ABOUT SMA:
SMA HISTORY

The Sierra Madre Alliance developed out of a campaign concerning the cultural and environmental impacts of a $90 million World Bank Forestry Development Loan intended for the Sierra Tarahumara. SMA founder, Randall Gingrich, was then the director of the Southwest Rainforest Alliance (SRA), which had conducted a number of campaigns against destructive World Bank development programs in tropical countries.

In 1991, Gingrich co-organized an international forum on the Sierra Madre Forestry Loan, which was attended by U.S. and Mexican NGOs, World Bank representatives, and the Mexican government. The conference fostered an international movement which succeeded in canceling the loan. Recognizing that the nongovernmental infrastructure in Chihuahua was weak and civil organization essential to change, he began organizing with Mexican partners in Chihuahua.

Randall joined with a native of the Sierra, Edwin Bustillos, and a group of Tarahumara and Tepehuan promoters who formed CASMAC (the Advisory Council of the Sierra Madre). At the request of Tarahumara communities, SMA and CASMAC exposed illegal logging and World Bank-financed road-building in regions dominated by violent drug gangs. SMA and CASMAC launched an international campaign against violence and logging and began to collaborate with a number of courageous Mexican officials, among them the former Federal Attorney General in Chihuahua, Teresa Jardí.

SMA and CASMAC, with help from the Biodiversity Support Program managed by World Wildlife Fund, began to plan alternatives to the World Bank program. Numerous indigenous pueblos proposed protected areas. Many more requested assistance with human rights issues, illegal logging, land tenure problems, and projects to alleviate the extreme poverty and hunger in their communities. Underfunded and understaffed, CASMAC struggled to meet these demands.

Edwin Bustillos
was awarded
the Goldman Environmental
Prize in 1996.

Edwin Bustillos was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1996. In 1998, SMA and former CASMAC staff formed a coalition to continue serving the communities. That same year, SMA helped found MITYTAC, an indigenous women’s cooperative. The new coalition succeeded in stopping illegal logging in the pueblo of Pino Gordo and has gone on to support the creation of a community-proposed protected natural area.

In 2004 a coalition of SMA associates and community leaders formed the Consego Ecoregional Sierra Tarahumara A.C. which manages regional and local conservation and community development projects.

Tierra Nativa A.C. was formed in 2006 to defend land rights of traditional communities and to protect the human rights of environmental defenders who are at risk of persecution from powerful ranchers and loggers.