by Dawn Paley
The last eviction, which took place on August 23, 2011, was different. This time families fled the area to the sound of gunfire. They watched as their homes were destroyed with chainsaws, doused in gasoline, and set on fire. Many of them ran to the hills, hiding out for days in the forest, eating what they could scavenge. One family hid with their then four-month-old baby, scared and hungry. The majority of the families in the community have young children.
The soldiers didn’t leave the remote village after the eviction, neither did the police or the armed park rangers. Instead, they occupied the few buildings they hadn’t burned to the ground. During my visit to the community, armed men were constantly present, standing in the forested areas on the edge of the settlement, limiting residents’ free movement.
After the August eviction, the community decided there was only one safe place to go, one place where the Guatemalan army and police couldn’t come after them: Mexico. They set up lean-tos and tents in a five-meter-wide strip that marks the border between the two countries, an area sometimes referred to as no man’s land. This marked one of the first times since Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal conflict officially ended in 1996 that an entire village has crossed into Mexico in search of safety. After being forcibly removed by Mexican authorities in January, the community returned and set up their makeshift shacks a few meters from the line. They drink and bathe using water from shallow wells dug alongside a stream that trickles across the border from the Mexican side. On April 10th, just a week after I left the community, a one-year-old named Yorleni Yolet Zacarías Escobar died from fever, dehydration, and diarrhea. Her death was entirely preventable.
“The people are very tired. There is a kind of collective depression. They’ve been in the camp for seven to eight months, living under tarps, eating whatever they can, with no drinking water,” said Brother Tomás González Castillo, the Franciscan priest based in Tenosique, Mexico, the closest urban area to Nueva Esperanza. “It’s tragic.” Castillo and others have organized church support for members of the community, who were prohibited from planting crops until their situation is resolved. Some of the men work for local Mexicans as farmhands when they can, pocketing about $9 on a good day.
A short walk along a narrow dirt trail from the cramped, muddy camp is the former village of Nueva Esperanza. Mynor Morales, who accompanied us to the old village, with his young son and another youth, pointed out the remains of the destroyed houses still visible under the weeds. Over the deep cries of howler monkeys that live in the lush forest, he explained how the community tried to live in harmony with nature, showing us a sign indicating where animals could and could not graze. “Now pretty much all you can see is bush, because everything grows fast here,” said Morales, who pointed out that the police and army also cut down the community’s fruit trees. As we came toward a clearing we saw one of the only structures still standing—the former community center. Music blasted out from the building and we could hear the voices of men who seemed to be in full party mode when we arrived at around eleven. Noticing us, a handful of officers hushed the party and came toward us, taking our picture with a digital camera and recording our names. It became clear that the party was in fact a gathering of the security forces tasked with protecting the area.
We told the police we were missionaries assisting the community, and carried on to a pristine stream that widened out under dense forest cover. As Mynor Morales’s son swam, police armed with semi-automatic weapons approached, and it was made clear that we were not welcome in Lacandón National Park. Other community members told us the army still bothers them, sometimes even patrolling at night, and that soldiers have threatened that women who try to access the stream for washing, bathing, and drinking water will be raped. Even with small children and no other safe source of water, people like Yorleni’s parents now stay away from their stream. “It hurts us a lot, in our souls, to see where we lived before. This is where our children were born, where we lived for years, where we had dreams of a better life,” said Morales.
The official reason for the eviction was that the people of Nueva Esperanza were illegally occupying private property. Others say it was a move by the Colom government to clear the area as part of Cuatro Balam, a mega-project in Petén that includes the promotion of tourism in the region. After the August eviction, Carlos Menocal, the former interior minister of Guatemala, claimed the families of Nueva Esperanza were involved in drug trafficking. For their part, residents said they’ve been told cocaine traffickers use a corridor that runs through the park, but they say their community has never been involved in the drug business. “A drug trafficker wouldn’t live under a tarp for eight months; they wouldn’t live here and sleep right on the ground,” said Morales, pointing to a piece of cardboard that served as a bed for an entire family.
If there are drugs moving through the park today, which seems a likely scenario, trafficking is carried out under the direct supervision of the army, and in territory under the care of “Defensores de la Naturaleza,” a private nongovernmental organization, and the National Commission of Protected Areas. “We’re not criminals, but the government chased us out of our country as if we were,” said Mynor Morales. “The government kicked us out.… They care more for animals than they do for humans, they want to go back to the time of war, back to the ’80s, when there were evictions throughout the country.”
The community accepted resettlement to another part of Petén in 2012. Whoever is moving drugs through the park today is doing so with little risk of being spotted by a civilian.
The Oil Factor
In May 2011, the municipality of La Libertad, Petén, was the site of the deadliest massacre in Guatemala since the conflict ended. Twenty-seven day laborers were killed on a ranch called Los Cocos. When authorities entered the ranch the day after the massacre, they found twenty-six bodies and twenty-three severed heads. On the wall beside the bodies, a message written in blood, in Spanish: “What’s up, Otto Salguero, you bastard? We are going to find you and behead you, too. Sincerely, Z200”—supposedly from a local cell of the Zetas.
Images of the carnage at La Libertad were posted online. They showed heads scattered in the grass, and soldiers guarding decapitated bodies whose hands were bound. They shocked the world and evoked memories of the darkest years of Guatemala’s history when these kinds of events were almost commonplace in some rural areas. But unlike the old days, it wasn’t men in government-issued uniforms overseeing the killing. This time, it was blamed on the Zetas. The rise in violence in Guatemala “has a lot to do with the beginning of the war in Mexico and interests of territorial control on the part of actors who didn’t involve themselves in territorial control because that was the job of local narcotraffickers,” said human rights monitor Samayoa. Following the massacre in Los Cocos, the government declared a state of emergency in Petén that lasted until January 2012.
“More than controlling the distribution chains and infrastructure needed to run the day-to-day operations, the Zetas are focused on controlling territory,” reads the introduction to a September 2011 series prepared for InSight Crime.[6] The report, based mostly on information from government sources and newspaper articles, points to the massacre in La Libertad as the first incursion of the Zetas into Petén. It does seem that drug traffickers who identify as Zetas are active in Petén, and Fox News even reported on a banner, hung in the state’s capital, threatening death to civilians in Petén and signed by Z200.
To claim that Petén is Zetas territory, however, is to ignore other important interests in the resource-rich region, which is bigger than Belgium. For one, there are established drug trafficking families in Petén who haven’t ceded control of the lucrative transshipment market to the Zetas. But the armed groups with the most visible presence in the region are the Guatemalan police and army, and they were an ever-present part of the daytime street life in the half-dozen cities and villages I visited there, driving around in the backs of pickup trucks or walking around in grou
ps. The Lacandón National Park, where Nueva Esperanza was located, is in the municipality of La Libertad, as is the Laguna del Tigre Park, where we were warned against entering because our presence at the various army checkpoints on the way into the park could create problems for the people we wished to visit.
Both of these protected areas are heavily militarized, and both are reported to be places where drugs are moved into Mexico, but they’re also home to dozens of peasant communities and are among the areas of Guatemala with the most abundant natural resources. The events unfolding in Petén are less familiar to many than those in Mexico, and merit closer attention. To get into the Laguna del Tigre National Park, you have to travel through El Naranjo, a busy frontier town bordering a river that flows to Mexico. While we visited, soldiers kept watch over the riverfront; rickety, wooden motorboats came and went; other armed men without uniforms stayed back under the shade of nearby shop fronts; and a small sign at the loading area displayed the logo of another powerful group operating in the area: Perenco. A Paris-based oil company, Perenco produced and exported over 3.6 million barrels of crude oil in 2011, when oil displaced cardamom as Guatemala’s fourth largest export, after coffee, sugar, and bananas. The firm operates forty-seven wells in what is known as the Xan Field inside the Laguna del Tigre National Park, forming a footprint anyone with access to Google Maps can see. The oil travels down a 475-kilometre pipeline, also owned by Perenco, which leads to the company’s refinery near La Libertad town center, and then continues on to the company’s terminal near Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast. Perenco acquired the operation from Canada’s Basic Resources in 2001.
According to one local resident, who asked that his identity be concealed for fear of reprisals, the militarization of the area has more to do with protecting oil interests than it does with fighting organized crime. “In the case of Perenco, it’s a company that’s providing financing for the army of Guatemala to install itself in the area,” he said, pointing out that six small military bases and at least 250 soldiers—part of a so-called green battalion that is framed as protecting wilderness—exist inside Laguna del Tigre. Some of these soldiers have taken part in forced evictions of communities living inside the park and are currently responsible for what amounts to a state of siege for those still living there. Not only are the twenty-five to thirty communities within the park forbidden from cutting a tree without a permit, they are under constant pressure from soldiers and armed park rangers.
“First, the mere presence of soldiers is something that makes the communities feel uncomfortable because of the memory of the people—when they see a soldier, they see someone who is there to kill,” said the resident, who travels regularly into the area. “Second, they built a military outpost on the road, fifteen or seventeen kilometers from here, from El Naranjo, where they are controlling everything that the communities bring into the park.” He said soldiers prevent community members from bringing in provisions, work tools, and materials they need for their homes, like corrugated zinc, cement bricks, sand, and rebar. “They’re pressuring them by denying them access to things they need, which is another way of pressuring them so that they’ll leave the area on their own,” he said.
Perenco has deflected attention from its impacts on the park by stating on its website they “recognize[s] the serious nature of the problems facing the Park, such as those caused by migrant communities [sic] illegal slash and burn farming techniques.” The government of Guatemala also blames people living inside the park for environmental damage to Central America’s largest wetlands. “I will not tire of saying that the biggest threats to the Laguna del Tigre Park are cows and not the pipes of Perenco company,” said former president Álvaro Colom in 2010.
Ex-Petén governor Rudel Mauricio Álvarez claims that during his administration, which ended in 2012, the choice was between oil or drugs. I met Álvarez in an open, modern café in Flores, the picturesque capital of Petén, following a Twitter exchange spurred by the word narcoganadería—or narcoranching, meaning large-scale ranches used as cover for drug trafficking activity. “That’s the question: What’s worse, what’s more damaging: oil that only impacts the 450 hectares where the fields are, or narcoranchers who have 140,000 hectares?” he asked. “Everyone, the environmentalists and everyone else went against oil.… They make the real problem of the protected areas invisible,” he said, pausing briefly before coming back to his own question. “The problem isn’t oil extraction. The problem is narcoranchers.”
No one I spoke to denied that Laguna del Tigre was part of a trafficking route where Colombian cocaine arrives on private airstrips and is then moved out to Mexico. Opinions differ on how involved the dozens of communities inside the park are with trafficking. Álvarez claimed that most of the communities are invaders, funded by narcodollars, but unlike parts of Mexico where the drug trade dominates, I didn’t see a single showy SUV while I was in Petén. My source in El Naranjo said the narcos keep to themselves, flying in and out of the area, while the communities—many of which were settled by families displaced during the internal conflict—survive off of their basic crops of corn, beans, and squash. One thing is clear: the presence of drug traffickers in Laguna del Tigre hasn’t affected oil production, and in fact, oil companies are showing a renewed interest in Guatemala’s crude. A handful of Canadian oil companies have made their own moves into Guatemala, including Calgary-based Quattro Exploration and Production, which actively extracts oil in Saskatchewan. Between November 2011 and mid-2012, Quattro acquired almost 350,000 hectares’ worth of oil concessions in Guatemala, including a concession block adjacent to Laguna del Tigre, itself within the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Other companies, like Pacific Rubiales and Latin American Resources Ltd., are also active in Petén.
Oil is only one of the super-profitable industries in Guatemala. The Cuatro Balam project proposes biofuels and large-scale agriculture in the south of Petén as well as increased spending on infrastructure for mass tourism, partially funded by groups such as the Inter-American Development Bank. Corporate-linked conservation groups, like the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society, continue to claim vast tracts of land as park. There is also the threat of new hydroelectric projects, four of which are proposed along the Usumacinta River, which activists say would flood 35,000 people off their land. Few, if any, of the profits from these illicit or licit economic activities will ever make it to Petén’s poor majority. They remain the most likely to be displaced from the land they depend on for survival, and they are the most likely to lose friends and loved ones as the drug war escalates in Guatemala.
US Marines, Beyond Mérida
In August, 2012, 200 US Marines were stationed in Guatemala as part of the war on drugs.[7] The deployment of US combat troops to Guatemala was part of Operation Martillo, a military plan meant to disrupt cocaine trafficking routes that pass through Central America from Colombia to the United States. “We have the sense that [fighting narcotrafficking] is a pretext to return to the level of military deployment that was maintained during the height of the armed conflict, which resulted in acts of genocide,” said Hernández Batres. The Guatemalan army was called upon to fight drug trafficking in early 2012. “Today, publicly, I want to lay out for the army an important goal of collaborating, coordinating, and cooperating with other security institutions, and that is to put an end to the external threats and contribute to neutralizing illegal armed groups by means of military power,” said Otto Pérez Molina, following his inauguration as president of Guatemala in January 2012.[8] Pérez Molina, a former general and head of army intelligence, promised to increase military spending, and so far, he’s kept his promise. According to Plaza Pública, a Guatemalan investigative journalism outlet, spending on military and security equipment in 2013 surpassed all such spending between 2004 and 2012.[9]
The arrival of US Marines to Guatemala in 2012 represents more than a military maneuver to disrupt drug trafficking. It demonstrates that in allied countries like Guatemala, the
United States can champion a military invasion under the discourse of the war on drugs with little fanfare or criticism. The deployment of troops to Guatemala is arguably the most blatant example of an evolving military strategy that the US military establishment is betting on in order to continue to exercise control within a framework of democracy and law and order. “The predominant hemispheric security challenges no longer stem principally from state-on-state conflict, right-wing paramilitaries, or left-wing insurgents,” reads the US Western Hemisphere Defense Policy Statement, released in October 2012. “Today’s threats to regional peace and stability stem from the spread of narcotics and other forms of illicit trafficking, gangs, and terrorism, the effects of which can be exacerbated by natural disasters and uneven economic opportunity.”[10]
Guatemala, and Central America as a whole, is a testing ground for one iteration of the US military’s evolving strategy of control, which is being applied unevenly throughout the hemisphere. In Guatemala, it includes US combat troops—something the United States can’t get away with in Mexico, whose constitution explicitly forbids foreigners from carrying weapons. Like Mexico, anti-drugs efforts in Guatemala also include the involvement of military officials from Canada, Chile, and Colombia as trainers in regional security matters.[11]
