The Future of Petén

Yesterday we completed our two-day return hike from El Mirador to Carmelita. The bajos again felt muddy and endless, but with the help of an early start and a mule ride, we made it out. On our own, without the archaeologists for the first time in many days, our group of four felt small.

On our return, we were guided by Mauricio, a Salvadoran immigrant who knew the woods more by instinct than by experience (he had only been all the way to Mirador once). Mauricio grew up in western El Salvador, where he was drafted into the military at age 14. He spent four years in the Air Force as a parachutist and parachute instructor, working his way up to sergeant. When El Salvador’s civil war ended, it was no longer safe for him to return home because of his military experience, and he began years of transient work in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. His two daughters from a previous marriage are in Mexico, but his work still takes him all over. He only returns to El Salvador to visit his parents on occasion; he prefers to stay away.

Mauricio and I are nearly peers in age, and yet by accident of birth he is a transient mule driver who has been through a war, and i am a tourist who can barely get into the saddle.

On the trail to Carmelita, in the last stretches, the wider-trunked trees gave way to more spindly ones as we entered private land. The trip from Carmelita to Flores was a further progression through the stages of encroaching land use in Petén. From the microbus we saw the secondary growth forest part in larger and larger patches where the trees had been cut down. Some hillsides were just a sea of stumps, the slash before the burn. Elsewhere, lop-eared cattle grazed on grass and vines behind barbed wire fences.

Coming out of such lush tropical forest (I love the Spanish word exuberante to describe this) it made me profoundly sad to see the land so denuded. On a visceral level, I understood Richard Hansen’s argument that once you see the jungle, how could you not want to preserve it? But I know that’s easier said from the perspective of someone who is here just to look at the land, not to live off of it.