The ministry, which estimates Mexico is losing 1.3 million acres of forest each year, will also use its bigger budget to step up surveillance in 2005 using helicopters, small planes, satellite images and troops, and will start using a nationwide database.

"We are expanding the scheme and making use of information and experience from 2004, and we will advance, on the path to 2006, towards the elimination of illegal logging," Cardenas told a news conference.

Mexico, a net importer of lumber, has been fighting for years against organized gangs of illegal loggers that are thinning out its jungles and forests -- regarded as precious national heritage as well as home to a key commodity -- and terrorizing local peasants.

In a country where kidnappings and carjackings are run of the mill, the illegal timber trade is equally ruthless. The gangs are frequently armed and work at night to avoid detection, often forcing indigenous locals into selling their trees.

They have also attacked police, government inspectors and journalists, built roadblocks to retake confiscated wood and stormed jails to free workmates, according to media reports.

"Three years ago we had a budget of 200 million pesos ($17.9 million) (to protect) the forestry sector, now we have a budget of more than 2 billion pesos," said Manuel Reed, director general of national forestry commission CONAFOR.

The government's biggest battle is over the state-protected 54,000 hectare (133,400-acre) Monarch butterfly reserve in central Mexico, whose highland fir forests have shrunk by nearly half since 1968, despite massive planting operations.

Hundreds of millions of Monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico from the United States and Canada each year, arriving in a golden cloud that attracts some 200,000 visitors.

During their four-month stay they depend on fir trees for shelter in the cold mountain winters and even small holes in a forest canopy can expose them to fatally cold temperatures.