By
Maria L. Villarreal-Sonora
Río Hondo is the natural border between
Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico, running 169 kilometers from its birth place
in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala to its delta in the Chetumal
Bay, Mexico.
The Río Hondo Riverkeeper program monitors the river’s
16,000 square kilometer watershed. This place is astonishingly beautiful,
with a wide range of ecosystems from mountaintops to coastal mangrove
forests on the Caribbean Sea.
Most of the people of the Río Hondo
watershed are artisans – subsistence
farmers, fishermen, and craftsmen whose livelihood is directly linked to
the health of their river. Sustainable development of the Río Hondo
watershed is central to the long-term health of the communities that surround
the river. The Riverkeeper program is working in a coalition with other
groups and two universities to develop coastal management plans to ensure
that eco-tourism and other uses of the coast are appropriate and sustainable.
We are also working on international issues such as trans-boundary parks
to preserve endangered species because the manatee, sea turtles, and other
species don’t know or respect political boundaries.
Río Hondo
is a paradise, but in this paradise we are facing a serious threat from
chemical-dependant corporate agriculture. For more than four decades sugar
cane plantations have used vast quantities of agrochemicals to produce
their crops. These chemicals spill over land and water damaging the health
of communities living on the river and impacting tropical forest ecosystems
and riparian habitat. Health impacts have never been quantified, and much
of the time they are not even recognized. Local medical personnel lack
even basic technical knowledge about these chemical products. But sugar
cane workers and their families are exposed to these chemicals every day
of their lives. Lack of awareness of the risks to communities by medical
professionals, and lack of oversight of the practices of these large industrial
farms by the government has blended into a silenced environment of complicity
and apathy.
As a biologist and community activist in Southeastern Mexico, I saw the
need for my community to break the silence and take action to protect ourselves.
In 2001, I started the Río Hondo Riverkeeper
program as a program of COBIOTEC, a Mexican community organization based
in the northern portion of the watershed. Our watershed needed a vigilant
organization to look out for the health of the community and the river – that’s
why I became the Río Hondo Riverkeeper.
We began by walking house
to house in effected communities, interviewing people about their family’s
health and their handling of toxic chemicals while working on the sugar
plantations. With our preliminary report we approached the local Citizen
Council for Marine Pollution and Research, chaired by the Mexican Navy,
and presented our action plan to address this growing problem.
We are establishing
a specialized medical center to attend to those suffering the effects of
exposure to these chemicals; a support and rehabilitation program for the
more than three thousand men, woman, and children whose lives have already
been affected; an education program on the handling and management of chemicals,
residuals, and containers; and a waste handling and confinement program.
Additionally we will work with the farmers to evaluate and test alternative
sugar cane plague management, because, after all, that is the same sugar
we take to our family and our dinner table every day.
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