THE sky is thickly overcast; the smoke makes eyes water and lungs gasp for breath; the muggy heat is unbearable. This is the Nicaraguan capital, Managua. Life was much the same this week in Mexico city, which was on full smog alert. Honduras reported a continuing sharp rise in respiratory disorders, and until Monday the country's four main airports had all been closed for some days for lack of visibility. At Tikal, in Guatemala, 700 firefighters were struggling to protect historic Mayan temples. For weeks now, fires have raged in scrub and forests from Panama to southern Mexico. Their effects are devastating, and will long outlast the human discomfort.
In Nicaragua alone, a British-aided monitoring programme using satellite images has counted many thousands of fires, especially on the Caribbean side, whose forests, stretching across into Honduras, are the last really large area of pristine forest in Central America. In some places the fire-front is 20, 30, even 50 kilometres wide. Nicaragua has about 40,000 square kilometres (15,450 square miles) of forest. But that is only half what it had in 1960—and about 500 square kilometres a week have recently being going up in smoke.
At last, Central Americans are noticing their own threatened environment, and listening to the experts who have been warning them for years that far more must be done to protect it. It is easy, this year, to blame El Niño. But many of the fires were started deliberately to clear land, only to run out of control in the drought and heat. The real trouble, now as for 30-40 years past, in Nicaragua and Honduras alike, is not weather but people: big ranchers clearing land for cattle, slash-and-burn peasant farmers, timber companies logging indiscriminately and often illegally: “They get permission for 50 trees and take 500,” says one angry conservationist. And behind these are the politicians and officials who allow it all and often profit from it.
In Nicaragua things have grown worse as thousands of destitute former Contra guerrillas, many with little skill in farming, have moved into uninhabited (and theoretically protected) forests in the north, and burned them to get land. Timber companies have played their part; a Korean one has been accused not only of cutting into precious hardwood forests around and in the Bosawas reserve on the Caribbean coast, but of opening trails into the forest for settlers like the ex-Contras. Peasants who might wish to protest—there are such—dare not: they would pay for it if they did, they say, and they don't mean in money.
A Nicaraguan ecologist, Kamilo Lara, says that if destruction goes on at the current rate—and he is not just thinking of this year—“Nicaragua will be a desert in 50 years' time.” At least he is alive to utter the warning. In Honduras, in this decade, two leading ecologists have been murdered. Others have received death threats and are now afraid to speak out. That it is worth silencing such people shows how high the economic stakes are. The two ecologists' friends readily name the army officer widely believed to have been behind the murders. No one has ever been put on trial, let alone punished, for them.
In Honduras, there is no effective control of logging, say ecologists. Local indigenous peoples have complained in the capital, Tegucigalpa, of ladino settlers moving into their (supposedly protected) areas in Mosquitia and elsewhere in the east, and even killing those who resist them. No one has much cared. Yet El Niño is forcing even the previously indifferent to sit up. Mosquitia is far away, but in the latest fires some 70% of the pine forests around Tegucigalpa have burned. The capital's three reservoirs are all but dry. Water is being taken by tanker around San Pedro Sula, the country's commercial capital, as it is in the Nicaraguan highland city of Matagalpa.
The authorities' response, however, has not been impressive. A diplomat in Honduras talks of a natural disaster of “catastrophic proportions”, about which the government, he says, is doing “damn all”. Honduran businessmen, lamenting the economic disruption, echo his complaint. In Nicaragua there is said now to be “serious concern at the highest levels”, but still no consensus about what is to be done. A meeting to decide on and co-ordinate action is scheduled—for early June.
But neither government action nor a flood to match Noah's could restore the forests as they were. Once burned, say conservationists, forest areas will inevitably be taken over by farmers. Siegfried Kasl, a technical adviser to a German project in Nicaragua's Bosawas reserve—named a UNESCO “biosphere” reserve only in February—says that it will need military protection: otherwise, “after the vegetation is destroyed, peasants will invade”.
Leave the last word to Nicaragua's La Prensa, not a famously radical newspaper:Desolation and destruction are everywhere; if nothing is done Nicaraguans will be without flora, fauna or food.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The burning of Central America"