The Future of Petén

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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 [...]

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.

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 our [...]

In our endeavors to increase community dialogue around the story that we’re covering, we have come across some concerns regarding blogging and what it means for us and for our story and the way we report it. Here is a little snippet of some of those discussions.