The Future of Petén

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the strangest things about Guatemala is how close it is to the US. And how easy to leave. In our plane, we effortlessly crossed the border where Mexico tries to keep the Guatemalans out, then cleared the wall the US is building to keep the Mexicans out. Just four [...]

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 [...]

I finally got to see more of Guatemala by land yesterday. I left Flores, Petén, with Kara and Nadia at 6 a.m. Hector, our friend and driver, was behind the wheel and we headed south for hours on straight roads passing more treeless land than I had seen my entire time in Guatemala. The vast [...]

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.

FLORES, Guatemala — Today we interviewed Juan Trujillo of Rainforest Alliance, current acting mayor of Carmelita, former president of the Carmelita forest concession. Trujillo describes himself as a skeptic-turned-believer in the concessions concept over the 11-year evolution of Carmelita’s concession. The concession, with its assembly, committees and elected leaders, is a much a [...]

Today head archaeologist Richard Hansen continued our tour of monumental architecture, while discussing his plans for the development of ecotourism at El Mirador. Hansen is convinced that the only way to stop deforestation is to create a legally protected 810,000-acre no-cut area around the archaeological sites here, bounded by the natural borders of the [...]