The Future of Petén

GUATEMALA CITY — This morning I flew to Guatemala City with half a dozen officials and NGO representatives from the Guatemalan state of Petén. They were all rushing to the capital for an impromptu meeting with President Álvaro Colom, who is unveiling a proposal that he says will promote forest conservation on a grand scale.

There have been numerous initiatives, but nothing seems to be able to adequately protect the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a United Nations-inspired patchwork of protected areas created in 1990 that covers the northern half of the state. But nearly two decades later, only about 70 percent of the original forest cover remains.

So the officials are dubious. They’ve heard proposals before. There are lots of “paper parks” in Guatemala, but little environmental enforcement because there is so little money for rangers to do their work. Whatever change comes has to be significant. And it has to come early in Colom’s administration. Sources tell me the newly elected president´s honeymoon is running out.

His plan is called “Four Balam,” a reference not to a geographic area but a cosmological vision handed down from the ancient Maya, signifying the bearers of good news from each of the four cardinal directions. In terms of cultural sensitivity, at least, Colom seems to be making the right gestures.

On the 8:30 a.m. Taca Airlines flight I sat next to a community activist named Bayron Castellanos, a “blue-blood Petenero” whose family arrived there in 1826. He’s the head of an organization coincidentally called Balam, which is attempting to gather environmental and community groups that have been at loggerheads for years over various proposals to control the illegal burning, cutting, farming, ranching, artifact looting and drug smuggling in the region.

Castellanos, like his colleagues at Wildlife Conservation Society, with whom he shares office space in Petén’s capital, Flores, is of the opinion that the main problem in forest conservation is enforcing the laws already on the books, not recasting hard-won but imperfect solutions such as community forest concessions. He’s an archaeologist by training who advocates what he calls “social archaeology.” To paraphrase a refrain heard throughout the profession in this country, archaeological projects that excavate the past while ignoring the needs of the present population of the area is a sterile endeavor. Likewise, he says, the poverty and lack of economic opportunities in the region make conservation of Guatemala’s rich cultural and natural patrimony a futile effort. That’s why he has been working since 2006 to gather what are called multisectoral roundtables to decide the best way forward for the region’s sustainable development.

Sitting next to Castellanos on the flight this morning was a key player indeed — Marcedonio Cortave, director of the organization that represents all 12 forestry concessions in the Biosphere. He noted with a pained expression on his face that the president’s initiative was called so quickly that the government neglected to include the heads of the concessions themselves in the list of 250 dignitaries invited to tonight’s event. An inauspicious sign, they agreed.

In the seat behind Cortave was Cynthia Perera, a representative from the U.S. Department of the Interior, whose International Technical Assistance Program is helping forest rangers in Guatemala come up with a plan to better patrol and promote ecotourism in the region. She has been working with many of the groups to try to iron out a stable management plan for the archaeology archaeotourism of the Mirador-Río Azúl National Park. One of her key partners is the Mirador Basin Project, which has proposed controversial new ecopark boundaries and is attracting big international investments.

Also on the flight: Gustavo Pinelo of Rainforest Alliance, an international NGO that helps market exotic wood products on the international market.

I also got to interview Ángel Cano, mayor of the expansive municipality of San Andrés, which covers nearly half the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Or so he says. The municipality next door, San José, claims much of the land that Cano says is in his township. The dispute matters because it’s an indicator of the tremendous economic wealth that still remains to be tapped in the region. Though much of the land has been deforested and polluted by oil exploration, there is still much more wood, petroleum and agricultural wealth to be extracted — and taxed — in Guatemala’s northern frontier.