Appropriate Technology?

Mexico's Western Sierra Madre is a rugged habitat. Pre-Hispanic communal tribes developed there unhindered by outside influences. These tribes—the Huichol of San Sebastián Teponohuaztlán, Santa Catarina Cuexcomatitlán, and San Andrés Cohamiata, as well as the Cora of La Mesa del Nayar—now stand apart from other native Mexican groups because they have remained self-sufficient and impervious to outside pressures to modify their internal patterns of behavior. The steep mountains of the Mexican states of Nayarit and Jalisco offered them a natural refuge until the first dirt roads were built on the periphery of their territory in 1970s with the purpose of reaching the untapped oak and pine forests on their high plateaus. Many disputes ensued as timber companies raped the land with the help of corrupt officials. They disregarded the tribes' traditional authorities and supplanted them with puppet figures. Though the communities were relatively unaffected by this tactic, it left a severe ecological scar near the roads.

In the mid 1990s, I attended a meeting in Tuapuri, the communityheadquarters of Santa Catarina. The topic was the government's offer to build a road to the only remaining unconnected center in the heart of Huichol land. Dispute and disharmony reigned until one of the principal elders insisted that the road represented a danger to the whole community. He said it would expose them to the presence of outsiders, who would then be within a short distance of their sacred ancestral sites, and that it was their duty to protect these places from curious visitors. The community unanimously voted against the government's generous offer because it recognized a loss the government was blind to.

The communities now face a new assault. The government plans to install electric posts and cables through their land for the benefit of a few of the mixed-blood and acculturated tribes in the periphery. The program will install posts and cables through the Huichol community of Santa Catarina and other indigenous villages. And construction requires felling trees over a 200-kilometer stretch covering sacred and archaeological sites. The Huichol had been counting on the government to expand a successful solar energy program already working in several parts of the Sierra. From November 3rd to the 9th last year, the Huichol of Santa Catarina attended a meeting to receive the first information about the government's proposed electrification program. Four hundred and ninety-seven community members protested the plan, and communal authorities assailed it at length. In the end, it was agreed that the government plan might benefit a few store owners and their family members, but only 30 people backed the project. A $60 million (470,000 peso) budget has been allocated for the project, which will serve only six Huichol and Cora communities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. A solar energy project would generate light for 43,459 Cora and Huichol, leaving $20 million for other communal projects. And indigenous people could be trained in solar panel maintenance, but the cable and post program makes economic dependence inevitable.

State President of the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Huichol People Alfredo Ponciano was invited to a congress on sacred sites celebrated at the National Indigenous Institute headquarters in Mexico City on November 21, 2001. He expressed there his opposition to the new electrification program. He explained that the Huichol did not want to become dependent on outside sources of energy, preferring instead to expand on solar energy sources. They felt, he explained, that electrical lines would not receive maintenance once lightning storms took their toll on the infrastructure. But his speech didn't convince Xóchitl Gálvez, director of the Institute, and the program is set to go by February 2002.