The Future of Petén

On July 16, when Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom presented the Cuatro Balam plan for increased tourism and environmental protection within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, he showed the following video:

The video invokes the wisdom of the ancient Maya, their superior knowledge of the heavens and the natural world. It goes on to paint a picture of the year 2023. The region is protected from invasive farming, drug trafficking and illegal logging. We see toucans and ancient pyramids rising above the jungle canopy. Major archaeological sites such as El Mirador are accessible to tourists by an electric train and 12 million people have visited the area. A new university promotes the study of the region’s flora and fauna by global scholars.

Much stands between this bucolic vision of Petén and present-day realities. Thousands of people live within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, legally and illegally. As of now, the government periodically evicts illegally settled communities in an effort to enforce the reserve’s boundaries. If the Cuatro Balam plan gains momentum and secures funding, evictions may accelerate. Already, CONAP, the government agency for protected areas, is undertaking a “technical integral study” to determine which communities will have to go.

In early August, just weeks after Colom’s Cuatro Balam press conference, the Guatemala City daily paper Prensa Libre reported on government efforts to evict a group of 120 families from an area in the Maya Biosphere Reserve just 20 km outside of El Mirador. According to Prensa Libre, a group called Xalbal-Laguna Larga, originally from the departments of Quiché and Huehuetenango in western Guatemala, had cut down 40 hectares of forest land and burned a thousand more in the two years since their arrival. When confronted by the government, the community at first refused to leave, demanding that they be resettled on a plantation with developed infrastructure. According to Roan McNab of Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the government was eventually able to broker their departure.

This past June, the Coordinadora Nacional Indigena y Campesina (CONIC), a rural advocacy group, said in a press release that the army had displaced 125 Maya Qeq’chi families in a community called Yalá within the Maya Biosphere Reserve. They said the army and police burned 95 dwellings including all the personal possessions of the inhabitants, tear gassed the community, and wounded several people including two who were macheted. After the eviction, community members returned to Yalá saying they had nowhere else to go.

I have been unable to confirm the details of the Yalá eviction with civil society groups or with CONAP, which is charged with enforcing the rules of the biosphere reserve in conjunction with the army and the national police. According to McNab, the government was eventually able to arrange a departure here as in Xalbal-Laguna Larga.

Incidents like these illustrate the gap between current realities in Petén and the government’s aspirations for Cuatro Balam. A 2006 report by CONAP and WCS estimated that about 10,000 “colonists” were living within the reserve at that time, that is, individuals who arrived after the formation of the reserve in 1990 and who have not received legal status as part of a community forest concession or agricultural polygon.

If the government wants to prevent illegal deforestation in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, it will have to reduce or eliminate the influx of new settlers in the park. This is in part a problem of enforcement resources. According to CONAP’s Mariela Lopez, there are only 150 soldiers and 250 to 300 park guards for the entire Petén, a number insufficient to protect the reserve’s 21,602 square kilometers.

Moreover, the government will have to address those individuals currently living in the reserve without legal title. In the past this process has proceeded piecemeal and resulted in a combination of evictions and the somewhat haphazard granting of legal status to certain groups.

Evictions remain highly politically problematic. They are potentially arbitrary, given the number of illegal communities in the park, and, as in the case of Yalá, they may lead to claims of human rights abuses. The Yalá press release likened the displacement to the “scorched earth” policy of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, during which hundreds of indigenous villages were razed by the military. While Petén was not a major theater of war, nor are the majority of its residents indigenous, the imagery of burning homes and the violence it implies still have resonance for many in Guatemala.

Still, according to WCS’s McNab, relocation of communities outside the reserve “is not viable, and will only provide a perverse incentive for more groups to invade protected areas. … Many resettled people sell their new properties and go back to reinvade.”

The problem is compounded by a pattern where small farmers are often paid by wealthy ranchers to invade and cut down forestland. Several years later, the ranchers displace the campesinos with cattle. Meanwhile, according to the WCS-CONAP report, campesinos are much more likely to be evicted while farming within the reserve than powerful landowners, despite the fact that subsistence farming has milder environmental impacts. Says McNab, “There MUST be some high profile evictions of the powerful for justice to prevail.”

In other words, if the government of Guatemala wants to create conditions favorable to international tourism, the preservation of cultural heritage, and academic advancement, it will have to confront social hierarchies. In a country where government is still dominated by an oligarchic ruling class, this will require a political will yet to be seen.