Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders

Preface

xi Preface On Conflicts and Conservation First we were dispossessed in the names of kings and emperors, later in the name of state development, and now in the name of conservation. —Indigenous delegates to the 2003 Fifth World Parks Congress, Durban, South Africa March 31, 1997. Days before Conservation International’s Guatemala program , ProPetén, was to inaugurate a new biological station in Laguna del Tigre National Park in the northwestern corner of the 1.6 million-hectare Maya Biosphere Reserve, sixty armed men in four motorized canoes arrived simultaneously from different sites on the Rio San Pedro. They burned the station to the ground and held thirteen workers hostage for two days. In the months leading up to this event, Guatemala’s national park service, the National Council for Protected Areas (Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas), or CONAP, had been relocating communities settled illegally along roads a petroleum company had built to its wells inside this same park. Among those involved in this orchestrated attack on ProPetén’s biological station were subsistence farmers who feared eviction from two nearby Q’eqchi’ villages established in the mid-1990s, well after the park’s opening in 1992. Lacking the political will and authority to continue the evictions, the CONAP director began negotiating usufruct concessions with the communities that had attacked the station, along with another dozen communities occupying other parts of the park. In these negotiations, Ladino (mestizo) squatters tended to emphasize their need for land, whereas Q’eqchi’ communities emphasized their moral relationship to land as Maya people and their customary right to plant corn for subsistence (N. Schwartz, pers. comm., 2010). xii Preface One Q’eqchi’ leader from these villages provocatively remarked to Conservation International’s former vice president for Mesoamerica, “This is the Maya Biosphere Reserve, we’re Maya, what’s the problem?” (Nations 2001: 466). This was not an isolated incident of indigenous communities in conflict with biodiversity conservation (for more cases, see, for example, Chapin 2004; Dowie 2009; Igoe 2004; West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006). From 1900 to 1960, the international conservation movement established almost a thousand protected areas. Multiplied a hundredfold, today there are at least 110,000 protected areas worldwide. Surpassing the World Parks Commission goal of protecting a tenth of the planet’s territory, more than 12 percent of the earth is now under some protected status, an area of almost nineteen million square kilometers, equivalent to half the world’s cultivated land (Dowie 2009: xx). A thousand indigenous groups once occupied about 80 percent of high priority ecoregions for biodiversity conservation identified by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (ibid.: 264–65). Some were allowed to stay in newly protected areas with restrictions placed on their resource use, but as many as fourteen million have been evicted from their ancestral homelands (ibid.: xxi). Exceeding this worldwide trend, almost one-third of Guatemala’s terriFigure P.1. System of protected areas in Guatemala. Source: Jason Arnold and Daniel Irwin, NASA/ SERVIR 2010 Preface xiii tory is now under protected status, thereby heightening the tensions between people and parks. Q’eqchi’ people have had to contend with a disproportionate number of Guatemala’s protected areas in their territory.1 Constituting less than one-tenth of Guatemala’s population, they nonetheless are surrounded by one-fourth (by number) and one-fifth (by area) of Guatemala’s parks (Secaira 2000) (figs. P.1, P.2). Some Q’eqchi’ communities were already legally settled in these regions before the parks were created in the 1990s. Others continued to arrive after it became illegal to settle there but before enforcement began. Many did so after the end of Guatemala’s civil war in response to false rumors spread among indigenous communities that the 1996 Peace Accords authorized them to claim unoccupied land, regardless of its conservation status.2 Around that time, I was collaborating with ProPetén to design and raise funds for an integrated health and conservation program, Remedios (Remedies ). My first project was with an indigenous women’s medicinal-plant group in the Itzá town of San José (later described in Sundberg 1998). Conservation International’s CEO had other ideas from Washington, D.C. He redirected our first grant to work instead with the two Q’eqchi’ communities that had attacked the biological station, Macawville and Basilfield. Without road access, Figure P.2. Maya Biosphere Reserve, Petén, Guatemala. Source: Jason Arnold and Daniel...