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Mexican forests are in a precarious condition today. Forests and jungles cover somewhere between 55 and 67 million hectares, or around 28 percent of Mexico’s total landmass, and they are disappearing at an alarming rate. About 600,000 hectares of woodland vanish every year, giving Mexico the dubious distinction of ranking as the world’s fifth most rapidly deforesting nation—and second in Latin America. One recent study shows that the total area covered by forests has fallen by 16.3 million hectares in the past thirty-five years; others indicate that 13 million hectares of temperate forests and 4 million of tropical forests disappeared between 2000 and 2005 alone. Still others suggest that the net loss of forests occurred at a rate of 300,000–490,000 hectares per year between 1998 and 2003. While data varies, the trend does not: deforestation in Mexico has reached an average annual rate of 22 percent in the past decades, considered to be one of the highest in the world.1 A representative case of deforestation occurred on the foothills of the volcano known as La Malintzin, on the central Mexican plateau. The combination of complex social, cultural, political, economic, and of course environmental processes surrounding this ecological system, rich in forest and hydrological resources, has resulted in massive environmental degradation . The different uses of natural resources over the past century and a half have given rise to many forms of environmental decomposition. chapter five Besieged Forests at Century’s End Industry, Speculation, and Dispossession in Tlaxcala’s La Malintzin Woodlands, 1860–1910 José Juan Juárez Flores 100 Incessant deforestation and consequent erosion have degraded this immense structure’s function to such an extent that it may have altered many local microclimates. From the “Idyll of the Volcanoes” to Ecocide In the central highlands of Mexico, particularly in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley , the sadness that now consumes La Malintzin is not due to her unconsummated love of El Citlaltepec, or “Mountain of the Star” (as Orizaba Peak is sometimes known), nor is it due to the indifference of Popocatépetl, “La Mujer Blanca.” Much less does her sadness originate from spite toward the mountain range governed by El Tenzo (her unrequited lover) or because of the dissatisfaction that Cuatlapanga, a tiny hill nestled in one of her great skirts, has perhaps struck out on her own.2 Alone in the PoblanoTlaxcalteca Valley, distant from the pretenses of these towering buttes, the sad silhouette of what was once called the “goddess of the blue skirts,” or Matlalcuéyetl, succumbs under the predatory momentum of those who only yesterday venerated her vestment of forests and now dedicate themselves to ripping them apart. At an altitude of 4,460 meters above sea level, La Malintzin (or La Malinche ) is the fifth highest peak in the country and holds a transcendental importance for the Puebla-Tlaxcala region. Its abiotic composition of “water and soil” and biological composition of “plants and animals” constitute a vital ecological system for the provision of forest and hydrological resources. The moisture captured by La Malintzin’s forests generates immense amounts of water, which is possibly the peak’s most important resource, and on which the whole state of Tlaxcala and 80 percent of the municipalities in Puebla depend. Nonetheless, this crucial ecological service has been damaged by the destruction of the forest cover as a result of inexorable historical processes. The mountain’s importance to the indigenous people of Tlaxcala was recorded in the chronicles and early historical accounts of the colony, which register the rituals of “a culture intimately connected to water.”3 The millennial relationship that native communities forged with the mountain constituted an essential element of their existence and helped to shape their worldviews. Yet this link was ruptured in the second half of the sixteenth century with the imposition of the colonial economic system that followed in the wake of the Conquest, which resulted among other things in the intensive exploitation of natural resources. Tlaxcala’s La Malintzin Woodlands · 101 By the second half of the nineteenth century, wood-dependent industrial processes had begun to contribute to the destruction of the forest. Adding to the traditional uses of wood as material for construction and fuel (as both firewood and charcoal), new industrial technologies used forest products to make turpentine (primarily for urban lighting) and railroad ties. The siege on the forests was brutal. Observers in the 1930s already noted a “rapid acceleration” in the rate...

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