Creating a Logjam in Honduras

SALAMA, Honduras — Father Andres Tamayo, for eight years the priest for this farming town in the piney woods of central Honduras, doesn't look like a man who can marshal a thousand followers at a few hours' notice.

The 48-year-old Roman Catholic priest is, in his own words, a "short Indian," balding and lumpily built, who usually dresses in faded jeans and ragged golf shirts. Away from the pulpit, he easily is lost in crowds.

Yet when he preaches, his arms waving and his tenor voice booming, his usually timid flock of poor farmers and careworn homemakers is galvanized, eager to be transformed into a corps of shock troops to stop what he calls indiscriminate environmental destruction by the country's loggers.

After decades of mismanaged logging that has erased half of Honduras' forests, rural communities such as Salama are left with what residents say are the consequences of deforestation: ruined water supplies, eroding topsoil, thinned-out wildlife and a dried-out climate. Many say they have nothing to lose by following Tamayo.

"The padre is our guide," said Alonso Santos Paz, an impoverished farmer who said he had grown desperate with the failure of his bean and corn crops the last two years for lack of water. "If it weren't for what our family members send us from the [United] States, we'd be dying of hunger here."

A dozen times last year, the people of Salama and thousands of other followers blocked highways and bridges to stop timber lorries, took over city halls and shut down logging operations here in Olancho province, which has the nation's largest timber reserves.

From this backwoods parish, Tamayo has built a nationwide following -- last year, he led 40,000 protesters from across Honduras on a march on the capital against wholesale deforestation. He has become Honduras' leading environmentalist.

The firebrand priest seems on a collision course with loggers and is aware of the possibly lethal consequences. Many of the nation's timber cutters are ruthless outlaws who have formed logging mafias and killed activists who got in their way. Since 1996, three members of Tamayo's Environmental Movement of Olancho, known by its Spanish acronym, MAO, have been gunned down.

The killing last month of an American nun, Dorothy Stang, who had battled illegal logging in the Amazon rain forests in Brazil, brought home the risks to Tamayo.