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When I learned last November that California’s then-governor Schwarzenegger had signed agreements to build a carbon offset protocol into California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32) (see AlterNet’s coverage here and here), and that one of these agreements was with the state of Chiapas, Mexico, where I’ve spent significant time, I wondered immediately what this would mean for the Indigenous communities of Chiapas, who have engaged in a long struggle for autonomy over their resources and territories.

Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, is Mexico’s poorest state, with large areas of forest and the country’s largest indigenous population. In 2009, the state launched and began widely publicizing its Climate Change Action Programme. The plan includes vast biofuel plantations, forest carbon offset projects, and a statewide “productive reconversion” initiative to convert subsistence farmers into producers of African palm, Jatropha, and export-oriented crops such as roses, fruits, and coffee.

I traveled to Chiapas in March to investigate. Among the dozens of people I spoke with was Gustavo Castro Soto, the coordinator of Otros Mundos, a small but prolific organization based in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the old colonial capital of Chiapas. Otros Mundos is the coordinating body of Friends of the Earth (FOE) Mexico, and a member of FOE International; locally, regionally, and internationally, Gustavo and Otros Mundos work to bring attention to the environmental and human rights impacts of corporate-led globalization in the form of large dams, mining, industrial agriculture, and, most recently, market-oriented climate mitigation policies such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the emergent protocol known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).