Claudia Santizo, CONAP’s secretary, said the agency is working to evict eight ranches near the El Mirador archaeological park, home of dozens of semi-excavated Maya archaeological sites.

At first I thought Cuatro Balam referred to the four anchor cities of the project (Tikal, El Mirador, Piedras Negras, Uaxactún) listed in a government press release, but I am not sure this is the case.

Also around the time that Cuatro Balam was announced, it was said to cover cover 22,500 square kilometers. The Maya Biosphere Reserve is only 21,602 square km. Will the plan cover the entire reserve and more?

Here are some links to press articles about Cuatro Balam:

http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2008/julio/17/251129.html
http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20080717/pais/61787
http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2008/mayo/23/238379.html
http://www.globalheritagefund.org/news/ghf_in_the_news/ghf_mirador_in_the_news_may_08.asp

by Michael Stoll

Published in the Earth Island Journal, a publication of the Earth Island Institute
To read the article as it appeared in the magazine, click here.

I knew things were bad when Paulino dipped his empty plastic water bottle into a shallow, muddy swamp puddle. After attempting to sweeten the sludge with a bright orange vitamin C tablet, the middle-aged Guatemalan archaeologist smiled at his Boy Scout ingenuity.

Somewhat calmed by his presence of mind, I was nonetheless scared about the prospect of getting lost in the vast, uncharted, tropical forest, carrying nothing but a few granola bars and an audio recorder. We had started out with 10 other adventurers on a planned 50-mile jungle trek, but had gotten separated during the hike. I asked Paulino if he thought we’d really have to drink his concoction to stay hydrated if we failed to locate our fellow hikers, whom we hadn’t seen for two hours.  “I don’t know how far we are exactly,” he huffed as we slogged through one of a thousand narrow trails through the bog. “But I try to be prepared, you see? That’s all you need.”

My introduction to the Mirador Rio-Azul Park made it vividly clear that in 2008 it was still possible to experience a true, vast, unpeopled wilderness, where tropical bird calls ring out instead of cell phones, and it’s handier to distinguish the ceiba tree from the ramon than it is to tell a Lexus from a Hyundai.

The purpose of my trip to Mirador last summer was to see the Guatemalan tropical forest firsthand, before it possibly suffers the fate of Laguna del Tigre, the neighboring “wilderness” at the other end of the northern state of Petén.

The contrast could not have been any starker. By all accounts Laguna del Tigre Park looked very similar to Mirador until about 15 years ago, when tens of thousands of people started settling along the few roads punched into the territory by oil and logging companies. Then a rapid and chaotic land grab ensued. Whether it was primarily due to wood poachers, or landless peasants looking for new places to plant their corn and beans, or ranchers who followed them to graze beef cattle on the depleted land, the effect was clear. Environmental groups estimate that as much as 70 percent of the 1,300-square-mile park has been burned and converted to agriculture — much of it, according to press reports, with the encouragement of corrupt officials and narcotics traffickers who use land and cattle to launder their drug money.

In Laguna del Tigre, travel could not have been more different from the jungle trek in Mirador. I rode shotgun in a pickup truck with a ranger transporting park police, and we covered about 400 miles in a 14-hour trip. There must have been more cows there than in all of Wisconsin, and the tropical sun was ever-present. The few improbably regal-looking ceiba trees towered over the charred remains poking through the ranchlands. The forest was all but wiped out.

These parks, virtually side by side, are part of what was supposed to be an uninterrupted 8,300-square-mile biosphere reserve protecting a huge swath of land that saw the rise and fall of the ancient Maya civilization. What the different fates of these two protected zones illustrate is that the best-laid plans of environmentalists aren’t enough to save the forest.

In the previous weeks, our team interviewed dozens of experts about where the strategy had failed and who was to blame. Some were lobbying the government for a moratorium on logging. Others wanted to expand community-based “sustainable” logging businesses. Both sides acknowledged, though, that the key to saving the forest probably lay in the knowledge of local people. And yet there was little evidence that politicians were making decisions based on the reality on the ground any more than they ever had. When President Álvaro Colom announced his latest conservation initiative in July, no more than a handful of Petén community leaders were among the 250 guests invited to the presidential palace.

Obviously, Paulino and I made it out of our parched predicament to reach our destination — the mostly buried Maya ruins at Mirador — and then back to civilization. Paulino, who had made the trip three times, said it was local knowledge about proper hydration, forest food, geology, and orienteering that had saved his skin on the walk more than once.

“All these are recommendations of the older people,” he said just before we were rescued by a forest guide. “When I got to Petén I didn’t know much. But having paid attention to these things, it solved many problems. These are the very little things that aren’t said by stupid people, but people who are rooted in this place.”

Michael Stoll is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist who traveled to Guatemala on a 2008 grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. See his work at www.futureofpeten.com.

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 and more of which is being uncovered by archeologists every year — largely to yourself. Soon, both the wilderness and the solitude may be harder to come by.

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.