Environment : Progress Tramples Mexico Frontier : Pemex’s search for oil has brought civilization to the jungle--and is killing the last rain forest in North America.

BENEMERITO DE LAS AMERICAS, Mexico —  As far as Aniseto Sanchez is concerned, the road started it all.

Before Petroleos Mexicanos cleared a 100-mile swath through the Lacandon rain forest to begin its search for oil in 1983, Benemerito was a sleepy river town entertained by wild spider monkeys and scarlet macaws. Visitors arrived by boat.

The dirt road, Sanchez said, ushered in a host of modern-day comforts, from bus service to a new 36-bed hospital. But it also brought an army of oil workers to erect metal rigs like jungle skyscrapers and burrow thousands of feet into the fertile soil.

Settlers moved in behind the oil company, razing miles of bush with match and machete to open pastures for their cattle. All along the road, fields are marked by charred tree stumps that stand like tombstones over their own graves.

Benemerito is a boom town in a rapidly disappearing jungle. And the state oil monopoly, called Pemex, is the marching band at the head of this procession of civilization that is trammeling Mexico’s final frontier in the southern tip of Chiapas state. It is encroaching on what is left of North America’s last rain forest.

“Some of us try to protect our area, and others don’t care,” said Sanchez, a 42-year-old farmer. “I was born here and try to care. Others come from outside to destroy, then leave again.”

Company officials insist they are taking extraordinary measures to protect the tropical environment around their drilling sites. They plant trees to replace ones they have to cut down, treat the waste water from drilling and post signs warning workers against cutting greenery or capturing animals. They recently handed out 1,500 cooking stoves to Indians around the municipal capital of Ococingo to keep them from burning firewood.

In February, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari visited the Lacandon jungle and established a commission and a $10-million fund to preserve it. He expanded the Monte Azules preserve to 135,000 acres.

But already the impact of oil production is dramatic in the area of Benemerito, where parabolic antennas bloom like jungle flowers and truck traffic abounds. Residents and environmentalists fear the drilling will destroy what is left of the beleaguered rain forest. It has been reduced by loggers, cattlemen, farmers and oil workers to roughly 2,070 square miles, less than half its size 50 years ago.

In the wake of the Pemex gas explosions that killed more than 200 people in Guadalajara in April, residents say they worry about an industrial accident. After all, they note, the company hasn’t even extracted oil yet. What happens in the future when it does?

If the past is any lesson, Benemerito residents might look for answers eight hours up the road in the ecological nightmare of Reforma, where Pemex has been producing oil for a decade.

A bucolic farming town of 6,763 people in 1970--only 627 more than a decade earlier--Reforma today is a city of 30,000 residents, 800 oil wells, a gas refinery and an industrial zone.

And pollution. Acid rain. Contaminated lagoons. Sick crops. Cattle whose offspring are stillborn.

In a neighborhood of wood shanties behind the industrial park, corroded pipes spew a stream of oily red and green industrial sludge, to which resident Carlos Hernandez puts a lighter. In seconds, the creek erupts in a thunder of flames and black smoke.

“I have to burn it, otherwise it backs up onto our property,” said Hernandez, 29.

His neighbor, Moises Mendoza, 19, scolds his younger brothers for occasionally playing in the toxic sludge. He points to his well about 50 feet from the creek and says, “The water’s no good.” But he uses it anyway, filtering the brown water through an enamel pot of sand before washing with it or giving his chickens a drink.

Journalist Blas Aldecoa Burelo was born in Reforma 37 years ago. “When I grew up, this was Macondo,” Aldecoa said, referring to the fictional town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

“It was the most isolated town in the world.”

In other words, said Pemex spokesman Mario Martinez, “Reforma used to be like Benemerito.”

As in Benemerito, Pemex built roads to bring drilling equipment into Reforma and men to work the rigs--outsiders with experience in the oil industry. The company built a highway to the state capital of Tuxtla and suburban-style housing for its employees. Soon, farmers turned from agriculture to commerce, renting rooms and opening roadside restaurants and stores.

At the end of 1972, Pemex struck gold.

“At first, everyone was happy because Reforma would change,” recalled Edmundo Gomez, 77. “We went to the well and lit fireworks. But after that, there were consequences. You know, oil is like falling in love with a girl you don’t know. You never know if she’ll be good or bad.”

How long was he in love? “Not very long. Everything got expensive, housing was scarce. All the people came and took the jobs. Delinquents came. There was alcohol and fights. Prostitution.”

Then came the pollution.

“When they burn the oil, day looks like night. We get acid rain. The fish taste bad,” Gomez said.

He is one of the original members of the 1,500-acre El Carmen ejido, or communal farm, roughly a third of which is now occupied by Pemex installations. He points to cracks in the wall of his concrete house and storefront. He says they were caused by vibrations from the Cactus refinery a mile away.

His friend Jose Alfredo Morales leans against the store window and adds his list of complaints: “When I was 15, the corn crop gave 100%. Now it doesn’t even give 10%. The cattle drink the water in the lagoon and their young are born too soon, dead.”

Oil is dirty business under the best of circumstances. But Reforma is the product of an unbridled state monopoly that was ordered in the 1970s to forge ahead at top speed in the exploration and production of oil. The discovery of Mexico’s huge reserves coincided with a giant increase in world oil prices and then-President Jose Lopez Portillo’s decision to make oil the motor of Mexican economic development.

In 1974, Mexico made the leap from an oil importer to an oil exporter. The Tabasco-Chiapas area, which produced about 60,000 barrels a day in 1970, was producing 1 million barrels a day by about 1976, according to Pemex spokesman Martinez. Most of that was in the Reforma area.

Pemex was so powerful that in Tabasco state the constitution was altered to allow the company to have access to land first and pay compensation later.

Since then, Pemex’s fortunes have declined along with oil prices. Once the darling of nationalistic Mexicans--the oil industry was nationalized in 1938--the company is now seen as corrupt and irresponsible after the Guadalajara accident. On government orders to clean up its act, Pemex hired Bechtel, the San Francisco-based engineering firm, to inspect its aging installations and operations throughout the country.

Salinas, a more environmentally aware president than his predecessors, is also a free-market champion who believes in privatization and decentralization. Taking advantage of the shift in public sentiment, he plans to break Pemex into several smaller companies. While oil exploration and extraction will remain in government hands, refining and other aspects of the industry will increasingly fall to private enterprise.

The question is whether these changes will come in time to save what remains of Lacandon forest.

The bustle of Benemerito suggests it may be too late.

Claver and Alina Noyola left drudgery in Los Angeles a year ago to take a chance on a hamburger stand on the main dusty drag in Benemerito. They arrived a month before electricity finally made its way into town.

There were only four restaurants in Benemerito when they opened their A & D eatery advertising “authentic Mexican and American food.” Today they face competition from 15 establishments, most boasting not only refrigeration for food supplies but also stereo music and video entertainment to accompany a meal.

The reason for such rapid growth, the Noyolas say, is Pemex.

“Pemex is a determining factor here,” Claver Noyola said over coffee. “The company attracts people like a magnet.”

Most of the 120 Pemex workers based at the nearby Lacantun camp are skilled laborers from out of town. They are bused into the camp from Ciudad Pemex in Tabasco state for two weeks of back-breaking work in shifts of 12 hours a day, seven days a week. At the El Cantil derrick, in a jungle clearing, they are drilling 15,000 feet into the ground.

They live apart from townsfolk in neat rows of air-conditioned, prefabricated houses less than five miles from Benemerito. At the end of their two weeks, they are bused out again for a two-week rest.

Nonetheless, the impact of the well-paid oil workers is obvious. They eat in restaurants, dance at the local disco and shop in the market.

Claver Noyola, who earns two or three times the wage he was paid in Los Angeles, said: “The oil workers earn 30,000 or 40,000 pesos a day, so when someone charges them 7,000 pesos for something, they happily pay it. But the campesinos can’t afford to pay.”

Municipal agent Alfredo Ruiz Ramos has seen Benemerito grow from a bandit-ridden, mosquito-bitten community of 1,000 people eight years ago to a town of nearly 7,000--so big that he is seeking to have it declared a municipality, separate from the town of Ococingo 200 miles away.

Ruiz, who represents the mayor of Ococingo, wrote to President Salinas on May 4 asking for potable drinking water, sewage pipes, a secondary school and other urban amenities. And he has asked the telephone company to provide service to Benemerito.

On a wall behind Ruiz hangs a poster of the Lacandon animals on the endangered species list--monkeys, jaguars, crocodiles, tortoises and macaws.

Oil workers say they still occasionally see a macaw or wildcat in the early morning when they go to work at the Lacandon and El Cantil rigs. Unlike the lagoons in Reforma, Benemerito’s Usumacinta and Grijalva rivers are still fresh. But those who have watched the town and Pemex camp grow ask how much longer that will be true.

“The water is still clean and sweet,” said one veteran oilman. “Who knows about the future. I think the government is worried about the environment. But every year the people burn more and more of the forest. And now they say there’s oil here. . . .”