In the area around Mount San Miguel at the outskirts of Cherán, a small town in Mexico’s Michoacán state, hundreds of tree stumps dot the landscape on either side of the road. As we rode together in an old pick-up truck, in May last year, “Panther” told me about the illegal loggers that had terrorised Cherán for years. “Every day, more than a hundred trucks passed this road,” he said, “filled with freshly cut logs.”
Panther then pointed out a place on the mountain where criminals associated with the loggers once ran a methamphetamine laboratory. “We had to do something,” he told me. “They were wiping us out.”
The loggers, he said, were affiliated with some of the country’s most powerful drug cartels, and got a free pass from the town’s authorities and police. They gained control of Cherán in 2008, and over the next three years, were reportedly behind numerous incidents of rape, murder, kidnapping and extortion. In that time, the loggers devastated around 7,000 of the 27,000 hectares of forest land that surrounds Cherán. When the criminals started logging around La Cofradía, a water spring the town’s cattle drank from, Cherán could not take it anymore.
COMMENT