The Future of Petén

LA PASADITA, Guatemala — The signs were all there: tree stumps, hastily constructed barbed-wire fences and stray cattle. All that was missing was the perpetrator — or perpetrators — of this all too common environmental crime.

About 45 hectares of forestland had been burned, replaced by corn plots and tall grasses, with a few cattle scattered about. About 50 head of cattle congregated around an artificial watering hole.
Officials said they arrested the men they believed to be responsible for this unauthorized land-use change, but they were out of jail on administrative supervision. They face long prison terms if convicted.

The problem is that log-slash-burn-farm-ranch-abandon cycles are rampant in this are of the Department of Petén, and that environmental officials seldom have enough knowledge of who’s responsible to make a conviction. Even in zones like this one, in which communities were explicitly given forestry concessions on the condition that they cut only selected trees in certain areas over long cutting cycles — what some environmentalists call sustainable forestry.

This plot, cleared earlier this year, was different. Some officials, with the Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas (National Council of Protected Areas) apparently identified the men responsible. On our trip, they pointed to a dozen people whose truck was parked by the side of the road, at least until the officials arrived with more than a dozen soldiers and police showed up.

The Los Angles Times published a really on-target article last week,“Smugglers, poachers thrive in Guatemala’s Peten,” which suggested that most of these so-called land invasions are the work of narco-ranchers, drug dealers who use cattle ranching to launder their ill-gotten gains. Hence the military backup.

I’m going into the heart of this region tomorrow, Laguna del Tigre National Park, which has been so degraded by settlers and ranchers that many environmentalists say the region, which was until the last decade almost entirely forested, and still contains the most extensive freshwater wetlands in the country, is beyond rescue. But whether or not these lands can be reclaimed in the name of “governability” is something all players in this battle care deeply about, even if the state lacks the resources to follow up.

The president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, made a point of reclaiming these lands in his talk last week introducing the Cuatro Balam (roughly, “Four Corners”) concept to create a megaparklike conservation zone out of the northern Petén. But the plan still lacks details.