Making the Maya Forest

"CONSERVATION, UNDER THE GUN"

In 1999, the truth commission sponsored by the United Nations (UN) published its findings that the Guatemalan military perpetrated genocide against Maya peoples (CEH, 1999). Today, Guatemala has become one of few countries to put its former leaders on trial for genocide, murder, and fraud. While former military dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested for crimes against humanity committed in Chile, his indictments, arrest, and detention occurred in Europe. When he returned to Chile, his own country made no moves to hold him accountable. In contrast, the national courts of Guatemala put their own former military dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, on trial for multiple charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. While he spent little time in jail due to procedural issues and concerns about his ailing health, this marked an important precedent in a nation holding its own leaders accountable. As was the case with popular ideas about Pinochet after his death, the 2016 trial of former president Otto Pérez Molina seems to signal mass frustration at his participation in corruption and stealing government funds — not his leadership role in killing civilians during the civil war. Long and winding court cases reveal that many Latin Americans see state violence against a nation-state's own citizens as paradoxically justifiable for "security."

Less acknowledged is how recent genocidal violence shapes contemporary conservation practices. It was not until after the protected-areas system was created that the peace accords process, which the UN insisted was the only way to ensure that rural and indigenous sectors could have a political voice, addressed fundamental questions of land rights. The park system was created in a process that was undemocratic and so lacking in transparency that baseline surveys conducted in 1990 and 1991 revealed that most residents did not know the Maya Biosphere Reserve existed, even though it encompassed half the Petén Department (USAID, 1995). This set protected areas as the stage for postwar agrarian conflicts in the lowlands.

While the protected-areas system was declared without community participation or physical boundary markers, enforcement began and increased through the 1990s. In 1997, around sixty community members took over Conservation International's (CI) field station in Laguna del Tigre National Park (part of the Maya Biosphere Reserve), taking thirteen CI employees hostage. They also burned down CI's seven-building field station complex. The global CI annual report recounts the story in a section titled "Conservation, Under the Gun":

The raid on Laguna del Tigre has its origins, ironically, in the 1996 peace accords that ended Guatemala's 36-year civil war. That welcome end to bloodshed had an unintended effect — it sparked an illegal land grab in some of the country's most sensitive protected forests. Guarding park borders was once the job of the military. But now the Guatemalan Army's role has been drastically reduced, and land-hungry refugees are streaming into the preserves, hoping to turn pristine forest into farmland. (Conservation International, 1997, 14)

CI's anger at the burning down of field stations is the first claim I have seen of land grabbing, something that was taken up with gusto by peasant scholars in the 2000s (Borras et al., 2012; Vidal, 2008). While contemporary peasant studies scholars use the term "land grabbing" to refer to big private companies taking lands from peasants by force and corruption, CI uses it to refer to poor farmers trying to "grab" land from state-protected areas. In this narrative the civil war was not a problem, and the role of the military in building roads, burning down forest, and taking over land for cattle ranches is not mentioned. Likewise, the park's declaration and subsequent building of field stations by and for international scientists on supposedly pristine forest goes unremarked. Rather, peace was the cause of the "illegal land grab" threatening the Maya Forest. CI claims that 700 families moved into the park since the peace accords, but what the annual report does not acknowledge is that (1) the park itself was created only seven years prior, as part of a broader conservation project that claimed more than half the land in Petén Department (Ybarra et al., 2012), and (2) there were already families living in the park prior to its declaration. This is important, because there were 42,000 legally recognized refugees who were negotiating a return to Guatemala in the late 1980s and more than 1 million people who were displaced from their homes within the country.

Conservationists decried what they called "an aggressive and rapid program of human settlements" in the biosphere reserve, including purchasing privately titled cooperative land for refugee resettlement (Ponciano, 1998, 107). In pitting the National Council of Protected Areas (Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas, CONAP) against the UN high commissioner for human rights, the conservation studies director for the national university, Universidad de San Carlos, claimed that "this resettlement process also brings investments by international organizations in infrastructure [including schools and homes], creating the possibility for further destruction of natural resources" (Ponciano, 1998, 109). Some of the people living in Laguna del Tigre National Park were displaced by the military's scorched-earth campaigns during the civil war. Still others were moving in alongside roads that were built to facilitate oil exploration. (Many of those families have been subject to subsequent eviction, but oil exploitation, transportation infrastructure and cattle ranching remain unaffected.) Most of these families did not have official land titles, but neither did parks: as of 2016, not all protected areas in the Maya Biosphere Reserve had been mapped and entered in the General Property Register. While CI's annual report is correct that these are sensitive forests, most participants saw themselves as protesting for land rights, not "raiding" them.

More important, CI framed the reduction of the army in the parks as a negative outcome, as there were not enough military "boots on the ground" to protect the forests from returning refugees. Why was the Guatemalan Army's role so drastically reduced? According to the findings of the UN-sponsored truth commission, the army played a key role in creating the refugee crisis as part of a genocidal counterinsurgency campaign. Without acknowledging the need for accountability for wartime atrocities, less than one year after the peace accords ended the civil war CI already advocated increasing the military's budget and its presence in parks. While the slippages in acknowledging context may go unnoticed by U.S.-based funders,...