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It’s an odd scene: a brigade of farmers and forest rangers plant inches-high pine saplings in a recently cleared stand of trees as the sound of chainsaws can be heard nearby in the forest-covered mountains of Mexico City, which are largely unknown to people outside of Mexico.
The southern, forest-covered half of the 9 million-person city has suffered greatly from illegal logging in recent years.
Authorities in Mexico City claim to have found the criminal gangs responsible for the illegal logging, and in recent months they have retaliated by organizing operations that involved hundreds of police officers and soldiers raiding hidden sawmills in the mountains. Reforestation initiatives are also supported by the city, however they are time-sensitive.
It would take decades to rebuild the magnificent mature forests being chopped, and many of the little saplings won’t survive.
The activist group Global Forest Watch estimates that in 2010, woods covered around 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares) of the city’s total area of 370,000 acres (150,000 hectares). According to the group, the city lost as much woodland in 2022—121 acres (49 hectares)—as compared to the previous four years put together.
Preserving Biodiversity
The issue is particularly severe in San Miguel Topilejo, which is a desirable location for gangs to cut logs and transport them to sawmills since it includes forests and is intersected by highways.
Before 2020, just around 500 acres (200 hectares), according to Pablo Amezcua, a natural resources engineer who works in San Miguel Topilejo, had been impacted by logging.
Amezcua estimates that by the middle of 2023, fully or partially chopped land would have covered around 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares).
Data from the nation’s attorney general for environmental protection shows that Mexico City has had 122 accusations of illegal logging since 2013, with more than half of them occurring so far in 2023.
On a recent day, a group of forest rangers and volunteers left San Miguel Topilejo in trucks for a forestry mission, traveling through the forest on curvy dirt roads that are just wide enough for the small trucks to pass.
Armed National Guard officers and troops were accompanying them. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Mexico City’s population skyrocketed, and urban expansion steadily climbed the mountain slopes on the southern boroughs of the city.
Since all forms of logging were already forbidden, some people think that the ban encouraged criminal activity.
Source: ABC News
