putting in enough to cover the bottom of the skillet without overlapping slices. Turn them when they brown around the edges. When the plantain are pale brown on both sides, remove them from the oil. Drain briefly on paper towels, then slide the cooked slices into the salted water
Let the plantains soak for a couple of minutes. Take them out of the water, dabbing off the excess. Using the back of a spoon, gently press the soaked slices until the edges burst!
Return the pressed slices to the oil, frying on both sides until they are a deep golden brown
With some practice, you can establish a rhythm; one batch coming out of the oil as another goes in. Don't skip the salt water soak - it keeps the slices from falling apart when you press them
After the second frying, drain the patacones well. Salt them to taste and serve. Eat them right away - they aren't very good cold.
Dangerous Coffee
By Ron Mader
Every year between November and April, untreated waste from coffee processing plants floods into Mexican rivers in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.
╥If the government wishes to step in and enforce the national water law, all of our state╒s coffee producers would have to go out of business,╙ explained Fernando Celis Callejas, spokesman for the National Coordination of Coffee Organizers (CNOC).
╥It╒s very simple,╙ he said. ╥The coffee industry is in a crisis because of the low international price. We don╒t have the financial resources to modernize our facilities.╙
Veracruz produces 40 percent of the nation╒s coffee supply. The state╒s humid climate does not accommodate the traditional method of drying coffee beans in the sun.
Instead, the beans are first crushed in a pulping machine and then fermented in tanks of river water. The liquid residue, called stillage, is then dumped back into the rivers.
For each kilogram of coffee produced, six-to-eight liters of stillage are created as a by-product.
╥Some of our rivers are biologically dead,╙ said biologist Eugenia Olguin, director of the Department of Environmental Biotechnology at the Institute of Ecology. ╥There╒s been a surge of agricultural industries in the last 30 years, and now the ecosystem is out of balance.╙
Olguin explained that the rivers are now overtaxed by the large amounts of organic material.
As a result, the seasonal wastes rob the rivers of their oxygen, leading to the suffocation of aquatic creatures. Fishermen complain that they have lost their livelihoods.
In October 1991, Mexico╒s secretariat in charge of environmental matters, Sedesol, launched the ╥Polluter Pays╙ principle. This established a fine for industries which discharge residual effluents into any body of water without meeting government standards.
╥The coffee industry could not be in a worse condition,╙ Celis said. ╥The cost has dropped to a quarter of its value four years ago. There are almost 300,000 coffee producers in Mexico and almost three million Mexicans who depend on this industry, but if the price does not rise, more producers will abandon their fields and more people will be unemployed.╙
Financial credits to coffee farmers have been paltry. According to the National Coordination of Coffee Organizers, the government╒s Solidarity program has given small coffee producers 322 dollars per hectare, while in the last six years, producers have lost 2,580 dollars per hectare.
╥Of course producers haven╒t used this money to modernize their facilities,╙ Celis said. ╥Farmers are using this money just to survive.
What Price Java? (Sidebar)
Coffee prices have been plummeting since 1989 when the international coffee cartel collapsed. Producers╒ losses have totaled approximately $10 billion. The price of coffee has fallen from $130 per quintal in 1989 to $50 per quintal in 1993. Subsequently, Mexico╒s harvest has dropped 30-35%.
On May 25, 1993, six Latin American coffee-producing countries approved the creation of the Latin American Coffee Organization (OLC). However, Mexico was not a signatory.
Mexico╒s coffee producers have to contend with lower prices as well as new competition from the United States. According to one research firm, since tariffs on coffee will be gradually eliminated, U.S. processors will be able to import coffee beans, process them, and export refined coffee to Mexico.
Worth noting is Jonathan Fox╒s article in the May 1992 edition of NACLA: Report on the Americas. Fox writes that peasant movements throughout Latin America are turning to autonomous rural organizations to articulate their demands for agrarian reform.
Traveling South?
If you're heading south this year, take along a membership card with the South American Explorer's Club (SAEC)
Based in Ithaca, New York, the Club has two clubhouses in South America, so if you're traveling to Ecuador or Peru, you'll have a home away from home.
What does the SAEC provide? Storage facilities for luggage, bikes or climbing equipment; member's travel guides to remote birding locations and environmentally-friendly outposts throughout Latin America, and, for all members, a subscription to their quarterly magazine.
The organization fills an important niche for travelers, academics and entrepreneurs alike. Plans are also in the works to expand to Mexico and Central America.
For more information, contact Don Montague at the South American Explorer's Club, 126 Indian Creek Road, Ithaca, NY 14850. (607) 277-0488.
Poetry
By Melissa Biggs
How they learn the truth
The astonishment of a chicken
Suddenly in our yard
Calls my city-born children out to inspect
A quick run
Through our urban garden -
Organic, of course,
but for the smog filled rain -
And it's off across the street
In an indignant protest of feathers
Leaving three startled sisters
To contemplate drumsticks
At dinner
House Poem
Dreaming domestications
Of polished floors
And gleaming dishes
Rather than everyday
Of undone laundry
And overflows of newspaper
If only
The rooms would order themselves
Instead of relying on
My inconsistent compass
Resources
Trouble with your shortwave? Listen to documentaries produced by Latin American radio stations on stereo cassette. Nota: All tapes are in Spanish.
Talking Planet
P.O. Box 1044
Austin, TX 78767-1044
Local News: Mexico Newspak synthesizes green news from Mexico every two weeks. For subscription info, write to the Documentation Exchange, P.O. Box 2327, Austin, TX 78768.
Books: Recent from Island Press: Trade and the Environment, The New Complete Guide to Environmental Careers and Faith in a Seed.
Name Change: Buzzworm magazine has changed its name to Earth Journal. Subscription information available at 1-800-825-0061.
Bargain: Copies of Eco Linking, a great eco-computer book are available for $3 at the Book Warehouse in the San Marcos outlet center.
Copyright 1995. El Planeta Platica, Volume 1, Number 1, published by RonMader@aol.com and ron@txinfinet.com.
