Historical references

Historically, as elsewhere in Guatemala, the reality of the indigenous population in Alta Verapaz has been continuously threatened by socio-cultural, economic and eco-logical transformations, including a wide range of politically destabilising factors.

Throughout the centuries, the rights of the Q'eqchi' were largely neglected and their culture, language and traditions were regarded as socially inferior by the European-descended ruling class. At the time when the Spanish colonists reached the eastern highlands in the 1530s, it was highly difficult to establish centralised governmental control over the area due to continued resistance of the Q'eqchi' and the dispersal of their settlements. After the Spanish military failed to conquer it by force, the territory became governed by an ecclesiastical administration. In the 1540s, the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas set out to pacify the area, which had been known until then as Tezulutlán – ›the land of war‹, by converting the population to Catholicism. In 1547, it was named Verapaz, ›true peace‹ (Schackt 2004: 6). Despite the ›spiritual conquest‹, which comprised a central element of the Spanish subjugation, the pre-hispanic relig-ion proved resilient, as the Q'eqchi' incorporated Christian beliefs into their traditrelig-ional worldview.³⁸ A second historical epoch that deeply transformed the world of the Q'eqchi' was the liberal period in the 19^th century, paving the road to the conflicts of the 20^th century.³⁹

Fig. 4.4 The Calvario in Cobán⁴⁰

38 The indigenous worldview will be further discussed in chapter 5.2.

39 For an early ethnographic account dealing with Q'eqchi' culture, see Sapper (1936).

40 As Secaira (2005) mentions, several sacred sites were ›christianised‹ by building churches on top of them. One example is the Calvary church in Cobán, which was built around 1810 on a hill

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Traditionally, each settlement had defined property rights over communal territories from which members of the community usually took up land for cultivation. The communities had established their own councils, which regulated the access to land.

In the 19^th century, the colonial government transferred indigenous territories into private ownership, thereby reducing most peasants to migrant labour status. The dis-placement from ancestral lands became a major problem and led to resistance move-ments since the purchase of land by the authorities not only involved the terrain itself, but also included its residents, who were obliged to work on the lands. Virtually all of the best farmland was seized, mostly by German expatriates who had settled in Alta Verapaz and established a production system based on fincas, for which they needed large expanses of land to meet the demands of the growing coffee export industry.⁴¹ Subsequently, the Q'eqchi' were relegated to farming mountain slopes and indentured into seasonal servitude on plantations. The continued fragmenting into small holdings due to ongoing land consolidation provoked massive migration movements of whole families towards the adjacent lowlands and places such as Senahú, Panzós, Lanquín, Ca-habón, to the Petén and southern Belize in search of new land (Carr 2004).⁴² Migration was even intensified as a result of the adverse effects of the violence of the armed confrontation during the years of war succeeding a military coup in 1954.⁴³ By the end of the 1970s, the first steps in a generalised social and political mobilisation had taken place. In 1978, a number of religious, labour and popular organisations began protest-ing the increasprotest-ing militarisation that was takprotest-ing place in rural areas of Alta Verapaz. A key event in mobilising the oppositional movement was the first massacre in Panzós.⁴⁴

ing the town. Today, traditional ceremonies are commonly performed next to the church entrance.

The city of Cobán was founded in 1544 on a sacred mountain where a deity called Mon'a venerated by the local Q'eqchi' was substituted by a big wooden cross (Flores Arenales 1999).

41 A finca is a large landholding devoted mainly to commercial agriculture. It is usually privately owned and includes a community of permanent land labourers. By 1930, the Verapaz was virtually a German territorial possession until the coffee empire came to an end with the 2^nd World War. As part of Guatemala's declaration of war on the side of the Allies, the Germans were expelled and their properties expropriated (Barreiro 2001). Nevertheless, the land and labour relations formed during that area have changed little to this date (Wilk 1997: 53). At present, finqueros (landlords) are often high-ranking members of the military.

42 While many indigenous peoples in Guatemala have tended to migrate toward the larger urban cen-tres as a result of forced displacement, the Q'eqchi' tended to move onto tierras baldías (empty lands) to establish new communities in the mountainous, forested and coastal areas of their region, thereby recreating their customary way of life (Barreiro 2001: 5). This phenomenon has to do with the fact that the Q'eqchi' were almost the only ethnic group in Guatemala that had a flexible agrarian frontier at its disposal (Siebers 1994: 233).

43 With exception of an agrarian reform initiated by the government between 1952 and 1954, no re-gime had attacked the agrarian roots of cultural discrimination. Between 1950 and 1970, the average farm seize dropped from 8.1 ha to 5.6 ha. The number of landless peasants increased to about one-forth of the rural workforce (Davis 1988: 14f.).

44 For several months, Q'eqchi' peasants of Panzós had been soliciting for official land titles. Despite counterclaims by finqueros, the government had promised to issue the titles. When the peasants came to the town hall to obtain them they were met by armed soldiers. In the ensuing encounter more than 100 people were killed (Davis 1988: 17). This event constituted a turning point because the army's strategy shifted thereupon from low intensity repression towards large-scale violence (Flores Arenales 1999: 97). Until late 1983, massacres became routine, whereas villages did not have to be

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In the early 1980s, the area north of Cobán was heavily affected by counterinsurgency campaigns because the guerrilla movement operated in the region. Dozens of com-munities were destroyed and thousands of inhabitants were killed or ›disappeared‹. At the height of the conflict, at least 40 percent of the Q'eqchi' were displaced from their original homelands; they either sought refuge in the towns or went into exile; some 20,000 fled into the mountains where they often remained for years. The physical dis-appearance of individuals not only adversely affected the life of the particular families but also the entire social body of the communities.⁴⁵ The army also moved entire communities, concentrating them in so-called ›model villages‹.

Another cornerstone of the counterinsurgency programme was the establishment of a system of civil self-defence patrols. By creating paramilitary control groups at the community level, the army aimed to separate the civil population from the insurgents operating from the mountainous areas. Since the early 1980s, villages throughout the highlands were patrolled by groups of men drawn from the civilian population and armed by the military with the purpose to control subversive activities in the country-side.⁴⁶ Adams (1988) comments that the colonial policy of forced labour was reinsti-tuted by the army with the civil patrols, requiring the unpaid time of all able-bodied male members of the communities. These men perceived the imposed system as bur-den that took time from their agricultural and other productive activities. In 2002, po-litical debates were ongoing as to these patrullas de autodefensa civil (PAC) in terms of of-ficial negotiations regarding financial compensations the government had assured to the former patrulleros for their unpaid services. As the state authorities never met their commitments, strikes were repeatedly called out and main routes were blocked throughout the country so as to remind of the official obligation to compensate the peasants for their engagement during the war. An informant living in San Benito, one of the villages the present study took place in, recalls that he had been a patrullero for almost 12 years. Sixty men from his community were obliged to patrol every third night, 10 to 15 men at a time. When asked whether he intended to participate in the announced strike, he replied indirectly by referring to the possibility of being killed on an occasion that probably would meet with official mechanisms of violence. In spite of official assertions concerning reparations and reinforced measures to advance unre-solved questions of land tenure, conflicts between large sections of the landless popu-lation and the government continue to destabilise the ongoing peace process.

suspected of collaborating with the guerrilla to be attacked. Communities with developed local insti-tutions such as cooperatives or schools were particularly targeted (Wilson 1990: 13).

45 Often the people knew about clandestine cemeteries, but army members or their informants pre-vented the people from bewailing the deaths (Flores Arenales 1999).

46 In 1985, the civil patrol system was said to include more than 900,000 men between the age of 18 and 60 who were armed and obliged to protect roads and the inhabitants of their villages from guer-rilla intrusion (Davis 1988: 27). According to Flores Arenales (1999: 138), other civilian and religious hierarchies were relegated to a subordinate position in relation to this paramilitary structure. The in-ternal organisation of the patrols remained in place when they were transformed into the above mentioned local development committees in the second half of the 1990s.

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The above mentioned culture of fear remains notable in many spheres of present society.

In particular, claims over land imply social tensions that manifest regularly in strikes and occupations of large estates. Due to the concentration of landownership, popula-tion growth and environmental degradapopula-tion, migrapopula-tion continues to play an important role in its impact on the deforestation process in the area.⁴⁷ Encouraged by improved means of transportation, migration occurred to an increased extent during the period between the censuses of 1981 and 1994 and led to deforestation rates in the munici-palities of the Petén and the Franja Transversal del Norte, which tripled the average growth of the country (CONAP1999: 100).⁴⁸ The expansion of the agricultural fron-tier was reinforced by the construction of roads through forested areas and even through National Parks and biosphere reserves.⁴⁹ As affirmed by Nations et al. (1998:

xviii), the most serious challenge the Selva Maya faces is caused by poverty. It impels individual farmers to clear the forest for cropland and pasture in order to feed their families. Thus, identifying viable economic alternatives to this pattern of destruction has become a most important issue. According to the authors, past experience has taught a significant lesson about ignoring the needs of local inhabitants: it does no good to designate an area as off-limits to human use or habitation when there are people in need of land, housing and food. To halt the process of deforestation and environmental deterioration, numerous protected areas have been established in the past decades throughout the northern territories. However, the information base for the development of a multipurpose range of alternative strategies for forest manage-ment in the area is limited, as Furley (1998: 128) states. This also applies to studies concerned with ethnoecological knowledge and the involvement of local communities in different conservation schemes.⁵⁰ These particular issues will be dealt with in the following sections concerned with the National Park Laguna Lachuá.

47 Besides migrating further into the adjacent lowlands, the Q'eqchi' have also migrated into higher terrains in the area. A study concerned with issues of territoriality, migration and land tenure has been provided by Pedroni (1991).

48 The Franja Transversal del Norte consists of a strip of land stretching from the Caribbean coast to the northern department of Huehuetenango. The Q'eqchi' areas of this transitional zone include the northern parts of Alta Verapaz and Izabal and the north-eastern part of Quiché. The latter is also re-ferred to as Ixcán.

49 For implications of this process, see Grünberg (2000).

50 Apart from the contributions by Secaira (2000), relatively little attention has been given so far by anthropologists to the design and implementation of conservation strategies in the area. While most work centres on the northernmost areas in the Petén (Primack et al. 1998, Sundberg 1998, Grünberg 2000, Katz 2000, Atran 2002, Carr 2004), few scholars have undertaken to analyse and document the particular conditions of protected area management in Alta Verapaz. The latest account by Secaira (2005) reveals an interesting example from the western highlands about efforts to build alliances be-tween indigenous communities and conservationists to protect sacred sites that often are located in areas important for biodiversity conservation.

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