The Future of Petén

UAXACTÚN, Guatemala — Everyone in this village down a muddy, rutted road, 23 km past the world-famous Maya archaeological site of Tikal, knows how to “xatear.”

The verb, which would stump most Guatemalans, means “to cut xate,” a decorative plant used in floral arrangements in the United States and elsewhere. But as obscure as the word may sound to outside ears, it’s a core activity for most of this village of fewer a little more than 1,000 people.

On Friday we accompanied two teams of xate harvesters out into the thick forests that surround Uaxactún who were equipped with not much more than rubber boots, two kinds of knives and large bundles for trudging home the delicate leaves.

What struck me was that at least in one village, the hope of sustainable development through low-impact forest product harvesting was possible, as many of the the environmental activists were saying. Villagers earn about US $10 a day cutting the plant when it’s in season, and supplement that with the collection of breadnut, chicle for chewing gum and allspice. During the spring they also cut some timber. But the village’s NGO-monitored sustainable logging community timber concession has managed to keep the area more than 90 percent forest, an accomplishment that many other nearby timber concessions cannot point to.

Some of those neighboring concessions are in such bad shape, with the spread of illegal fires, large-scale farms and cattle ranching, that the environmental nonprofit organizations that helped set them up are trying to close them down, hoping their failure won’t drag down the good name of the success stories.

But even here, the word success must be qualified. Only some Uaxactún residents, the ones who can afford household generators, have electricity, and usually they run them a few hours a night. There are only a handful of telephones in the community. Transportation along the road is uncomfortable and infrequent. Most collect their water from roof runoff. There are few jobs that pay anything like what can be made in Flores, the capital of Petén, which is also a major tourist hub.

If, as some international development organizations and governments claim, tourism is the best possibility for this area, that reality has yet to hit Uaxactún. It’s just down the road from where huge tour buses bring thousands travelers from all of the word come to see the pyramids of Tikal, supposedly yielding hundreds of millions of dollars for the local economy.

But even though the village owes its protection from invaders to the park guards at Tikal, hardly anyone ever makes it to Uaxactún, accessible only by that one dirt road to see the ruins there. One town resident has a collection of more than 600 pieces of Maya art donated by xate harvesters who rescued them from looter trenches at the archaeological sites at the edge of town. Yet the room is only opened for the rare visit of an out-of-towner, and the donation box hasn’t earned enough to pay for photocopied brochures, much less proper curation or museum cases.

Must Uaxactún and other scattered success stories remain poor and isolated in order to remain models of sustainable development? Would adding more economic opportunity to the mix also imperil the balance these villagers have struck with nature? It’s hard to tell from a quick visit, but it’s easy to see why development experts who want to find ways to harmonize human settlement with the environment would study this little town.