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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Lost in the jungle at night with no water, but lots of mud and mosquitos.
Paco went missing. On the first of two days of walking, on Monday, I was enjoying a series of mini botany and archaeology lectures from Paulino, the archaeologist we’d nicknamed “The Philosopher.” He was pointing out the differences between the ceiba [...]

We’ve been in Guatemala City for four days, running around nonstop. I slept for 45 minutes after our redeye Tuesday night and managed to motor through the following day. We spent Wednesday through Friday interviewing a variety of experts and government officials. During that time, we managed to hook up with a group of archaeologists [...]

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.

This is an invitation to join in The Future of Petén weblogging project, www.futureofpeten.com, aimed at creating a dialogue around the story of the remote Petén region of northern Guatemala where environmentalists are fighting environmentalists in a behind-the-scenes ideological conflict over how best to save the vast but rapidly shrinking Maya forest.
*JOIN THE CONVERSATION & [...]

OAKLAND, Calif. — I am going back to Guatemala, but this time to the jungle. My family marvels at it — a return to a place crawling with desperate thieves and ex-paramilitary types? AK47s, snakes, overgrown Mayan ruins and a two-and-a-half-day hike into a place where even the Google Street Team dares not to go. [...]