ZIHUATENEJO, Mexico — The forest is struggling back to life on the once-barren slopes of the Sierra Madre above this Pacific coastal resort, seven years after Felipe Arreaga's defiant band of farmers turned back the logging trucks.

A group of women led by Arreaga's wife has trucked in 176,000 red-cedar saplings and planted them around 13 villages in the Coyuquilla River Valley. Most of those communities have stopped issuing logging permits and clearing new fields for crops or cattle. Others enforce limits on what timber comes down and have started tree nurseries.

Residents say the undergrowth is noticeably thicker, soaking up more rain and causing streams that had dwindled to rise.

"The roadblock was the turning point," said Damian Ruiz Vazquez, leader of the Zapotillal farming community. "We are learning to care for our forests."

Arreaga, 56, has taught that lesson more effectively than anyone else, the valley's farmers say. The devout Roman Catholic describes how his calling to safeguard a God-given "paradise on Earth" helped defeat the practice of illegal logging.

But this is a story he must tell from jail. Arreaga was charged in November in the murder of the son of the conservationists' nemesis, the wealthy landowner who brokered the sell-off of the valley's timber during the 1980s and '90s. Arreaga is awaiting trial.

Local farmers and Amnesty International say the landowner, Bernardo Bautista Valle, initiated the murder charge as vengeance for the anti-logging roadblock, which occurred weeks before the 1998 killing. The accusation, which also names 10 other anti-logging activists as suspects, is based solely on testimony of another Bautista son, who survived the roadside ambush.

Several people support Arreaga's alibi that he was attending a wedding at the time. A different explanation for the murder has gained credence in the valley: The landowner's estranged wife allegedly ordered one of his bodyguards killed for setting up her husband with a mistress, but the hired gunmen mistook her son for the intended target.

"I am innocent, and a lot of people know it," Arreaga said through a chain-link fence in the visiting area of Zihuatenejo's prison. "The only thing I have done is not to let them take down what is left of our forest."

A lawless state

"The international community — those who protect human rights and those who protect the environment — are watching Guerrero," said Marcia Newlands, a Seattle attorney representing the Environmental Defender Law Center, based in Salt Lake City.

Arreaga's defenders said they are counting on new Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca, who took office on April 1, to re-examine the case and drop the prosecution.

Arreaga's case "could be an indicator of change or no change in Guerrero," said Arreaga's local attorney, Mario Patron.

Torreblanca was elected by the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party, which alleges that hundreds of its activists were killed for political reasons under the now-ousted Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held power from 1929 to 2000.

Mexico is trying to consolidate a democracy five years after voters ended a seven-decade grip on the presidency by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. In many parts of the country, however, the old system endures as local bosses known as "caciques" manipulate the legal system for political and personal vendettas.

The fight over logging in this corner of Guerrero, a lawless state long ruled by the PRI, has come to a standoff. Ecologists have mobilized enough farmers to stop the loggers. But the offended cacique Bautista, years after leaving his cattle ranch near El Mameyal after his son's death, still casts a shadow of fear.

"Nobody is going to testify for Felipe, because people here are still afraid of that gentleman who went away," said El Mameyal's mayor, Elio Martinez Mateos, Others say Bautista continues to live deep in the Sierra Madre and often sends his "pistoleros" on menacing errands in a black SUV.

But no one seems to know exactly where he lives. The cacique and his surviving son are formal accusers in the murder case, but when Judge Jose Jacobo Gorrostieta tried to summon them to Zihuatenejo in November for cross-examination, his secretary could not locate them and gave up trying.

That presents a problem for the jailed ecologist, who under Mexican law must prove his innocence.

"For the moment, he is considered the probable culprit," the judge said, adding that he was not concerned about the powerful economic interests at play.

Those interests involved more than trees. Albertano Penalosa, a farmer in El Mameyal, said he planted marijuana and poppy for opium production on cleared forest land while working for Bautista. He alleged that army troops protected the illegal venture, supplied guns for the cacique's bodyguards and often dropped in for barbecues.

After Arreaga and 103 other farmers blocked the logging trucks, "Bautista was the first to threaten to kill the leaders," recalled Celsa Valdovinos, Arreaga's wife. "He sent the army after them, claiming they were hooded ones" — a term used for the bands of leftist guerrillas roaming the valley at the time.

The army arrested two blockade leaders, Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, in 1999. They confessed under torture to having taken part in an armed rebel attack and spent 2 ½ years in prison. President Vicente Fox, whose election in 2000 toppled the PRI, freed them under pressure from international human-rights groups, but his government has not gone after their torturers.

Montiel and Cabrera since have fled Guerrero, and other members of their Organization of Peasant Ecologists have dropped out. Only Arreaga and his wife have remained active, which is why they believe that he alone has been arrested.

Arreaga said he hopes the recent defeat of the PRI in state elections will bring him justiceTorreblanca, who won big in the valley, has promised to review the case and to break the power of the PRI-allied caciques.

"They are powerful because governors have been complicit," Torreblanca said. "If I had taken their money, I would be their accomplice, but I did not. I will govern without them."