Honduras”. He described the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) as a “monster”, threatening to open up Honduran forests to faster deforestation.

Fr Tamayo organised two Marches for Life where thousands of Hondurans walked to the capital city, demanding a logging ban. Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa and head of the country’s Catholic Church, joined them.

Elsewhere the Catholic Bishops of Northern Mexico have criticised lumber companies for having “no vision of the future” and “placing economic incentives before all else”. In 2005, a Brazilian Catholic bishop succeeded in stalling a huge irrigation project for Brazil’s impoverished Northeast by staging a hunger strike. Bishop Luiz Flavio Cappio vowed to keep up his hunger strike until death unless President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government cancelled a US$2 billion project to divert water from the Sao Francisco River. Around 70 per cent of the water from the project would go for production of shrimp, grapes, flowers, and other farm exports. Only about 4 per cent would go to the homes of poor families in arid areas. Campaigners believed it would exacerbate problems already being felt due to climate change.

Latin American work stemming from the World Council of Churches (WCC) Climate Change initiative is co-ordinated by Carlos Tamez, a Presbyterian pastor in Mexico. He was part of the WCC delegation at the climate conference in Montreal in December 2005, where he outlined his region’s vulnerability to increasingly severe and frequent hurricanes, to drought and desertification, to hunger, and to forced migration – a litany of perils that he attributed to climate change. At the same event, the Argentine ecumenical patriarch Elias Crisostomo Abramides described the effects of climate change in Argentina, from melting and receding glaciers to eroding coastlines, as well as intensifying desertification and increasing outbreaks of tropical diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever in formerly temperate zones. “We are dealing not only with a technological issue,” he said, “but with a spiritual crisis that has taken us to the present situation.”

(From Up in Smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean, August 2006)