Living with Oil: Promises, Peaks, and Declines on Mexico’s Gulf Coast

2. Natural Resources in the Laguna de Términos: Piracy and Profit

Peaks and declines are a part of everyday life on the shores of Mexico’s Gulf coast, shaped by centuries of natural resource exploitation. The oil industry represents only the most recent in a nearly half-millennium of endlessly repeating cycles of natural resource extraction in the Laguna de Términos. Local residents are all too familiar with the production cycles of a series of peculiar tropical commodities—a wood-based dye, hardwood timber, and natural chewing-gum fiber—known for rising to the highest peaks and declining into utter obscurity. Campeche’s well-known and lamentable booms and busts all share the same features : foreign territorialization, occupation, and ownership; labor exploitation ; and serious pressure on the natural environment. The exploitation of various natural resources in the Laguna de Términos over the past 500 years has contributed to the same local net effect—the failure to generate sustainable social and economic development at the local level. Political and economic policy from the export-led mercantilism of Spanish colonialism through Mexican state-led national development projects of the twentieth century demonstrate that the primary factor in shaping Campeche’s development agenda has been the protection of the interests of foreign and private capital over resident populations. Not only did the exploitation of Campeche’s resources fail to build the regional economy, but because the practice was so invested in foreign capital and resource extraction, ecological destruction, and the accrual of debt for recruited workers, it produced a physical and social landscape indelibly marked by the export-oriented strategies used in the region. This chapter traces the cumulative effects of a series of cycles of natural resource exploitation in the Laguna de Términos culminating in the CHAPTER 2 Natural Resources in the Laguna de Términos: Piracy and Profit 66 Peaks and Declines region’s current post-peak condition. I demonstrate how the historical legacy of natural resource exploitation continues to affect the social dynamics of contemporary Campeche. Cycles of Exploitation From the dawning of global trade initiated with the conquest of the Americas to the globalization of the market hastened by advanced technologies of production and communication, the worldwide commodification of natural resources has tended to proceed . . . as if they were inexhaustible. coronil 1997: 23 At the time of the Spanish arrival, indigenous residents of settlements around the Laguna de Términos made use of resources of the wetlands, lagoons, and rivers of the watershed (Jiménez Valdez 1989: 103–104). Coastal inhabitants used cayucos (canoes) to access marine resources. Salted fish, shark meat, and shells were important regional commodities brought from the Laguna de Términos to markets as far as the Mexican mainland and Central America (ibid.). Soon after the Conquest began, Campeche’s port of Carmen became a key node of the incipient global marketplace of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. But the trade in Campeche’s resources neither began nor ended as a project of colonial empire building. Spain’s first endeavors in the region were either halfhearted or thwarted by other means. The first profit-generating European settlers in the Laguna de Términos region were not conquistadores but English, Scottish, and French pirates who cut and shipped the valuable dyewood palo de tinte (also known as palo de campeche) to Europe and New England. Although Spain regained control of the territory in the eighteenth century, palo de tinte did not see a golden age of profitable resource exploitation until after Mexican independence, during the Porfiriato (1876–1910). The fall of the palo de tinte market, coinciding with the deforestation surrounding the Laguna de Términos, occurred with the rise of another highly profitable tropical export commodity: chicle, raw chewing-gum sap. Mexican national policies at the turn of twentieth century enabled foreign capital to buy extensive land tracts from the Mexican Gulf coast across Campeche to Guatemala to enable the export of natural resources to mostly U.S. markets. It was not until the cultivation of the Gulf and lagoon fisheries in the 1940s (after the Natural Resources in the Laguna de Términos 67 collapse of the transnational chicle market) that the local population began to use local resources for local markets. Although the region had long supported artisanal and subsistence fishing among the coastal population , in the 1940s a new commercial fishing boom occurred with the shrimping trade based in Ciudad del Carmen. Palo...