Dealing with the Relocation from the Path of the Jaguar

Nearly 7 million indigenous people live within the Corridor's National Parks. For these communities, the conservation of this natural resource has left them without entitlement to the land. Now 'their' land isn't 'theirs' any longer. These communities are caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma. They don't want to move but they can't afford to stay.

Dealing with the Relocation from the Path of the Jaguar Correspondent: The reason Don Carlos knows this land so well is because until recently he was a hunter himself. Then he switched sides. Jose Carlos Mendez Montenegro: I noticed a tremendous decrease of animal numbers. So it was then I started to wonder what was happening because I used to hunt here by myself and I thought I was the only one. Then I realized that like me there were many other hunters doing the same. Correspondent: Today he works as a park ranger and takes eco-tourists into the forest where he imparts his intimate knowledge. Jose Carlos Mendez Montenegro: This is one of so many plants we have in the forest. It is a medicinal plant called plant of life. Correspondent: Don Carlos’s murdered son Jose Rudolpho bequeathed his name to a trail in this park another name of a long list of Central Americans who have lost their lives protecting the land that they love. It’s a legacy not lost on those backing the Corridor Project. Jorge Cabrera (NASA/CCAD Guatemala): In far communities still present to the American countries I think this is a very delicate subject this has taken the lives of people who have dedicated to looking after protected areas and were trying to enforce the law on problems related to the natural resources. Correspondent: But enforcing such laws isn’t just dangerous it’s also a task fought with dilemmas. We now travel southeast along the path of the jaguar to a national park in neighboring El Salvador aptly named El Impossible, the Impossible. The park was set up in the early 1990s. The Chinchilla family has been living on this land for generations but now their land isn’t theirs any longer. It is not an easy task for the people behind the corridor’s project to have to relocate families like this who live inside the park and are caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma. They don’t want to move but they can’t afford to stay. Ire Marile Chinchilla: I am used to this place. I enjoy living and walking in this forest. I simply love this place before it used to be different. In the past if anybody noted to build a house we simply went into the forest and took the wood we needed to build it. Nobody used to complain or say that it was forbidden. The forest is quite big and there is with despair. Nowadays they do not allow us to cut even a dead tree. Enrique Fuentes Duran (Salvanatura El Salvador): I’m against the idea of relocating people because its not their fault that this place become a National Park but I’m also aware that if you can’t afford your families to living here keep getting bigger that’s only a matter of time before the internal pressures get so strong that we’ll not know what to do. The problem is that were no internal regulation in these cases and these people will never own property if they remain inside the park. Correspondent: The corridor project is aiming to help fund the relocation of families such as the Chinchilla’s to areas outside protected zones giving people better opportunities and making the path of the jaguar a viable ecological proposition. Juan Carlos Godoy (CCAD/UNEP/GPTZ Guatemala): Yes, population and human activities are threatening the biological corridor but intelligence, creativity and human organization are there to create opportunities to design new corridors where they are required. Ricardo Radulovich (GEF/CCAD/UNEP): For people to really change their practices you have to offer something much better in exchange for allowing possibilities to conserve their culture their practices but at the same time to come into the 21st century because this is a project for quality of life. Exercising your right to the termination and that means having your own money in your pocket. Correspondent: We’re on the move again this time we’re doing 60 km per hour scheming the top of a repeatedly bottomless crater lake. Central America’s rich volcanic soils are what farmers dreams are made of and for those required to move from the protected zones in the path of the Jaguar farming this fertile land provides great opportunities particularly on the crop on which this regions agricultural economy is built. Lilian Marquez (Fundacion Solar, Guatemala): Coffee is one of the strategies in the biological corridor because it can act as a buffer zone for protected areas because it’s economically attractive because it’s environmentally sustainable or more sustainable than other agricultural practices performance is a good idea and a good decision to grow coffee. Correspondent: This is what’s known as shade grown coffee. It’s inter planted with trees shrubs and coco. The beauty of this type of coffee is that it can be cultivated organically providing a product that commands premium prices on supermarket shelves in the rich world. Small holder Andre Ramos knows it makes sense. Andre Ramos: Organic coffee needs shade. It does shade to protect the beans from getting brown in the sun. Also when it rains the drops of water hit the fallen leaves and of the soil and in that way it protects it to. Correspondent: The coffee bushes and fruit trees also provide essential habitat for small mammals birds and insects. Farmers do well from this crop because they don’t have to buy pesticides and fertilizers and they can also sell their fruit. Avocadoes are among the most lucrative. Lilian Marquez (Fundacion Solar, Guatemala): By promoting coffee or by allowing them to have better prices or better access to either markets or to the inputs they need to put into their plots agricultural migration or the clearing of new land can be detained or stucked. Correspondent: But if only all the solutions were as simple as growing organic coffee as we continued southeast among the path of the jaguar from Guatemala and El Salvador to Panama we encounter a twist in the trail.