Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation

Abstract

This paper examines the significance of historically sedimented military practices for conservation in contemporary Guatemala. During a 36-year civil war, the military represented the lowlands as dangerous jungle that had to be tamed to justify its counterinsurgency campaigns, thus positioning the jungle's inhabitants as suspect citizens or potential insurgents. Also during the war, international conservationists coalesced to successfully lobby for a protected areas system that enclosed one-third of Guatemala's territory. This paper argues that this transnational conservation alliance, comprised of international conservation agencies and national elites, evokes the violence of scorched earth counterinsurgency. The use of jungle and forest discourses in successive territorial projects produces a racialized landscape that connects a violent past to a violent present. In recent years, jungle discourses have articulated advocacy for increased militarization to fight the ‘war on drugs’ in protected areas. As such, I argue thatconservation agencies and the military are complicit in reproducing social inequalities, often through violent exclusions.

This paper was presented at the 2010 International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, sponsored by the Land Deal Politics Initiative, at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex. A National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant provided research support. Leonardo Luc, Mario López Barrientos and Alberto Alonso Fradejas all offered important insights into Guatemalan land politics. I consulted the CIRMA Archive and the ProPetén library for key project documents. J. Keith Gilless, Octaviano Chavarin, Norman B. Schwartz, Melissa Leach and two anonymous reviewers wrote incisive comments on paper drafts. I am especially grateful to Nancy L. Peluso for encouraging me to develop this paper in consonance with her work. I am responsible for all translations. Any remaining errors are my own.

Keywords:

• conservation
• Guatemala
• political ecology
• protected areas
• violence
• counterinsurgency

Notes

This paper was presented at the 2010 International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, sponsored by the Land Deal Politics Initiative, at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex. A National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant provided research support. Leonardo Luc, Mario López Barrientos and Alberto Alonso Fradejas all offered important insights into Guatemalan land politics. I consulted the CIRMA Archive and the ProPetén library for key project documents. J. Keith Gilless, Octaviano Chavarin, Norman B. Schwartz, Melissa Leach and two anonymous reviewers wrote incisive comments on paper drafts. I am especially grateful to Nancy L. Peluso for encouraging me to develop this paper in consonance with her work. I am responsible for all translations. Any remaining errors are my own.

¹The term, Maya Forest, is hotly contested, particularly by those who identify themselves as the Maya and see the protected areas as a reproduction of racialized dispossession. I discuss the genealogy of the term below.

²Q'eqchi's are one of 21 legally recognized indigenous Maya peoples in Guatemala.

³The Álvaro Colom administration declared estados de sitio (martial law) for military campaigns in the Alta Verapaz and Petén departments in December 2010 (until February 2011) and May 2011 (until August 2011), respectively. Both these campaigns map onto the Maya Forest.

⁴Funding was consolidated through the USAID after its creation in 1961 as part of the regional Alliance for Progress.

⁵FYDEP told Peteneros they would have to purchase their land, but many refused to pay, believing they were already landowners (Schwartz 2000).

⁶The central government supported this project, but regional agencies quickly grew ambivalent about the massive immigration. Although regional INTA and FYDEP offices were notoriously slow (with cases often dragging on for more than 20 years), they did not stop people from settling the lowlands.

⁷In many parts of the country, counterinsurgency was genocidal (CEH 1999). This was not the case in Petén, but it was in Alta Verapaz.

⁸Guatemala battled Mexico over territory during the nineteenth century, and has an ongoing border dispute with Belize today.

⁹I found this in semi-structured interviews conducted in 2008 with village elders resettled nearthe Laguna Lachúa National Park, the Candelaria Caves National Park and one other site.

¹⁰This statement is based on an unpublished analysis of a 1,000-household survey of Petén.

¹¹USAID's Mayarema plan created NGO territorial zones that are still in existence today.

¹²The status of the Mopanes is more complicated because they are Petenero Maya, but sometimes intermarry with the Q'eqchi's.

¹³Granovsky-Larsen (2011) records one instance, but the Secretary of Agrarian Affairs (SAA) has records dating back to at least 2001, and community officials have written agreements with park officials dating back to the early 1990s.

¹⁴Many people, including those displaced during war violence, do not have documentation of their historical claims.

¹⁵The narrative that the army's role was to combat subversion ignores the Truth Commission findings that the army systematically repressed and killed non-combatants, committing genocide.

¹⁶The ostensible need for guns was in the event of confrontations with the guerrillas or Mexican loggers in the 1990s, and with drug traffickers in the 2000s.

¹⁷It is illegal for the land titling agency and the Property Register to register titles for privately held land already claimed by the park. State agencies broke the law to grant legal title to narco-plantations inside the core protected areas.

¹⁸In 2010, President Álvaro Colom celebrated the arrival of a Green Forces battalion in Laguna del Tigre, but as of January 2012, I do not know of any others in Petén.