Environmental Movements

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Environmental Movements

During the 1980s environmental matters gained strong currency in Latin America, especially with the proliferation of democracies throughout the region. By the 1990s nongovernmental environmental organizations numbered in the thousands. Some had their beginnings in the late 1960s or early 1970s, but most appeared in the 1980s.

Beginning in the 1980s, Latin American environmental issues were usually related to development, whether the subject be deforestation, industrial pollution, sanitation, transportation, indigenous populations, public education, or animal rights. Poverty itself was considered a major environmental concern, since the poor placed serious strains on natural resources for their livelihood in the absence of more environmentally sound alternatives. In short, environmental issues had strong political and economic implications and thus provoked much controversy.

The United Nations chose to hold its second major international conference on development and the environment in a Latin American setting (Rio de Janeiro) in 1992. (The first conference had taken place in Stockholm in 1972.) One objective of the 1992 conference was to establish a financial mechanism for industrialized nations to aid Third World environmental programs. It was suggested that developed countries should pay an "ecological debt" to Latin American nations and transfer pollution control technologies without charge. More than 178 governments adopted Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of Principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests at the 1992 UN conference. The commitment to Agenda 21 and the accompanying Rio documents was reasserted at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, in Latin America, support and implementation of Agenda 21 by national governments, NGOs, and social movements have been uneven due to priorities other than sustainable development, such as alleviating poverty and achieving political stability.

Most international attention to Latin America's environmental problems tended to focus on global warming as it related to the destruction of tropical forests, especially in the Amazon and Central America. Brazil received much adverse attention in late 1988 when Chico Mendes Filho, an Amazon rubber tapper and political activist, was murdered at the behest of a local rancher. Mendes's political success in the Brazilian Congress had resulted in legislation rendering the rancher's property worthless, so Mendes Filho was killed in revenge.

Tropical forests, however, had always been relatively underpopulated. A far greater number of Latin Americans were adversely affected by urban pollution problems, especially deficient sewage treatment (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and smog (Mexico City and Santiago, Chile).

While Latin America's environmental problems remained widespread and serious in the mid-1990s, progress was being made on some fronts. For instance, Cubatão, the Brazilian city once called the most polluted site on earth, reduced petrochemical and fertilizer pollutants to a fraction of their former levels with the assistance of a World Bank loan. The health indicators for the city's inhabitants improved dramatically, and lush vegetation reappeared in once-decimated areas.

Green Politics

The importance of environmental issues in Latin American politics was undeniable by the late 1980s. In Mexico, for example, President Carlos Salinas De Gortari chose to seize the environmental initiative and pursue "preemptive reforms" rather than wait for grassroots mobilization and pressures. Salinas declared the health of the Mexican people to be a greater priority of his administration than development. His words were followed with substantive actions: $2.5 billion was budgeted to improve Mexico City's air quality, a major petroleum refinery operated by Pemex (Mexico's state-owned oil company) was closed, unleaded gasoline was introduced, and 3,500 city buses were replaced. As a result, Salinas was awarded the United Nations-backed United Earth Association award in 1991, a move applauded by many of Mexico's environmental groups.

Meanwhile, the intensity of international attention to the Amazon provoked a political backlash. In 1990 the state of Amazonas readily elected a governor whose platform was blatantly anti-environment; he had declared that since there were no healthy trees in the Amazon, people should use them up before the termites did. Subsequently, some military officers and conservative civilian politicians accused international environmentalists of threatening Brazil's national sovereignty and security.

While some Latin American countries had "green" political parties by the 1990s, they were relatively small and their political impact limited. Most were not formally linked to the European-based international Green Party movement.

The State and the Environment

Cabinetlevel environment posts (either ministries or secretariats) were created in many but not all Latin American countries in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were notably lacking in Central America, except for Guatemala. Some of the agencies were exclusively environmental ministries (Brazil and Argentina) while others combined environmental matters with such development-related areas as natural resources (Venezuela and Colombia) or urban planning and development (Uruguay and Mexico). Often, these new entities represented an upgrading of earlier, less powerful government agencies with environmental mandates.

Environmental legislation varied markedly throughout the region in the early 1990s. Some countries had fairly comprehensive laws and policies, while others lacked them almost totally. Even where such measures existed on paper, implementation and enforcement were difficult or sometimes even impossible; frequently the measures were simply ignored.

Debt-for-Nature Swaps

In the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American governments contracted foreign public and private loans for development projects. When the world's economy entered recession in the early 1980s, these loans quickly became unserviceable. Several contentious years of debt negotiations followed, but by the late 1980s more creative approaches to the problem had emerged. One such idea was the debt swap, whereby a country's debt paper could be purchased at a fraction of its original worth on secondary markets and then utilized in that country for approved projects, including those related to the environment. Projects for such swaps were further encouraged in the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative of 1990, promoted by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. It was difficult, though, for environmental groups to raise substantial amounts of capital for such undertakings. Nevertheless, a few debt-for-nature swaps have occurred, most notably in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica.

In the early 1990s, debt-for-nature initiatives included a project by Argentina's National Development Bank for natural grassland and forest preservation in the ecologically sensitive Patagonia region. There was also a swap proposal from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration to create a trust fund that could be tapped by Central American environmental organizations and university groups. In general, debt-for-nature initiatives have been looked upon favorably by conservation groups and debtor governments. In October of 2006, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy arranged a landmark $24 million debt-for-nature swap between the governments of the United States and Guatemala. Earmarked for protecting threatened Guatemalan tropical forests and stimulating economic activity, this is the largest swap of its kind to date.

Debt swaps, however, can be politically sensitive issues. Mexico refused to participate in debt swaps instigated by third parties because it was unwilling to cede national territory and sovereignty to such ventures. Instead, it invented a variation on the debt swap theme by contracting a loan from the World Bank to purchase its own debt. This in turn created a $150 million fund for reforesting 173,000 acres of Mexico City with 200 million trees. In Brazil, the Collor administration reversed the policy of its predecessor and accepted debt-for-nature swaps in principle. This added to the criticism within Brazil that the country was losing control over the Amazon.

Development Versus the Environment

At the root of many Latin American environmental issues in the early 1990s were government development policies and objectives. Past development strategies of the 1960s and 1970s were often identified as the source of many of the most serious environmental problems of the 1980s and 1990s. By the 1990s new development projects were more likely to be scrutinized and criticized, often under the concept of sustainable development. Ecuador and Guatemala, for example, faced serious choices between opening new areas to petroleum production or forgoing same in favor of conserving the biologically diverse and unique areas involved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The environmental movement in Latin America is just beginning to receive systematic scholarly attention, and sources remain scarce. Two of the few monographs covering the region as a whole are David A. Preston, ed., Environment, Society, and Rural Change in Latin America: The Past, Present, and Future in the Countryside (1980), and David Goodman and Michael Redclift, eds., Environment and Development in Latin America: The Politics of Sustainability (1991). Another recent scholarly effort to survey the Latin American environmental movement is the entire issue of Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 1, issue 72 (1992). Latin America often receives attention in works with broader, global themes, such as the UN World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987). Articles with regionwide foci include Eduardo Gudynas, "Environment and Sustainable Development in Latin America: The Challenge to Recover 'El Dorado,'" in International Transnational Associations 4 (1989): 197-199, and Scott White-ford, David Wiley, and Kenneth Wylie, "In the Name of Development: Transforming the Environment in Africa and Latin America" in Centennial Review 35, no. 2 (1991): 205-219. Other articles often focus on a specific country or theme, such as Stephen P. Mumme, "System Maintenance and Environmental Reform in Mexico: Salinas's Preemptive Strategy," in Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 1, issue 72 (1992): 123-143. An indispensable source for updated information on environment-related developments throughout the world, usually organized on a country basis, is the Bureau of National Affairs's biweekly International Environment Reporter: Current Reports.

Additional Bibliography

Deere, Carolyn L., and Daniel C. Esty. Greening the Americas: NAFTA's Lessons for Hemispheric Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

García-Guadilla, María Pilar. Environmental Movements, Politics, and Agenda 21 in Latin America. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2005.

Roberts, J. Timmons, and Nikki Demetria Thanos. Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Laura Jarnagin

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture