The Future of Petén

LAGUNA DEL TIGRE NATIONAL PARK, Guatemala — The sign announcing the entrance to Laguna del Tigre National Park is large and impressive. The problem is, that’s about the only visible sign that you’re entering a “core protected area” of a massive national wilderness preserve.

We traveled about five hours by four-wheel-drive pickup truck on drenched dirt roads with four police officers riding in the back through kilometer after endless kilometer of cattle pasture clearly converted recently from primary tropical forest. The cows munched grass that had grown up among the charred stumps of massive trees that once formed a canopy over this vast terrain dotted by wetlands and savanna. Though the radio station was tuned to a popular rock/salsa/reggaeton station, whose name translated to “Mahogany 94.5,” all the mahogany trees, and tropical cedars, had long since been cut down along the entire route.

The burning came next. That was also the fate of the guard post at the entrance of the park. Locals — the park rangers call them “invaders” — were unhappy with the presence of law enforcement, and burned down the post. It hasn’t been reoccupied, even though thousands of setters have set up homes, businesses and barbed-wire-delineated ranches as far as the eye can see.

The rangers, from the Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas (National Council of Protected Areas) complain endlessly about the lack of political will to combat the illegal settlements, and the lack of resources to evict people. Ranch after ranch has been the subject of an “accord” whereby the owner is given the “temporary” right to use the land, even if they’re not technically the owners. That may have slowed the invasions, but it’s not about to dislodge those who are already there. Deep into the park we passed a curious but telling sign, “This property for sale.” Problem is, the property belongs to the state.

But possession, as they say in English, anyway, is nine-tenths of the law. And the “possessors” of land within the park are making it known that they’re not about to be removed by a handful of unarmed guards at remote rural camps. One I visited, Control Post Guayacán Tigre, had three guards on the particular 22-day rotation when I visited, and no vehicle to do patrols.

Another element, that I’ll be writing about in future posts and in newspaper articles, is the presence of oil exploration within the park. The oil companies built the roads into the forest to service their pipelines, and the settlers followed them in with their thousands and thousands of cattle. Now the oil companies are providing the Guatemalan government with material support to help police the land, but a huge amount of damage has been done.

I’m still trying to get firm figures from the National Council of Protected Areas about how much forest has been lost in the last decade. The problem is, every time they get a satellite picture of the region from NASA, it shows the forest receding further. The illegal logging and fires are nothing like on the scale of what they were in 2005, when the smoke from northern Guatemala closed schools briefly in Texas. But the government is still wrangling with “ungovernability” in a region that two decades ago it thought it had protected forever.