Comm: "Once, a few million years ago, a thin, crooked finger of land rose out of the sea creating a barrier between two great oceans and a bridge between two great continents.

"An isthmus today home to seven nations. Together they share an ecological treasure-trove. Earth Report travels to Central America and follows a corridor of life."

The Path of the Jaguar

Comm: "Central America. A rugged, jungled isthmus. It occupies just one half of one per cent of the earth's land surface but it boasts seven per cent of the planet's biological diversity. And now it's the focus of an international effort to protect and restore the spectacular network of wildlife that spans it.

"Earth scientists consider the emergence of this continental land-bridge from the ocean the pivotal natural event of the past sixty million years of the earth's history. The impact of this new corridor was profound. Everything changed - ocean circulation, climate, the distribution of plants and animals on land,sea and air. Evolutionary forces went into freeplay.

"Nearly nine-hundred species of mammals, birds and reptiles on one strip of land. After millenia of segregation in either North or South America, species were finally free to mix and migrate. The path of the Jaguar became an exotic biological interchange.

"Then, around twelve-thousand years ago, homo sapiens arrived on the scene. Today, thirty-five million of them live in seven countries that comprise modern Central America. Population has tripled in the past five decades and in twenty years time, there may be fifty-million."

Edgar Pineda, United Nations Environment Programme: "We have a serious problem, and that is population growth. We are looking for different options to face the demands for food, housing and employment for the current population. We believe this is a subject governments have to face. The church has to get more understanding, and the international organisations have to put this on top of their agendas."

Comm: "As population has grown, the environment has suffered. As one natural historian put it: 'a biological corridor that took more than sixty-million years to develop. is taking less than a century to destroy.'

"It's led to an epidemic of poaching and logging. At its worst, this is what deforestation looks like and with it goes natural habitat.

"The green represents the forested area fifty years ago; and this is what it's shrunk to today.

"But now, led by The Global Environment Facility , as the largest donor, a host of international and local environmental organisations have decided enough is enough. They're trying to recreate a connected corridor of sustainably managed, protected land. They may have rechristened the Path of the Jaguar 'The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor,ī but it means the same thing. Its sheer scale and scope eclipses all other transnational conservation projects ever attempted.
..Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala.

"But affording protection to this rich ecological heritage comes at a price. a greater price than even the $100-million already pumped into the Corridor project.

"The Sierra de las Minas chain of mountains, a National Park in southeast Guatemala.

"Don Jose Carlos Mendez knows every gully and crag. And he now knows the cost of enforcing the laws to protect them."

Jose Carlos Mendez Montenegro: "There are people in high positions in the big cities that know about the laws but unfortunately only a few of us are willing to enforce it. My son and I were victims of a violent attack. My son was killed, and I was left disabled for life on my right arm. But I feel satisfied with our efforts. For me, there is no bigger sacrifice than this for the love we feel for this land."

Comm: "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 when I started to wonder what was happening? Because I used to hunt here by myself and thought I was the only one. Then I realised that like me there were many other hunters doing the same."

Comm: "Today he works as a park ranger and takes ecotourists 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.'"

Comm:"Don Carlos' murdered son, Jose Rodolfo, bequeathed his name to a trail in this park. Another name on a long list of Central Americans who've 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:"Environmental impunity is still present in many of the Central American countries. I think this is a very delicate subject which has taken the lives of people who were dedicated to looking after the protected areas and were trying to enforce the law on problems related to the natural resources."

Comm:"But enforcing such laws isn't just dangerous. It's also a task fraught with dilemmas. We now travel southeast along the Path of the Jaguar to a national park in neighbouring El Salvador, aptly named El Imposible - The Impossible.

"The park was set up in the early 1990s. The Chinchilla family's 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 needed 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 wood to spare. Nowadays they do not allow us to cut even a dead tree."

Enrique Fuentes Duren, Salvanatura, El Salvador: "I am against the idea of relocating these people because it is not their fault that this place became a national park. But I am also aware that if the current 40 families who are living here keep getting bigger then it is only a matter of time before the internal pressure gets so strong that we will not know what to do. The problem is that there are no internal regulations for these cases and these people will never own property if they remain inside the park."

Comm: "The Corridor project is aiming to help fund the relocation of families like the Chinchillas 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/GTZ, Guatemala: "Yes, population and human activities are threatening the Biological Corridor. But intelligence, creativity and human organisation 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. 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 determination and that means having your own money in your own pocket"

Comm: "We are on the move again. This time, we're doing sixty kilometers per hour, skimming the top of a reputedly 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 in the crop on which this region's 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 is economically attractive, because it is environmentally sustainable or more sustainable than other agricultural practices, for farmers it is a good idea and a good decision to grow coffee."

Comm: "This is what's known as shade-grown coffee - it's interplanted with fruit trees, shrubs and cocoa.

"The beauty of this type of coffee is that it can be cultivated organically, providing a product which commands premium prices on supermarket shelves in the rich world.

"Small-holder Andres Ramos knows it makes sense."

Andres Ramos: "Organic coffee needs shade, because the shade helps to protect the beans from getting burnt by the sun. Also when it rains, the drops of water hit the fallen leaves and not the soil, in that way it protects it too."

Comm: "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 fertilisers and they can also sell their fruit - avocados 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 their markets or to their inputs they need to put into their plots, agricultural migration or the clearing of new land can be detained or stopped."

Comm: "But if only all the solutions were as simple as growing organic coffee. As Earth Report continued southeast along the Path of the Jaguar from Guatemala and El Salvador through to Panama we encounter a twist in the trail.

"We move from Central America's Pacific coast to its Atlantic seaboard.

"Confrontations and conflicts over land here are notoriously rather more complex than the question of how or where to resettle poor farmers who happen to live along the Path of the Jaguar.

"There are forty-five indigenous groups in the region. The most populous of them live in protected areas with the highest levels of biodiversity. The brains behind the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor insist that the needs of those with ancestral claims to this land should remain at the heart of the corridor concept.

"The trouble is, some indigenous groups see the whole idea as a threat to traditional land rights.

"Others resist transnational efforts to dictate how natural resources like forests be managed."

Tesla Marina Ventura, COPINH, Honduras: "We are completely ignored because we are indigenous people. They treat us as being stupid, ignorant, and hopeless. We cannot use a computer because if we use one then we are not indigenous people. That's ridiculous. They also say that we are unable to administrate money, which is also false. We have proved that we can do it. We have administered our forests and looked after them for years. Why shouldn't we be able to administer anything."

Josefina Adela Ixcaquic, Ixmucan, Guatemala: "For us to talk about the Biological Corridor is confusing. Our people do not understand what is all about. What do they want with that Biological Corridor? They presented it to us in a fancy way but to us it does not help at all."

Minerva Wilson Ortega, ALISTAR, Nicaragua: "Governments talk about land and say they will give us titles to it. They understand land as a piece of soil to plant crops or a piece of soil to bury us when we die. For us that is not the concept we have of land, which is much wider and deeper. We talk about flora, fauna, natural resources, air, water, soil, subsoil. Our government is talking of a law to distribute communal territories and they think they will solve the problem with this, but that is not true. We want entitlement to our land."

Comm: "This is Kuna Yala - the land of the Kuna, governed exclusively by indigenous people. Most live in small fishing communities on the San Blas Archepelago, a chain of 370 coral atols which run along the exquisite Atlantic Coast like a string of pearls. We touched down on one of the 40 inhabited islands.

"The Kuna are widely considered a model example of a people who've asserted political influence to protect their lands and their culture.
They're also considered an essential link in the Corridor plan which supports them in their efforts to reverse the trend of losing their traditional lifestyles. The Kuna want to see eco-tourism take off here."

Enrique Inatoy, ACUANUSADUP, Kuna Yala: "Our own experience has taught us that traditional tourism has degraded our spiritual world. So what we want to do is to present an alternative to recover all what we have lost. With ecotourism we are trying to be more creative, more dynamic to feed the tourist's brains, to make them understand our indigenous world."

Faustino Alba, Ex-Secretary Kuna Congress: "I think the people behind the Biological Corridor should talk to our Kuna people, they know where the sacred places are and encourage the new generations to protect them. If the idea is of conservation and unification that is a positive idea. We, the Kuna people, when we want to build a hotel or a house we take the material from nature but in a rational way without affecting ėMother Nature'. The problem will be if there are more inhabitants for whom we have to build more hotels and more houses then this may damage the natural ecosystems."

Comm: "But the damage is already being done. The fragile ecosystem is being systematically demolished.

"Land to build on is scarce on the tiny San Blas atols.

"A local Kuna politician is paying these divers US$300 a week to break up a living coral reef that's taken around 7,000 years to form.
One after another, great chunks of coral are raised to the surface.

"So what do they do with the coral? It's being dumped back in the water again to build the foundations of a brand new hotel which one day soon will open its doors to unwitting eco-tourists.

"The impact of tourism here is already beginning to bite in another way. As Kuna fishermen have discovered, the marine resources at their disposal offer lucrative returns. But talk of 'the good old days' has now crept into their conversations."

Mauricio Ayarza: "Every day you see about 20 or 30 boats going out to fish lobster. There is a huge demand for lobster not only locally but also to export to other countries. There is a ban placed by the local congress because they are over fishing. Fish is very expensive these days, before we used to eat for free, now we even have to buy it."

Comm: "With many indigenous groups stealthily moving into the global cash economy, the fate of these delicate ecosystems - and with it, the fate of indigenous cultures depending upon them - is seriously threatened.

"The tidal fringes of the coasts lining the Path of the Jaguar boast eight per cent of the world's mangroves - nature's buffer against the furious storms and hurricanes which lash this region. Where they've been cleared elsewhere in the world, the coasts have been left dangerously exposed.

"The mangrove swamps provide habitat for a spectacular array of migratory birds.

"Their dense root systems act as traps for sediment which would otherwise suffocate offshore reefs in mud. And in turn, the coral reefs protect the mangroves from angry seas. One can't survive without the other. Together they provide shelter for a exotic display of underwater species.

"Ensuring that the mangroves and coral reefs continue to survive on this isthmus is a key ingredient of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.

"The economies of the seven countries contained by the Central American isthmus are dependent on natural resources. Using these resources makes sense but conserving what's left is the only way to ensure that they last.

"What concerns those who conceived of this hugely ambitious project is that its purpose be understood by all those whose lives it affects - including the region's seven-million indigenous people and the 21-million Central Americans living in poverty. Without their support, the dream won't be realised.

Edgar Pineda, United Nations Environment Programme: "Our challenge is what to offer them. I mean what can they do? What economic activities could they develop?"

Juan Bautista Chinchilla: "How we can contribute with this is with our own children. I teach my children what is forbidden. I tell them not to poison the rivers and not to log the forest. In that way if we all educate our children all will be different."

Jorge Cabrera, NASA/CCAD, Guatemala: "If the Biological Corridor succeeds and retains governments' support I think in a few years we are going to have very important results that will be reproduced by other groups of countries, such as the Andean, African and many other countries around the world."

Edgar Pineda, United Nations Environment Programme: "We should come with even more alternatives to make the corridor an opportunity to deal with the environment in a economically productive way. Unless we make a development instrument out of it, the Corridor won't go beyond a pretty map or the wild dreams we have."