"There the cancer has spread and those who are destroying (the land) are the big fish, not the small ones"

Two sides of the coin in the Maya Biosphere

Eduardo García [Latinamerica Press] Guatemala

Agricultural and livestock expansion, along with drug trafficking, threatens nature reserve.

A land management debate is heating up within the Maya Biosphere, a 2.1-million-hectare (5-million-acre) protected area in the northern Guatemalan department of Peten, considered the largest tropical forest north of the Amazon.

While the situation is unsustainable in the Tiger Lagoon National Park, the system used in the Multiple Use Zone (ZUM) is thriving.

Tiger Lagoon is included on the Ramsar Convention’s List of Wetlands of International Importance, an area under strict protection where human settlements are prohibited by law.

From the park’s entrance in the municipality of Naranjo through the Xan military checkpoint, there exists an area that cannot be described better than as scorched land. The landscape is distressing: felled trees, recent fires, smoke, idle farms, and barbed wire everywhere.

"In total, close to 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres), or 40 percent of the park, has suffered irreversible effects, most of them in the Xan area," said Byron Castellanos of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a US-based organization.

The presence of drug trafficking
However, authorities do not attribute the problem simply to illegal occupation but rather the presence of drug trafficking. Evidence indicates that the drug trade is not something that is brought in from outside but is instead something that involves many of the illegal occupants", some of whom use the lands for stockbreeding as well, giving way to a new phenomenon: "narco-stockbreeding."

"The problem is not only the occupations, but also everything that is tied to the ‘narco-stockbreeding’ and money laundering," said Vinicio Montero, director of the National Protected Areas Council (CONAP) in Peten.

According to Montero, there are six clandestine landing strips within the park, and CONAP knows of at least 13 small airplanes, that have been abandoned by drug traffickers.

The area’s limited police presence, along with the drug traffickers and high number of illegal occupants – which WCS estimates to be between 7,000 and 8,000 people – has rendered the area ungovernable.

"We are not making arrests here," said Elías Ramos Quiroa, one of only two CONAP agents who protect the post of El Tigrillo at the park’s entrance. "If we arrest someone, the neighbors will lynch us."

"It is frustrating because we have a job to do, but we cannot do anything. It is as if we are prisoners here."

The future of the Tiger Lagoon is uncertain, but it is clear that the "strict protection system" of the park is not working, due, among other things, to the lack of state resources and the limited ability of President Oscar Berger’s administration to impose its authority on this area.

"We wanted to apply the strict Costa Rican protection system here, but that model is not applicable in a Third World country like Guatemala," said Montero.

In contrast to what is happening in Tiger Lagoon park, the model of forestland concessions that is being implemented in the ZUM, the 848,000 hectares (2 million acres), 40 percent of the biosphere, granted to 13 communities, and two private companies for 25 years so that they make a sustainable use of forest resources, seems to be working relatively well.

Good forest management
Of the communities working in ZUM are in possession of a certificate of good forest management or "green seal" called SmartWood, which is granted by the US organization Rainforest Alliance.

Satellite photographs of the area demonstrate that in the ZUM the forest is far better conserved. A recent WCS report supports this: "In current intensities, the use does not seem to pose a major threat to the Biosphere. On the contrary, extraction operations (of wood and other forest resources) create jobs for community members and, thereby potential land uses that are less conservation-friendly decrease." 

Macedonio Cortave, director of the Association of Forest Communities of Peten, which includes all the communities that have land in the ZUM, thinks that they are making a good job regarding to preservation of the area.  

"To put a police officer on every tree is not the solution because the police are corrupt. The lesson that we have learned is that conservation only will be possible as long as communities can use the resources rationally," he said. 

The Guatemalan government is negotiating a loan of US$10 million with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to develop the Maya Biosphere, with the aim of supporting concessions.  

"One of the priorities will be to support the concessions, mainly to the communities, so that they are sustainable," said Carmen Rosa Pérez, national coordinator of the Integral Program of Sustainable Development in the Reserve of the Mayan Biosphere. 

Although the concession model has shown to be more successful than the strict protection system of the Tiger Lagoon, Cortave does not believe that the ZUM model can be translated there. 

"There the cancer has spread and those who are destroying (the land) are the big fish, not the small ones," Cortave said. 

Thursday,  July 7,  2005