The Future of Petén

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It looks like the Guatemalan forest rangers from CONAP, the Council of Protected Areas, think they can make a dent in the eviction of ranchers who have staked illegal claims to the land in the Maya forest — if they get a lot more funding from the federal government. Claudia Santizo, CONAP’s secretary, said the [...]

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 the Blackberry in different [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 Mirador [...]

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 [...]

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.