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.

Latin Trade today announced the winners of the Latin Trade Bravo Business Awards intended to “honor government and business leaders for their contributions to progress in Latin America.” The award puts Hansen in the company of corporate leaders such as Michael Dell of Dell computers and Craig Herkert of Wal-Mart Americas, as well as major Latin American political figures. The awards ceremony will take place on October 24 in Miami.

It is jarring to move so quickly from one environment to the next. And I am reminded that this very act — the ability to move freely — has so much to do with the situation in Petén.

Petén is being shaped by politicians and conservationists who draw borders trying to redefine how people and forest products will move through the region. Petén is being shaped by narco-ranchers, invasive farmers and fire-setters who mow down the forest illegally in swaths and patches. Some are big-time landowners with political connections. Others are campesinos who have edged north one by one, seeking the parcela that they couldn’t find anywhere else. Petén is being shaped, too, by the communities rooted there who have been living off the forest for generations. Very few of the latter people could ever get on a plane and just go.

Before we left Guatemala, we had time to explore communities in and near the Maya Biosphere Reserve. First we visited the lumberyard of FORESCOM, a company that markets the forest products of the concessions belonging to umbrella organization ACOFOP. There, we watched as the trees of the jungle were planed, shaved and measured into decking and molding, ready to be exported to the U.S.

From there we visited AFISAP, the concession of San Andrés, a community on the north side of Lago Petén Itzá. There, too, trees were becoming lumber, as is the work of this season. At AFISAP, raw trunks were laid out in the sun, and we could appreciate the enormity of each one. Workers pried off the bark with the full force of their arms and backs, one blow at a time, until the trunks lay bare and ready for the saws.

Raquel, our guide at AFISAP explained that at this rainy time of year, the logging has ended, and the wood is being prepared for export. AFISAP is focusing on marketing some lesser known hardwoods and trying to build international demand. The reason: the mahogany is running out. It will be gone in 10 years, he says. Raquel was the first and only Guatemalan to discuss this problem with us. We had heard a similar prognosis for mahogany from Professor Liza Grandia, formerly of ProPetén. Raquel says that ACOFOP is already strategizing to find other sources of income for forest-dependent communities.

This, of course, raises the question of how sustainable “sustainable” forestry is. As we found out, the results varied dramatically from one community to the next. In communities such as Carmelita and Uaxactún where the traditional economic activities are the harvesting of non-timber forest products, communities have been fairly successful in maintaining the forest, even with a lumber industry. This is in part because they have never been big farmers, and have always depended on the forest ecosystem. In the case of Uaxactún, the security provided by guards at the Tikal archaeological site dramatically reduces their burden to patrol their concession for invaders and illegal loggers and makes it easier to keep the forest intact.

But other communities are less equipped. The day after our AFISAP visit, David and I spent a long time traveling up and down the road between Flores and Carmelita. Our first stop was a CONAP security post under construction. CONAP had been run out of a nearby town called Cruce a Dos Aguadas, where angry community members torched their guard post. Now there are 10 soldiers stationed on the border of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a little ways up from the town. The number will increase to 35, we were told, when the post is finished, and they believe this will be enough to prevent the trafficking of illegal timber, drugs and other products in and out of the Reserve.

Later we stopped in Cruce a Dos Aguadas to learn what happened from the community perspective. One of the leaders, Eliseo Acuña, described how the concession model doesn’t work for communities ill-equipped to live off the forest. The people of Cruce a Dos Aguadas, he said, were farmers. They each wanted individual parcels of farmland instead of tracts of forest. After six years of petitioning the government, particularly the legislature for an agricultural concession as opposed to a forest concession, he helped get the area recognized as an “agricultural polygon” where farming is allowed within the Biosphere Reserve.

But the community’s experience with CONAP was negative, he said. His biggest critique is that CONAP comes in, tells people that they can’t cut down the forest, but doesn’t provide enough alternative employment. He says for poor people with families to feed, there is simply no alternative to growing corn and beans to survive, and that requires land.

In neighboring communities such as San Miguel and La Pasadita, forest concessions were granted but they failed. According to Eliseo, the communities didn’t have the resources adequate to manage and protect the reserve, so they sold out to ranchers, although the land is not legally theirs to sell. Their concessions have since been canceled. These failures will be fodder for the political debate over land use under the Cuatro Balam plan. Still, concessions advocates maintain that on the whole they have been more successful in maintaining the forest than in areas without them.

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.

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.

I think of this now while on the plane and am grateful for the seven hour layover at LAX that served as a much-needed transition into US culture. Nadia and I also had the opportunity to practice the summary of our trip. Sole-sucking mud, ear-eating black flies, mule-chasing jaguars, howling monkies’ disembodied cries, and our bodies in a constant state of crisis. But somehow it didn’t seem that bad in retelling it. We both hate telling war stories, but somehow the sharing of it forced us to give some coherence to it all. Afterall, how can you really grok these kinds of experiences unless it is done experentially? You will believe it more if you learn it for yourself. But video helps.
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Soon after leaving Petén the road joins with the main east-west corridor, an overland connection between Guatemala’s coasts. The roads wind between the growing hills from the plains in the east to the mountains in the west. Traffic moves slowly as we leapfrog ahead of large trucks filled with cargo from the Atlantic ships and others with cows packed like chickens into large beds towering over our red minivan. But we speed on.

A stop for lunch with Kara’s family in Chiquimula is a rare opportunity to share family time with others in a place so far away from home. All the family made us feel welcome and fed us lunch in the shade of a large open patio as the children played in a kiddie pool to beat the heavy heat of the sun. In too short of a time we were all passing hugs and kisses goodbye, promises to return and we off again stomachs full and the final drive in to the capital.

Our time here is ended (for now) and I point the Blackberry in different directions while on the plane with the hopes that I’ll be able to send at least one text or one blog entry while in the clouds. I am a horrible role model when it comes to connectivity politeness; make no mistake, it’s a lifeline and it can get Hobbesian quickly.

One of the freeing things about being able to write from the mobile is that I am not distracted by the production possibilities a laptop holds. I don’t go into the inbox, I don’t upload and Photoshop pictures, I don’t re-organize my iTunes library, I don’t video edit, it’s about as close to a blank sheet of paper and pen as I’m going to get. And so it is here, while seated on the plane in 30D with Nadia Sussman passed out next to me and a fully-charged iPod with 10 gigs of songs and podcasts that I begin to write.

Next to my foot I have my Indiana Andrade hat which all the airport security and screeners took a moment to examine, peering at the Mayan hieroglyphs that somehow spell out my name. They smile and move me along after I say Mirador. Many Guatemalans have not journeyed that far north to Petén, much less Mirador, so their eyes glow with curiosity when I mention it in passing.

“I’ve never been there, what is it like?” the taxista asked me this morning on our way to the airport. I tell him what I believe now to be true, it is one of the rawest and most authentic experiences of surviving in nature that I have ever experienced. It is at once a privilege, a gift and a quickly approaching anachronism as the day of the eco-train or million dollar narrow gauge train that cuts straight through the rainforest is quickly approaching. It has been done in Mexico already with their Mayan ruins, Nadia tells me. Hansen sits poised to make it happen as he collects stakeholders to back up the idea of a train into the heart of Mirador as a way to create ecotourism. That is, as soon as Guatemala offers up a more protected status to the forest. In Guatemala, if enough money backs up anything, the speed at which decisions are made is remarkably expedited. I can only think of all the arrieros and mules that will be displaced once the train comes in. The not so remote possibility of this train creating access to Mirador, does make us realize that our experiences of walking through swampland into archaeological discovery wonderland will be one of those rare experiences that anyone will be able to do comfortably in the near future.

Technology is disruptive and slowly I am seeing my country change with it. As we enter Chiquimula terrain for a small family detour, we almost miss the entrance because there is a new supercenter that blocks the entrance and the supermarket Paiz looks above the Chiquimula city sign. Paiz is Guate’s answer to Wal-Mart and for now it is blocking my view and affecting my nostalgia.

From the days of my childhood, Chiquimula was much like Uaxactún, a sleepy and isolated town made so by its mountains and it’s almost desert-like climate that make herding and ranching the only viable business. Not the case anymore as narcotrafficking also pushes more inland. While we sat at three tables with mounds of freshly cooked beef, tortillas, salad and an endless supply of Gallo beer, I realized how quickly things change and perhaps how much like centarians I’ve met who have lived through the invention of electricity, television, the internet, the atom and hydrogen bomb, I too might live unimaginable changes that will alter my reality in at least two countries that I call home. When I become aware of this, I hold my memories tighter to my chest and clutch at them as they happen.

Climbing into my aunt’s hammock where I would fall asleep as a child in the heaviness of afternoon, I saw the broken threads of its use and realized that the hammock I had bought in Flores really belonged here. I ran to the car, pulled out of my bag and presented it to my aunt.

“Here, Tia, for the next thirty years to come. It will hold us all through it.” She smiled and I hugged her until I could no longer just stay in her arms and hold back time. We all climbed into Hector’s red mini-van and did our next four-hour leg into Guatemala City. We climbed out of the Chiquilmula valley and sludged into outlying sprawl and traffic that awaited us. At 7 p.m., 11 hours after our departure that morning, we reached the dingy streets of a rainy city with the flapping plastic covers of streets vendors so much like tattered flags welcoming us on our penultimate day of the trip. We asked ourselves why in Central America all the capitals are like a plunge into purgatory to spit us out of its bowels only to swallow us again when we returned.
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The verb, which would stump most Guatemalans, means “to cut xate,” a decorative plant used in floral arrangements in the United States and elsewhere. But as obscure as the word may sound to outside ears, it’s a core activity for most of this village of fewer a little more than 1,000 people.

On Friday we accompanied two teams of xate harvesters out into the thick forests that surround Uaxactún who were equipped with not much more than rubber boots, two kinds of knives and large bundles for trudging home the delicate leaves.

What struck me was that at least in one village, the hope of sustainable development through low-impact forest product harvesting was possible, as many of the the environmental activists were saying. Villagers earn about US $10 a day cutting the plant when it’s in season, and supplement that with the collection of breadnut, chicle for chewing gum and allspice. During the spring they also cut some timber. But the village’s NGO-monitored sustainable logging community timber concession has managed to keep the area more than 90 percent forest, an accomplishment that many other nearby timber concessions cannot point to.

Some of those neighboring concessions are in such bad shape, with the spread of illegal fires, large-scale farms and cattle ranching, that the environmental nonprofit organizations that helped set them up are trying to close them down, hoping their failure won’t drag down the good name of the success stories.

But even here, the word success must be qualified. Only some Uaxactún residents, the ones who can afford household generators, have electricity, and usually they run them a few hours a night. There are only a handful of telephones in the community. Transportation along the road is uncomfortable and infrequent. Most collect their water from roof runoff. There are few jobs that pay anything like what can be made in Flores, the capital of Petén, which is also a major tourist hub.

If, as some international development organizations and governments claim, tourism is the best possibility for this area, that reality has yet to hit Uaxactún. It’s just down the road from where huge tour buses bring thousands travelers from all of the word come to see the pyramids of Tikal, supposedly yielding hundreds of millions of dollars for the local economy.

But even though the village owes its protection from invaders to the park guards at Tikal, hardly anyone ever makes it to Uaxactún, accessible only by that one dirt road to see the ruins there. One town resident has a collection of more than 600 pieces of Maya art donated by xate harvesters who rescued them from looter trenches at the archaeological sites at the edge of town. Yet the room is only opened for the rare visit of an out-of-towner, and the donation box hasn’t earned enough to pay for photocopied brochures, much less proper curation or museum cases.

Must Uaxactún and other scattered success stories remain poor and isolated in order to remain models of sustainable development? Would adding more economic opportunity to the mix also imperil the balance these villagers have struck with nature? It’s hard to tell from a quick visit, but it’s easy to see why development experts who want to find ways to harmonize human settlement with the environment would study this little town.