In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Forestry Comes to Oaxaca: Bureaucrats, Gangsters, and Indigenous Communities, 1926–1956 The pine forests of Oaxaca may appear peaceful, but they are not always so. When forestry science began to travel from Mexico City to the provinces in the 1920s and 1930s, forestry bureaucrats based in the city of Oaxaca encountered a tangled web of political intrigue. Struggles to gain control of valuable timber could become violent, as officials, loggers, and community leaders manipulated forestry regulations and environmental theories to claim control over forests. A distant echo of gunfights, murders, and possible bribery reaches us if we can imagine events in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca on a winter morning in January 1950. According to newspaper accounts, a survey team from San Juan Mixtepec had been shot at by a group from their neighbor and rival Santo Domingo Ozoletepec , incited and perhaps led by two Spanish loggers, Miguel and José Ranz. The Ranz duo was arrested and sentenced to prison for the shooting : It subsequently emerged that they had paid for a logging road and signed a timber contract with Ozolotepec (Anonymous 1951c, 1951d). The Ranz team sounds like a tough pair: They knew that they had to protect their investment in the logging road and the community political alliance that would give them access to the forests, and they were prepared use violence if they had to. As it happened, there were also less violent means of staying in business. By July 1951, the duo were free, soon after the judge responsible for their release was removed from office for abuse of authority (Anonymous 1951b). Wildcat loggers such as the Ranz’s had to play a number of games successfully: They had to find supporters in the indigenous communities who owned the forests, they had to manage the heavy burden of official paperwork and find official allies in the forest service, and, on occasion, they probably had to buy their way out of trouble. Certainly, the Ranz’s did not give up easily: In later years, they were accused of evading tax payment checkpoints (Various 1957), and as late as 1962, they were still 94 Chapter 4 in business and still in trouble for ignoring logging regulations (Compa- ñia Forestal de Oaxaca 1962). This was a kind of Wild West in the forest. Logging happened in social worlds pervaded by sporadic violence and doubtful alliances, led by small logging companies that could manipulate or flout the law, paying off judges, avoiding taxes, building roads, and cutting trees. These violent years of wildcat logging, from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, were to give way to a more orderly situation when two large logging companies gained control of the vast majority of the forests of Oaxaca in 1956. Brief as it was, the period of wildcat logging was a critical moment in the gradual expansion of the Mexican forest service into the forests. Projects of state building gradually entangled the Zapotec and Chinantec people of the Sierra Juárez, introducing them to official theories about forest management and the role of forests in affecting climate. Official projects of fighting forest fires and conceptual divisions between forests and fields gradually transformed indigenous understandings of forests, as previous cycles of warfare and mining became submerged beneath projects of environmental restoration. Even as official theories about the environment traveled to forests, state projects of legibility through forestry regulations failed to find reliable allies, and the Mexican state had little way of finding out what happened in the forest. Critically, the state was trying to know about forests through a fragile web of alliances with loggers, community leaders, and forestry officials: The texture of these alliances made all the difference to the kinds of things that the state could come to know. Forestry Comes to Oaxaca The postrevolutionary political settlement had given rise to an increasingly centralizing federal government, which asserted unprecedented control over forests, bypassing state and local governments in the name of science, environmental restoration, and economic development. This program of environmental restoration and political control was built by means of traveling documents and a gradually expanding network of forest service offices where officials lived with the documents, forestry regulations, and forms that were the physical manifestation of the forest laws. The science of forestry traveled to Oaxaca in the hands of a tiny cadre of forestry officials who were responsible for making forests legible and controllable to the state. This was, in the end, an impossible project: There were...

Share