Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Communities and Concessions

By Nadia Sussman

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the strangest things about Guatemala is how close it is to the US. And how easy to leave. In our plane, we effortlessly crossed the border where Mexico tries to keep the Guatemalans out, then cleared the wall the US is building to keep the Mexicans out. Just four and a half hours out of Guatemala City’s gleaming new airport we landed in LA.

It is jarring to move so quickly from one environment to the next. And I am reminded that this very act — the ability to move freely — has so much to do with the situation in Petén ...

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A Visit to Beef National Park

By Michael Stoll

LAGUNA DEL TIGRE NATIONAL PARK, Guatemala — The sign announcing the entrance to Laguna del Tigre National Park is large and impressive. The problem is, that’s about the only visible sign that you’re entering a “core protected area” of a massive national wilderness preserve.

We traveled about five hours by four-wheel-drive pickup truck on drenched dirt roads with four police officers riding in the back through kilometer after endless kilometer of cattle pasture clearly converted recently from primary tropical forest. The cows munched grass that had grown up among the charred stumps of massive trees that once formed a canopy over this vast terrain dotted by wetlands and savanna. Though the radio station was tuned to a popular rock/salsa/reggaeton station, whose name translated to “Mahogany 94.5,” all the mahogany trees, and tropical cedars, had long since been cut down along the entire route ...

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On patrol with Guatemalan environment officials and soldiers

By Michael Stoll

LA PASADITA, Guatemala — The signs were all there: tree stumps, hastily constructed barbed-wire fences and stray cattle. All that was missing was the perpetrator — or perpetrators — of this all too common environmental crime.

About 45 hectares of forestland had been burned, replaced by corn plots and tall grasses, with a few cattle scattered about. About 50 head of cattle congregated around an artificial watering hole.
Officials said they arrested the men they believed to be responsible for this unauthorized land-use change, but they were out of jail on administrative supervision. They face long prison terms if convicted.

The problem is that log-slash-burn-farm-ranch-abandon cycles are rampant in this area...

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Almost back to Oakland for the Mirador Four

By Kara Andrade

It’s the last leg of our journey back from Guatemala and I marvel at the difference in the landscape from above — houses neatly dotted against the foothill ridges and valleys of California’s sloping red terrain inching all the way from Los Angeles in random sproutings of civilization. It’s the same feeling I had while staring out at the Pacific from Laguna del Rey today — kids ran from the onrush of crashing waves and boogie borders chased their boards only to bounce on them within an inch of a quick slide beneath their feet. Five hours away is Guatemala City, chaotic, sprawling and a nightmare in city planning (if there actually was ever any real planning behind the city’s massive overpopulation during the some 36 years of war). It’s a research project onto itself, how a city like la capital developed into such an unwelcoming place in its design and the impact it must have on the psyche of its inhabitants ...

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Over land to the capitol

By David Barreda 

I finally got to see more of Guatemala by land yesterday. I left Flores, Petén, with Kara and Nadia at 6 a.m. Hector, our friend and driver, was behind the wheel and we headed south for hours on straight roads passing more treeless land than I had seen my entire time in Guatemala. The vast rain forest that remains to the north has long ago been transformed into great open tracts of multi-use land. Houses line the roads, roofs are tiled or metal covered rather than thatched. The livestock grazing in the fields are larger and meatier, the car traffic is denser.

Soon after leaving Petén the road joins with the main east-west corridor, an overland connection between Guatemala’s coasts. The roads wind between the growing hills from the plains in the east to the mountains in the west. Traffic moves slowly as we leapfrog ahead of large trucks filled with cargo from the Atlantic ships and others with cows packed like chickens in to large beds towering over our red minivan. But we speed on ...

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Guatemala City rain and welcoming

By Kara Andrade

As the sun emerges from the gray brown smog that hangs over Guatemala City’s wet streets, we board our plane and are inundated by the sounds of English words,  and     babies crying — for the most part a universal language of frustration.

Our time here is ended (for now) and I point the Blackberry in different directions while on the plane with the hopes that I’ll be able to send at least one text or one blog entry while in the clouds. I am a horrible role model when it comes to connectivity politeness; make no mistake, it’s a life line and it can get Hobbesian quickly.

One of the freeing things.   about being able to write from the mobile is that I am not distracted by the production possibliities a laptop holds. I don’t go into the inbox, I don’t upload and Photoshop pictures, I don’t re-organize my Itunes library, I don’t video edit, it’s about as close to a blank sheet of paper and pen as I’m going to get. And so it is here, while seated on the plane in 30 D with Nadia Sussman passed out next to me and a fully-charged ipod with 10 gigs of songs and podcasts that I begin to write ...

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Sustainable forest agriculture spawns its own verb

By Michael Stoll

UAXACTÚN, Guatemala — Everyone in this village down a muddy, rutted road, 23 km past the world-famous Maya archaeological site of Tikal, knows how to “xatear.”

The verb, which would stump most Guatemalans, means “to cut xate,” a decorative plant used in floral arrangements in the United States and elsewhere. But as obscure as the word may sound to outside ears, it’s a core activity for most of this village of fewer than 1,000 people ...

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Guatemala: Peteneros descend on the capital, dubious of another presidential initiative

By: Michael Stoll

GUATEMALA CITY_This morning I flew to Guatemala City with half a dozen officials and NGO representatives from the Guatemalan state of Petén.

They were all rushing to the capital for an impromptu meeting with President Álvaro Colóm, who is unveilling a proposal that he says will promote forest conservation on a grand scale. There have been numerous initiatives, but nothing seems to be able to adequately protect the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a United Nations-inspired patchwork of protected areas created in 1990 that covers the northern half of the state. But nearly two decades later, only about 70 percent of the original forest cover remains ...

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Guatemala: Comforts of the Jungle

By: Michael Stoll

FLORES—A bottle of clear water was set before me. Drops of condensation from the recent refrigeration clinging to its sides. I just had to twist off the cap and drink. And I did, and it was good and tasted just like water should taste, like nothing but refreshing just the same. Of course it should be refreshing, we were 50 miles deep in the jungle earlier this week in the mud and heat and rain and…well you can read the posts we have on that…

That bottle, carelessly placed before me by an overworked bartender/waiter, tasted like water and it was cold—it was what I am used to but it felt strange this time. It didn’t have that plastic taste weakly masked with Gatorade or crystallized coffee or powdered milk, it wasn’t consumed at the temperature of the jungle. My first trek into the rainforest had been replete with analysis of processes, comparisons of livelihoods and shear toil against many physical obstacles, and here I was contemplating the water in front of me. After a day of sitting in on interview after interview the water was something that needed no immediate translating ...

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Guatemala: The view from the top of the Maya World

By: Michael Stoll

We came to northern Guatemala, and slogged through the mud for two days straight, to find out whether there was anything to the claims that archaeology could help save a Rhode Island-size chunk of roadless tropical forest.

The answer, in short, is yes, there’s something to it. But there’s no assurance that the archaeologists’ vision will work out the way they want it to. It all depends on their ability to tell the world about the cultural riches that remain buried beneath the jungle floor, and whether they can make peace with constituencies that have very different ideas about how to promote sustainable development ...

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