The Future of Petén

Please take a look at our new Wikipedia entry on “Cuatro Balam” and feel free to edit and add more accurate content. One of the items we’re in discussion about is the origins of Cuatro Balam. Many people we talked with seemed to suggest that Cuatro Balam was not just an initative, but a geographic reference too, [...]

The road to El Mirador  By Nadia Sussman for the Mercury News Buried beneath deep jungle growth in Guatemala’s northern reaches, the ancient Maya metropolis of El Mirador is worth the walking. And walking, and walking some more. Go now for the rare chance to experience lush tropical forest and have the ancient city — more [...]

It’s the last leg of our journey back from Guatemala and I marvel at the difference in the landscape from above — houses neatly dotted against the foothill ridges and valleys of California’s sloping red terrain inching all the way from Los Angeles in random sproutings of civilization. It’s the same feeling I had while [...]

As the sun emerges from the gray-brown smog that hangs over Guatemala City’s wet streets, we board our plane and are inundated by the sounds of English words, and babies crying — for the most part a universal language of frustration. Our time here is ended (for now) and I point the Blackberry in different [...]

Our Future of Petén multimedia team has been searching the Flores, Guatemala area for lumber workers to tell us their story. Today we found a few and broke that Flores lassitude fade into the distance.

The jungle of Mirador spit us out on Sunday. One hundred miles swelling up our feet, we stumbled into Carmelita and drank ourselves a Famosa and inhaled some PBJ sandwiches while watching las mulas swat away flies from their behinds. Small curious childen watched us as we sprawled on plastic lawn chairs y Doña Pati [...]

The more than 40-mile trek from Mirador to Tintal, Guatemala, did at times involve hopping on the mule during rain torrents.

July 13, 2008 FLORES, Guatemala — From our plush hotel balcony in Flores, Don Oscar’s house sits by my pinky when I stretch my arm out. A week ago we landed there straight from the bus ride from Guatemala City and scrambled to keep things organized and to have a sense of where we were [...]

July 12, 2008 TINTAL, Guatemala — Tintal is quiet and empty without the anthropologists. In the distance the howling monkeys scrape their calls through the night. We sit under a xate rooftop and listen to it rain again and again while we drink hot sweetened milk – our eyes glazed over from fatigue. We’ve untied [...]

The laboratory in the jungle is a small oasis of electricity and Wi-Fi in Peten’s sea of rainforest darkness broken only by the drone of cicadas that is present all day. Every night, David Barreda and I move in with a bag of battery chargers, power strips, two laptops and a multitude of gadgets that [...]