The Maya Tropical Forest: People, Parks, and Ancient CIties

1 Introduction to the Maya Tropical Forest

 1 Introduction to the Maya Tropical Forest February 16, 1990. Department of Petén, Guatemala. We woke up to the raucous, barking growl of howler monkeys in the trees overhead—a sound much louder than animals their size should make and one that raises the hair on the back of your neck the first time you hear it in the rainforest. We had slept in the thousand-year-old ruins of the Maya city of Piedras Negras, on a sandy bank above the dark, rushing water of the Río Usumacinta, in northwestern Guatemala. Fifty meters (164 feet) across the water, on the other side of the river, was Mexico, where the same species of tropical trees dipped branches down to the sedimentladen water as it slid by underneath. In a satellite view of where we were, we would have been microscopic specks in an ocean of trees, with the river running though it like a twisting, greenribbon.FromourcampontheGuatemalansideoftheRíoUsumacinta, the forest stretched eastward for 50 uninterrupted kilometers (31 miles) before the first muddy logging road cut through the canopy of trees. This block of tropical forest hid the ruins of a dozen more ancient stone cities, a wealth of wildlife and plants, and 500 furtive Guatemalan revolutionaries who operated under the rubric of the Unión Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG). Their stated goal was to overthrow the government of Guatemala and declare a Marxist state. Shaking sand from our sleeping bags, we ignored the howlers 30 meters (98 feet) overhead, but we perked up when Santiago Billy yelled, “Avena y café para todos” (Oatmeal and coffee for everyone). We gathered around the smoking fire that Santiago had built in a fire pit on the beach and slurped oatmeal and sipped coffee and blinked the sleep from our eyes. Ten meters (33 feet) below us, fog began to rise from the fast-moving swirls 4  the maya tropical forest of the river. Slender, white royal herons picked their way along the shore downstream, and tiny blue kingfishers darted in and out of the foliage, watching the water for minnows. Standing around the fire in the early morning chill, we were eight people in all: Tom Sever, Dan Lee, and Frank Miller, respectively an archaeologist, remote sensing specialist, and forester, working on a project with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); Alfred Nakatsuma, the environmental officer with the Guatemala office of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); two boat drivers, Israel Martínez Calderón and Rudy García, whom we had hired in the town of Sayaxch é;SantiagoBilly,aseniorresearcherwithGuatemala’sComisiónNacional del Medio Ambiente (CONAMA); and me, a U.S. anthropologist turned conservationist. Together, we were the field team responsible for groundtruthing the first satellite image of the month-old 16,000 square kilometer map 1. The Maya Tropical Forest Introduction  5 (6,178 sq. mi.; 3 million acre) Maya Biosphere Reserve, a newly created protected area in the lowland tropical forest of northern Guatemala. Informally , we called ourselves the Traveling Wilburys, after the singing group on the only cassette tape we had brought along on a previous expedition. Today—although we didn’t know it yet—we were about to be captured by Guatemalan guerrilla fighters, who at that precise moment were locking and loading their weapons and settling into ambush positions 10 kilometers (6 miles) upriver. After breakfast, we rinsed our dishes and gathered up our gear to pile it into the front of the two 4-meter (13-foot) aluminum boats we had hired in Sayaxché, Petén, a riverside town on the shore of the Río de la Pasión, one of a half-dozen tributaries of the Río Usumacinta. Our two boat drivers , Israel and Rudy, who lived in Sayaxché, were remarkably adept at maneuvering the small boats through the whirlpools and rapids of the river. Because we were headed upriver, against the current, they strained the 35-horsepower motors to push against the rushing flow of dark green water , and the boat yawed in the front, swishing from side to side as the drivers dodged boulders hidden beneath the water. Frank Miller—“El Diablo” because of his Lucifer-like goatee and diabolical laugh—grabbed the tiedown rope from the bow of the boat he was in and stood on the front aluminum bench, riding the bounce of the rapids like an urban...