An overview of environmental policies in Latin America

Introduction

Mexico, Middle and South America forms a conglomerate of independent nations, plus a few Dutch and British islands, a small French territory - the French Guyana, and a large number of surviving pre-Columbian native tribes or nations of distinct ethnic origins. Trinidad-Tobago, Guyana and Suriname became independent from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in the 1960’. No visible trace of early Viking sailors survived. Besides, each war in Europe forced a wave of migrants to search for asylum in the New World. Italians, Polish, Hungarians, Russians, Germans, Japanese, Syrians, Lebanese, among others formed in some cases tightly closed enclaves, speaking long forgotten dialects that have vanished in their native countries, but more often mingling with the host populations, and retaining but just a few folkloric traces of their original cultures.

The expression Latin America refers to the Iberian conquerors, the Spanish and Portuguese navigators that arrived in the American continent at the end of the XVth century and in the early XVIth’s. Ensuing territorial disputes over known and unknown lands of the New World were tentatively settled by Papal bullas and treaties between the kingdoms of Castella and Portugal. From 1581 to 1640 Portugal was under Spanish rule, which was somehow beneficial to Brazilian territorial expansion, beyond the limits imposed by former treaties. The final treaty that ended war in the Iberian peninsula was signed in 1668. All along the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, astronomers, naturalists and soldiers made extensive expeditions to demarcate land and river frontiers. Attempts by French and Dutch expeditions to establish permanent colonies in Brazil were short lived. With the cessation of hostilities involving Spain, The Netherlands, England and France, compensations were paid and the three Guyanas established. Towards the northern latitudes, Spain colonized Middle and North America, with the exception of small enclaves as Dutch Manhattan – later sold to England - and the French Louisiana.

Spanish became the common language of the majority of Latin American countries, while Portuguese is spoken in Brazil.

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Until the XIXth century, the environmental policies in Latin America were those imposed by the European colonizers, and obviously directed towards the exploitation of natural resources, vegetal, animal, and mineral. Natives were also considered a natural resource, and duly enslaved, at a time when the Catholic church condoned and justified slavery. The earliest regulatory initiatives were aimed at the restriction of trading rights or at the limitation of property and use. Thus, the Portuguese expression madeira de lei was adopted to designate those noble species of trees which belonged legally to the king, to be used in naval construction or in fine wood craftsmanship. For example, it has been recently estimated that from the XVIth to the XIXth century, about 470 thousand logs of Cesalpinia echinata, the Brazil wood, were cut and exported to Portugal for its precious red die. There followed the introduction of species from Europe, and European colonies in Asia and Africa. Botanical gardens were established in the New World to cultivate and spread the costly spices from the Orient and a variety of introduced cultivated plants and domestic animals. New diseases and parasites arrived with men and animals, as it was well documented by the early travellers and chroniclers. From the Americas, plants, animals and materia medica were sent to Europe, causing profound changes in the Old World nutritional habits (Avila-Pires, 2003). Gold, silver and gems would be a later development in the process of territorial occupation of Brazil. On the Pacific side, Spanish conquerors found a number of developed native societies already submitted and ruled by the Inca Empire, with large riches in precious metals ready to be plundered. To the north of the Equator, the Aztec and Mayan civilizations suffered the same fate.

During the 1780’ the governments of Spain and Portugal exploited their American domains in a thorough and systematic fashion. Reports of early naturalists are available nowadays in fac-simile and in commented editions. They help us with the reconstruction of former patters of geographical distribution of pre-Columbian fauna and flora. Early in the XIXth century, with the invasion of Lisbon by the Napoleonic armies, the Portuguese court moved to Brazil. Foreign naturalists were permitted or encouraged to travel and explore the hinterland, except through the mining districts and a new era for the Natural History of the New World began.

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Isolated initiatives for specific situations like the restriction of collecting aigrettes date from imperial times.

Involvement of naturalists with the politics of economic development is not a new phenomenon. Cardoso (2003) shows how Domenico Vandelli, trained in medicine and natural history in his native Italy, supported the notion that a better knowledge of natural resources was a fundamental condition for addressing problems of efficiency in their economic allocation. His idea that natural history should be the basis for an economic agenda was a central element in the emergence of political economy as an autonomous scientific discourse during the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Vandelli was also instrumental in advocating the financing of an expedition in the late 1700’ to study the natural productions of Brazil, with the objective of establishing a program of systematic economic exploration.

Environmental policies, in the modern sense were directed to environmental protection and were formally introduced in 1864, when the United States Congress donated an area in the Yosemite Valley to the State of California to be used for public use, recreation, and as a refuge for animals. Eight years later, in 1872, Yellowstone was created as the first National Park, “…hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale under the laws of the United States and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” The rationale behind it was the protection of certain threatened species and scenic landscapes.

Mexico established his first National Park, El Chico, in 1898, while in South America it was Argentina who was pioneer, in 1934, with Nahuel Huapi National Park.

The modern era began in the late 1930’ when several Latin American countries imposed regulations upon the exploitation of natural resources - oil prospection and mining in particular - not because of the their ecological impacts upon the environment but mostly for political, economic and protectionist considerations.

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Thirty years later conservationist efforts of naturalists – zoologists, botanists, anthropologists, archeologists – were rewarded with a limited dose of success that gathered momentum with the growing interest and support from public opinion. This movement was to take force during the two following decades. Concepts of conservation substituted the previous protection policies, intended to salvage threatened animals and plants and to establish national parks and preserves, sometimes focusing on certain species, and not on natural communities, which are the basis for environmental conservation as shown by Avila-Pires in 1972.

During the 1960’ and 1970’ democratic or dictatorial governments in Latin America either adopted or revised conservation laws. In the case of revolutionary governments it was done through Presidential Law-Decrees or by Congress, with little discussion or argument. But it was not a simple process. Scientists in one side, legislators and jurists in another, and considerable national and international commercial and political interests sometimes intervened and some of the problems that loomed in the near future were the object of discussion during the 8 th Reunion of the Central Council of the International Union of Magistrates in 1971.

Brazil revised the legislation of the thirties in the period beginning in 1964, under a military dictatorship, which viewed conservation as an integral part of the national security policy. Scientific Committees were formed to prepare the new texts, which were approved by Congress as submitted, without discussion. Old legislation on hunting, fishing, soil, water, minerals is substituted by very advanced laws incorporating modern ecological principles. Plant formations like savanas/cerrados, caatingas, mangroves, coastal restingas became protected as well as with forests. Professional hunting and the commerce of wild animals was prohibited. In Latin American countries like Colombia and Peru followed some of those principles, and based their own laws on the Brazilian legal texts. Repertories of the growing legislation from 1934 on are now available (Farah, 1967; Cavalcanti, 1971; Cavalcanti, 1978. Santos, 1991; Farias e Lima, 1990; Rocco,2002). A full Report on the environmental outlook was published recently (IBAMA, 2002) and an Atlas of Nature Conservancy in Brazil has just appeared. (IBAMA, 2005).

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Argentina approved Law nº 5781 in 1956 to regulate fishing activities and since 1967 a number of Provincial laws on National Parks and Faunal Preserves. A preoccupation with tourism was behind some of the initiatives. One drawback was the permission to introduce exotic animals, as wild boar and European deer in National Parks.

In 1974 Bolivia the Law-Decree nº 11686 of August 13, 1974 established the Ley General Forestal de la Nación or General Forest Law of the Nation. It was regulated by the Resolución Suprema or Governmental Resolution nº 183204 of February 2, 1977. Also in the 1970’ Bolivia passed the Law-Decree nº 12301 dealing with Wildlife, National Parks, Hunting and Fishing.

Peruvian history of environmental management dates back to early native cultures that had to cope with the adverse conditions of one of the driest deserts in the world, which extends from Northern Chile to Ecuador. In Peru, a revolutionary government imposed a Forest and Wildlife Law-Decree-nº 21147 in May 13, 1975. Its main objective was to discipline and regulate the exploitation of plant and animal natural resources.

In Venezuela, Arturo Eichler (1968) was instrumental in the spread of conservationism and introduced the concept of technical conservation, or management of natural resources, with emphasis on agriculture, agrarian reform, erosion, forest fires, and floods.

In spite of the efforts of conservationists and the existing legislation, in several countries mining activities and oil exploration take place in natural preserves, as it is the case of Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru (Galindo-Leal, 2000). A number of related important questions were aptly addressed by Halffter (1995).

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