How illegal logging is fueling CDMX forest fires

The forest in Topilejo, still smoking a week after a blaze, with brigadiers setting out water for local animals. Image credit: Axel Hernández.

by Madeleine Wattenbarger and Axel Hernández.

“Because I saw they were destroying the forest, I had to come take care of it,” says Jorge Luis Morales of his decision twenty years ago to join the Teporingos forest-protection brigade.

Wildfires and illegal logging threaten the forest around Morales’s home community of San Miguel Topilejo, Tlalpan, where last week flames ripped through about six hundred hectares of woods. Burns have worsened since 2020 thanks to combustibles left behind by illegal logging operations.

Topilejo sits on the far southern edge of Mexico City, where it harbors 6,000 hectares of a community ecological reserve. Part of the capital’s recently dubbed “water forest,” the area remains governed by a communal land-holding structure. The brigade members, part of the Topilejo community, work year-round to reforest, prevent blazes and keep the trees healthy. “We take care of the forest so that Mexico City can have water,” Morales says.

The Teporingos community brigades used drones to map the area consumed by last week’s fire in Las Palomas, Tlalpan. Image credit: Axel Hernández.

The fire last week ripped through the Las Palomas area on the Mexico City border with Morelos. A week after they put the flames out, the Teporingos brigades returned to Las Palomas, this time to leave watering holes for the animals whose habitats were destroyed.

“[The fire] was heartbreaking,” recalled Rosa Vázquez, the first female leader of the Teporingos brigade–named after a rabbit endemic to the southern Mexico City forest–and the first Topilejo woman in the role. “It destroyed all kinds of life, flora, fauna, and all the species that survive in the forest.”

Rosa Vázques, the first woman forest-protection brigade leader in San Miguel Topilejo. Image credit: Axel Hernández.

Just a few meters away from the México-Cuernavaca highway, freshly felled trees over the burned grass revealed that the illegal loggers continue operating in the area just a few days after the fire.

The brigadiers routinely patrol the paths into the forest to document the damage caused by this lucrative business. Pine is the most used wood in many industries, but only the biggest straight trunks are useful to make planks. The rest of the trees became potential fuel. Since the logging increased, the fires became harder to put out. Each one represents serious harm to the ecosystem and to local species, many of them at risk of extinction, like the Sierra Madre sparrow and the teporingo, the second smallest rabbit in the world.

The presence of firearm-toting loggers also limits the brigades. “This fire got complicated because there wasn’t much prevention work done, because the loggers were there,” says Aarón Flores Gutiérrez, who joined the Teporingos after 36 years as a firefighter with the National Forest Commission (CONAFOR).

The National Guard and military are stationed in the area to combat the loggers. They occasionally seize trucks filled with illegal wood, but the fires are evidence that the plunder is far from over.

Despite the area’s importance for the capital’s water supply and air quality, the Teporingos work without equipment, healthcare or labor contracts. The firefighting brigades are part of the Commission of Natural Resources and Rural Development (CORENADR). Currently, CORENADR hires brigadiers as beneficiaries of a social program rather than as workers, a hiring scheme adopted during President Claudia Sheinbaum’s time as the city’s mayor. Unlike other government workers, those who maintain Mexico City’s water supply are not entitled to healthcare. They also have to provide their own helmets, goggles, gloves and flame-retardant uniforms.

Just a few days after the fire went out, illegal loggers returned to the area to continue cutting down trees. Image credit: Axel Hernández.

“Sometimes we have maximum-magnitude fire and we don’t have resistant tools to combat that fire,” says Vázquez, the brigade leader. “You run the risk of getting burned in a fire. We need insurance, somewhere where you know for certain they’ll attend you in case of an accident and uniforms that are adequate for our work.”

Despite their precarious working conditions, the Teporingos dedicate their lives to protecting the woods and its biodiversity.

As the firefighting veteran Gutiérrez puts it, “All forests are important, but this forest is the lungs of Mexico City.”

Editor’s Note: Axel Hernández is a Mexican reporter and photojournalist specializing in covering human rights and environmental movements.