She is sitting next to a leafy chilacayote that climbs a wooden pergola where it shelters from the mid-afternoon sun. With her little girl’s wide dress covered with purple flowers and her ‘crocs’ with socks she looks like a frail old woman, but the hoarse and scratchy voice of one who has sung at the top of her lungs a million songs breaks with that image. Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, a music teacher and defender of the territory, is 69 years old and round, with short gray hair, like a Chavela Vargas from the woods in this small town in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro called Agua del Maíz. “I have a volcano inside,” she says, and she laughs with the force of the magma that she hides in her chest.
Since he came to these lands escaping from the city in the 1980s, he has not stopped fighting to protect them. With his organization Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda, which has just celebrated its 35th anniversary, he taught environmental education to thousands of children throughout the region and managed to convert more than 386,000 hectares into a Biosphere Reserve, the first in the country to be created at the request of the population. The long list of projects that he has stopped, from hydroelectric plants to high tension towers, hangs around his neck like a handful of medals; the dozens of international awards by the UN, National Geographic or Ashoka come later.
“I am involved in all this out of pure spiritual ambition, because I found something in Mother Earth that I can adore,” she says from the garden of her house, surrounded by sweetgum forests. To get to her you have to walk a kilometer down a dirt road downhill, because she never wanted the road to reach the door of her wooden cabin, straight out of a Hansel and Gretel story. To one side is the orchard that she is proud of: juicy tomatoes, green chiles, mint, and giant banana trees that hummingbirds visit. At her feet rests Bilbo, a dog with hair like thorns that looks more like a wild boar. “I love boars. They are pederos, tenacious. I identify with his foolish insistence, with his strength.”
Born in the city of Querétaro in a well-to-do family, ‘Pati’, as everyone knows her because her sister called her ‘leg’ and the nickname stuck to her, as a child she adjusted to the manual of the conservative society of the time. At the age of 12 she began in music and for five years she was the first violin of the chamber orchestra of her city. She married Roberto, she had two children, she was a music teacher at the American school. “I grew up in the Queretaro mold, but I was ready to break the pitcher. fuck it I was suffocating.” Her flight was precipitated by the illness of her son, Mario de Ella, who suffered from asthma.
“One day the doctor told me: ‘Take this kid out of karate, don’t run, don’t swim.’ And I told him: ‘José Antonio, I promise you I’m going to do exactly the opposite.’ So I decided: well now is when to jump. He stopped the treatments and from now on we are in the hands of Mother Nature. We forget about the doctor, about hypochondria, to hell with it”. They moved with the two children to the land of her husband’s family in Agua del Maíz. She was 30 years old and had iron convictions like concrete pillars.
“Since we arrived, the creatures swallowed a glass of lemon with olive oil and a clove of minced garlic every day. He stopped me and shouted: ‘they entered a Spartan regime’. He would get them up at 6 in the morning to take away the ‘urban sucker’. Every day they went to milk up to the hill in front and in the afternoons to keep the calves in the corral. At three months the children were running uphill. They could have grown up rejecting all that, but Roberto and Mario absorbed their parents’ causes as their own. Today Roberto Jr. is in charge of the Grupo Ecológico wilderness program and Mario of the Tonatico school ranch.
The quiet country life would be over soon, because of the volcano. Every time he went down to town to shop, ‘Pati’ was outraged at what he saw: new roads opened in the cloud forests, poaching, illegal logging, garbage on the hillsides. So he decided to gather a group of friends in Jalpan, the main town in the area, and form an organization to teach environmental education to the population. She was a music teacher, and she used music for that task. “We would get on a ‘pickup’ with the microphone and the accordion and we would go to the schools in Pinal de Amoles. We attacked the entire school. We sang, recited poetry, recycled paper, played with the children, but always with the aim of raising environmental awareness”.
They began to print some “newspapers” on global warming for the kids, coloring books and learning about the birds of the Sierra Gorda, pamphlets with advice for parents. They made dozens of plays for rural environmental education, zero waste campaigns, glass recycling programs, reforestation campaigns… and the thing began to get bigger than her. She found in the governor of the State at that time, Enrique Burgos, an ally with which to strengthen the project. That’s how they got their first promoters, some old government vans and support for their projects. “But I realized that if we didn’t look for it to be an area with its rules, federal, that blanket was going to be pulled to her side.”
After extensive work with the communities, ‘doña Pati’ managed to have the Sierra Gorda declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1997. The instrument gave her the tools to reject any project that would endanger the region’s rich ecosystems, ranging from cloud and coniferous forests to deciduous forests. For 14 years she was the director of the reserve, a “golden age” in which she fought “a thousand battles in defense of the territory. Because each new Governor is more Kaffir than the previous one”. She stopped the Estórax river dam, six hydroelectric plants and 142 high-voltage towers that they wanted to install along the highway. Her life has not been exempt from threats, as has become the sad reality of Mexico’s defenders. “Every time we said ‘no,’ they put a stick in us.” She remembers the complaint for butterfly trafficking before the Prosecutor’s Office, the smear campaigns.
But nothing stopped his efforts. Over the years he has allied himself with the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations, the World Land Trust and dozens of private companies in order to finance his programs. The numbers today are those of a well-established project, with an unusual impact for a civil society organization in Mexico: they have more than 11,300 hectares of forest protected thanks to conservation payments to the owners of the land, they have seven private reserves to preserve cloud forests and have promoted 56 community tourism micro-enterprises. At 69 years old, ‘Pati’ is still as active as ever, giving online classes to teachers on sustainable development, meeting every day with local authorities and seeking funding to keep the project alive.
The threats to the territory are not few, but compared to other regions of the country, such as Michoacán or Oaxaca, the Sierra Gorda “remains a beacon of light in the face of that darkness.” The steep orography of the terrain is a natural shield for the protection of the territory: it is necessary to cross more than four hundred curves to reach these mountains, and the karstic soil does not allow the development of high-quality timber trees coveted by organized crime groups. . But, above all, here is ‘doña Pati’, ready to spit lava from the volcano against anyone who dares to touch her Sierra Gorda.
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