Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest

by Megan Ybarra

Overview

Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialized dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples into neoliberal citizens. Even as Q’eqchi’s participate in conservation, Green Wars amplifies their call for material decolonization by recognizing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520968035
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/15/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Megan Ybarra is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington.

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CHAPTER 1

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, conservation organizations' advocacy on behalf of the military is a key reason why rural war survivors associate international conservation with violence.

Finally, the report demonstrates that conservation big international nongovernmental organizations (BINGOs) knowingly criminalized civil war survivors. The 1997 report acknowledged that many people are war refugees, but even so CI qualifies this — calling them "land-hungry refugees." This articulates with local elite claims that Q'eqchi' refugees are wood-hungry termites, a racialized stereotype. Rather than Indigenous peoples reclaiming land in the wake of genocide, CI positioned these as poor people in need of humanitarian aid, preferably outside the 1.6 million–hectare reserve. In explaining who is in the park and why, CI claimed that "squatters" are "reportedly organized by a band of smugglers who trafficked in drugs, tropical birds and timber," without offering evidence to back its claim (Conservation International, 1997, 14–15). While drug trafficking was not the prominent problem in 1997 that it has since become, conservation BINGOs were already making inflammatory and unsupported accusations that park squatters work for drug traffickers. As Bocarejo and Ojeda (2016) suggest, these kinds of accusations go beyond unfortunate coincidences and unintended consequences in the global struggle for conservation — rather, they are an explicit call for remilitarization using criminalizing narratives with racialized consequences. These narconarratives foreclose the possibilities of political change and eat away at solidarities, as all individuals fend for themselves in twenty-first-century green wars.

Even at the time, not all conservation professionals agreed with CI's official narrative of why affected communities burned down the station and held CI employees hostage. While Liza Grandia largely agrees with CI's account, she shifts the focus toward the ways that "Guatemalan staff risked their lives defending the property after loggers tricked local communities" into burning down the biological station (2009b, 12). Grandia's account centers on the power that Washington-based CI wielded to the detriment of Guatemalan conservation practitioners, but even her more sympathetic portrayal does not treat local communities' political claims as legitimate. The language that local communities were "tricked" is part of a longer trend of discounting Maya political activists who were "tricked" (engañados) by outsiders (Marxists, loggers, drug traffickers), which is a rationalization to ignore their political claims (Nelson, 2009). As she was living in Petén at the time, Grandia probably has good reason to suggest that illicit actors were involved. Still, a simple trick (whether truco or engaño) does not explain why more than ten years later the relationship between conservation organizations and affected communities is still "difficult, conflictive, and sometimes physically dangerous" (Grandia, 2009b, 11). Claiming that Indigenous land activists were "tricked" by greedy capitalist outsiders is a just-so story, one where if Maya peoples only knew how important the Maya Forest is to global conservation, they would concede their homelands.

Whether they argue that these connections are nefarious or manipulative, both portrayals use the role of illicit actors to avoid territorial politics. CI's former vice president, Jim Nations, acknowledges that conservation organizations frame "conflicts" in terms of criminality in his recounting of how CI's country director (of Guatemalan nationality) defused the hostage situation. He claims that the director "played his cards brilliantly," reporting a case of kidnapping for cash ransom to the police and the press. When the hostage takers saw that the newspaper depicted them as "kidnappers rather than political leaders" (Nations, 2006, 193), they gave up. According to Nations, CI lost the biological field station (later rebuilt) but won the war of representational politics. Conservation BINGOs' strategy to win the war is one that systematically undermines the political demands of affected communities. Rather than territorial claims and shared rights to negotiate, CI and other organizations have represented returned refugees and displaced peoples as criminals who take advantage (aprovecharse) of international aid. In presenting them as common criminals, conservation practitioners elide the political implications of their collaboration with settler states in creating and enforcing protected-areas rules.

In this chapter, I draw on political ecology, postcolonial, and indigenous studies literatures to demonstrate how conservation can become a racial territorial project. Racial projects interpret racial dynamics in ways that facilitate resource distribution (Omi and Winant, 1994; Pulido, 2015, 2017). I apply the concept of a racial project to postwar Guatemala to show how racializing Maya peoples also individualizes them, stripping them of collective territoriality. Racial projects bring together Orientalist imaginaries, everyday practices, and political structures to institutionalize racism: this is how the scary figure of the narco gets mapped onto a Q'eqchi' farmer. In preempting other territorial claims, Guatemala's protected-areas system has become a racial territorial project that distributes resources away from Indigenous peoples. The creation of the national protected-areas system and repeated militarization to save the Maya Forest is the articulation of two imaginaries: first, the U.S. depiction of the Maya Forest that employs colonial and imaginaries of Maya places and peoples to write a new spatial relation using tropical logics of conservation (to paraphrase Mbembe, 2003, 25–26), and second, Guatemalan depictions of the subversive jungle that represents a security emergency. In this articulation, conservation acts as a racial territorial project where conservation BINGOs, Guatemalan military, and even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration employ imaginaries of tropical forest and dangerous jungle to create an isomorphism between Maya peoples with the two-faced Indian (Nelson, 2009), guerrilla, and/or narco subject. In other words, the imaginary of the Maya Forest simultaneously represents Maya peoples as a threat and authorizes violent, racialized actions to protect the forest in the name of global conservation.

"COME TO THE CONQUEST OF YOUR OWN TERRITORY!": INVITING IMMIGRANTS TO THE LOWLAND FRONTIER

Land for Those Who "Work" It

While many Latin Americanists point to the Spanish invasion as the key colonial moment, for Q'eqchi' lowlanders there were three pivotal moments in Guatemala's settler colonialism. While the Spanish did arrive and conquer territory, Q'eqchi' leaders brokered a deal with the Catholic Church, agreeing to mass conversion and maintaining relative territorial autonomy. It was not until independence and nineteenth-century nation building that Q'eqchi's were confronted with massive territorial dispossession. In this, creole and ladino elites in Guatemala's new capital gave away their land and their autonomy (billing them as colonos, or serfs) to European immigrants. While some new plantation owners embraced mestizaje (racial mixing) to create a better nation, most embraced blanqueamiento, a politics of whitening that prefigured the demise of Indigenous peoples (Euraque, Gould, and Hale, 2004). Scholars regularly refer to landowners and would-be landowners as ladinos, but many of them reject or contest this term, as I discuss below and in Chapter 3. Even though Q'eqchi's spoke only an indigenous language and wore traditional indigenous clothing (guipil and corte), highland Mayas often considered them less indigenous because they lived on European-owned plantations (e.g., Rigoberta Menchú in Burgos-Debray, 1984). Over time, this means that ethnographers of living Maya peoples study the highlands (especially K'iche's and Kaqchikels), while archaeologists look for the demise of ancient Maya peoples in the lowlands. It is possible that the relative dearth of scholarship on indigeneity in the lowlands led conservation and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to uncritically embrace the narrative of Q'eqchi'-as-migrant (Sundberg 1998a).

It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the ladino state opened up the possibility of landownership to Q'eqchi's. In this, both the progressive reformers (1940s–1950s) and conservative dictators (1950s–1970s) embraced a liberal program that can be summed up as "land for those who work it." Today, peasant organizations such as Via Campesina have taken up the call of land for those who work it and have sought to reframe its liberal and Lockean history as a rejection of land markets that facilitate the dispossession of the poorest farmers (Rosset, Patel, and Courville, 2006; Wolford, 2010). As with the nation-building phase of Latin America, however, this allows the World Bank and states to only see — and value — some forms of labor (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003; Sundberg, 2008). Settlers do not see Q'eqchi' work as labor, nor do they see Q'eqchi' land management as a material property claim. These misrepresentations facilitate racialized dispossession among both land-hungry capitalist speculators and land-poor farmers seeking new land.

At the end of World War II, an alliance of landed and military elites, together with urban workers, forced authoritarian dictator Jorge Ubico to resign, opening up a space for a ten-year "democratic spring." Democratically elected presidents enacted a series of sweeping reforms. The most dramatic of these was Decree 900, passed in 1952, a large-scale plan to ameliorate land inequality by expropriating more than 500,000 hectares of unused or fallow land (approximately 17 percent of privately owned land in the nation) and allocating it to 100,000 farming families in just eighteen months (Brockett, 1998). U.S. corporations had significant land interests, notably the United Fruit Company, which had large fallow landholdings and a growing interest in oil exploration in the country (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 2005; Solano Ponciano, 2005). These material interests, together with rising Cold War fears of communism (Gleijeses, 1991), led the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to cooperate with the Guatemalan military to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz. In 1954, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the first-known solo CIA coup d'état of a foreign government. The immediate success emboldened U.S. forces to intervene in other Latin American countries, even as the long-simmering conflicts boiled over into a civil war.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Conservation and Settler Logics of Elimination 1
1. Making the Maya Forest 29
2. We Didn’t Invade the Park, the Park Invaded Us 54
3. Rethinking Ladinos as Settlers 82
4. Taxing the Kaxlan: Q’eqchi’ Self-Determination within and beyond the Settler State 107
5. Narco-Narratives and Twenty-First-Century Green Wars 136
Conclusion: Decolonizing the Maya Forest, and Beyond 155

Notes 165
Glossary of Terms and Acronyms 177
References 181