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Drug trafficking, cattle ranching and Land use and Land cover change in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve
Abstract
Drug trafficking organizations are driving deforestation in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. Drug traffickers deforest the protected area in order to illegally ranch cattle, which serves as a mechanism of money laundering, drug smuggling, and territory control. Journalists and ethnographers have analyzed “narco-cattle ranching” activities in the reserve and resulting “narco-deforestation,” yet land use change scientists have yet to quantify the contribution of illegal cattle ranching to forest loss. This article uses remote sensing and GIS analysis to distinguish the relative contribution of cattle ranching, farming, and land speculation to reserve deforestation and other forms of land use and land cover change. We also use ethnographic methods to provide evidentiary links between illegal cattle ranching and drug trafficking activities that suggest a large part, but not all, of illegal cattle ranching is narco-capitalized. Our research finds that illegal cattle ranching is responsible for the majority of reserve deforestation, ranging from 59 to 86% of photographs on deforested lands in three sampled areas. We also found illegal cattle ranching activities are the highest in the reserve’s western national parks, which should be strictly protected from land use change. Contrary to popular debate, these findings suggest drug traffickers in the context of the US-led War on Drugs are to blame for forest loss, not subsistence farmers illegally living in the reserve.
... Currently, only one of these concessions is still active, Cruce a la Colorada. The differences among these concessions with regards to their forest experience, background, and demographics have likely contributed to this outcome along with the characteristics of the forest concessions themselves regarding size, proximity to roads, and external pressures on the land, including the presence of narco-drug trafficking and illegal cattle ranching in the region (Radachowsky et al. 2012;Hodgdon et al. 2015;Devine et al. 2020). The two industrial concessions, Gibor and La Gloria, are located within the central region of the reserve also in the MUZ (see Figure 2). ...
... Cruce a la Colorada also struggled as a concession, it has been able to overcome the challenges other recently-inhabited concessions were unable to (Devine et al. 2020) and thus is the focus of the recently-inhabited concession results. ...
... Soils that are more acidic are more likely to not foster tree growth; pixels at higher elevations are less likely to be deforested through slash-and-burn agricultural methods; and pixels that receive higher levels of precipitation are more likely to foster forest growth. We include distance to the edges of the reserve and the buffer zone as an additional proxy for how remote the forest pixel is and its potential proximity to illegal cattle ranching that is related to narco-drug trafficking in the reserve, which has been found to take place in the western portion of the reserve and along the road to Carmelita in the MUZ (Hodgdon et al., 2015;Devine et al., 2020). ...
... Drug trafficking and money laundering via livestock production contribute to deforestation directly implicated with habitat loss in Central America [1,2]. In light of reports of deforestation in Central America being connected to narcotrafficking, we examined trends suggestive of deforestation within Laguna del Tigre National Park in Guatemala's highly biodiverse Maya Biosphere Reserve. ...
... Among Central America's protected areas, narco-deforestation has impacted Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve and La Mosquitia, at the border between Honduras and Nicaragua; and to a lesser extent, the Jiquilisco region in El Salvador, the Osa peninsula in Costa Rica, and Darién National Park in Panama [16]. Cattle ranch laundering might be facilitated in northern Guatemala due to the low presence of law enforcement agencies for border security [25], increase of illegal economies and clandestine routes through the border [26], low control of cattle monetary transactions [1], the increase of narco-airstrips since mid-2000s [27], and corruption [28]. ...
... Previous reports noted forests are cut for clandestine roads and landing strips, and drug trafficking intensifies preexisting pressures on forests by infusing already weakly governed frontiers with unprecedented amounts of cash and weapons [2]. In Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, drug traffickers deforest the protected area to illegally ranch cattle, which serves as a mechanism of money laundering, drug smuggling, and territory control [1]. From a social-justice perspective, deforestation from drug paddocks is linked to flood disasters, without forests acting as a natural "shield" against extreme weather events. ...
Characteristic of the Anthropocene, human impacts have resulted in worldwide losses in forested land cover, which can directly and indirectly drive biodiversity loss. The global illicit drug trade is one source of deforestation directly implicated with habitat loss in Central America, typically for drug trafficking and livestock production for money laundering. Given reports of deforestation in Central America linked to narcotraffic, we explored vegetation changes within Guatemala’s highly biodiverse Maya Biosphere Reserve by examining trends suggestive of deforestation in a protected area. As such, we collected satellite-derived data in the form of enhanced vegetation index (EVI), as well as history of burned areas, published human-“footprint” data, official population density, and artificial light activity in Laguna del Tigre National Park from 2002 to 2020 for descriptive analysis. We found consistent reductions in EVI and trends of anomalous losses of vegetation despite a baseline accounting for variation within the park. Analyses revealed weak correlations (R2 ≤ 0.26) between EVI losses and official sources of anthropogenic data, which may be attributable to the data’s limited spatial and temporal resolution. Alarmingly, simple analyses identified vegetation losses within a protected area, thus emphasizing the need for additional monitoring and science-based, but interdisciplinary policies to protect this biodiversity hotspot.
... Recent reports have raised crucial concerns about the increasing expansions in illegal cattle ranching activities relating to illegal cocaine trafficking (narcotics trafficking) in Central America, Guatemala (Devine et al., 2020) and Nicaragua (Tobar-López et al., 2019). ...
... Furthermore, the areas of forest cover and natural vegetation transitioning to urban were the largest among all continents, and they were located mainly in the USA . Guatemala (Devine et al., 2020) and Nicaragua (Tobar-López et al., 2019) experienced high deforestation rates, not only in the Americas but also at the global scale. This could be attributed to the expansion of palm oil plantations in the former nation and coffee in the latter. ...
... This could be attributed to the expansion of palm oil plantations in the former nation and coffee in the latter. Another factor causing this issue in Central America was the illegal cattle ranching expansion in relation to illegal cocaine trafficking (Devine et al., 2020). ...
Changes in global land cover (LC) have significant consequences for global environmental change, impacting the sustainability of biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and food security. Different forms of LC change have taken place across the world in recent decades due to a combination of natural and anthropogenic drivers, however, the types of change and rates of change have traditionally been hard to quantify. This thesis exploits the properties of the recently released ESA-CCI-LC product – an internally consistent, high-resolution annual time-series of global LC extending from 1992 to 2018. Specifically, this thesis uses a combination of trajectories and transition maps to quantify LC changes over time at national, continental and global scales, in order to develop a deeper understanding of what, where and when significant changes in LC have taken place and relates these to natural and anthropogenic drivers. This thesis presents three analytical chapters that contribute to achieving the objectives and the overarching aim of the thesis. The first analytical chapter initially focuses on the Nile Delta region of Egypt, one of the most densely populated and rapidly urbanising regions globally, to quantify historic rates of urbanisation across the fertile agricultural land, before modelling a series of alternative futures in which these lands are largely protected from future urban expansion. The results show that 74,600 hectares of fertile agricultural land in the Nile Delta (Old Lands) was lost to urban expansion between 1992 and 2015. Furthermore, a scenario that encouraged urban expansion into the desert and adjacent to areas of existing high population density could be achieved, hence preserving large areas of fertile agricultural land within the Nile Delta. The second analytical chapter goes on to examine LC changes across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a complex and diverse environment, through the joint lenses of political regions and ecoregions, differentiating between natural and anthropogenic signals of change and relating to likely drivers. The results reveal key LC change processes at a range of spatial scales, and identify hotspots of LC change. The major five key LC change processes were: (i) “gain of dry forests” covered the largest extent and was distributed across the whole of SSA; (ii) “greening of deserts” found adjacent to desert areas (e.g., the Sahel belt); (iii) “loss of tree-dominated savanna” extending mainly across South-eastern Africa; (iv) “loss of shrub-dominated savanna” stretching across West Africa, and “loss of tropical rainforests” unexpectedly covering the smallest extent, mainly in the DRC, West Africa and Madagascar. The final analytical chapter considers LC change at the global scale, providing a comprehensive assessment of LC gains and losses, trajectories and transitions, including a complete assessment of associated uncertainties. This chapter highlights variability between continents and identifies locations of high LC dynamism, recognising global hotspots for sustainability challenges. At the national scale, the chapter identifies the top 10 countries with the largest percentages of forest loss and urban expansion globally. The results show that the majority of these countries have stabilised their forest losses, however, urban expansion was consistently on the rise in all countries. The thesis concludes with recommendations for future research as global LC products become more refined (spatially, temporally and thematically) allowing deeper insights into the causes and consequences of global LC change to be determined.
... The most destructive of these illegal activities is cattle ranching [22,38,45,50,53,55,59]. Protected and remote areas highly impacted by drug trafficking and related illicit activities include the Petén and Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, and Honduras's Rio Plátano Biosphere Reserve [44,45,55,57,[60][61][62][63]. ...
... In Central America, drug trafficking has produced distinctive patterns of extensive deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation [45,62,63]. Deforestation in this region is considered a large-scale, late-stage effect of "narco-degradation" that reflects changes in smuggling routes and greatly varies in the time, space, type, and intensity of these activities, typically emerging at a local level as drug trade inserts in specific locations across Central American countries [22,45]. ...
Central America is a unique geographical region that connects North and South America, enclosed by the Caribbean Sea to the East, and the Pacific Ocean to the West. This region, encompassing Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua, is highly vulnerable to the emergence or resurgence of mosquito-borne and tick-borne diseases due to a combination of key ecological and socioeconomic determinants acting together, often in a synergistic fashion. Of particular interest are the effects of land use changes, such as deforestation-driven urbanization and forest degradation, on the incidence and prevalence of these diseases, which are not well understood. In recent years, parts of Central America have experienced social and economic improvements; however, the region still faces major challenges in developing effective strategies and significant investments in public health infrastructure to prevent and control these diseases. In this article, we review the current knowledge and potential impacts of deforestation, urbanization, and other land use changes on mosquito-borne and tick-borne disease transmission in Central America and how these anthropogenic drivers could affect the risk for disease emergence and resurgence in the region. These issues are addressed in the context of other interconnected environmental and social challenges.
... Air routes, on the contrary, typically see private planes coming from Venezuela and Colombia landing in one of the multiple illegal airstrips of the country (UNODC, 2012). These airstrips are often found in isolated areas and across a variety of landscapes, such as forested regions, oil palm plantations, indigenous territories and communal lands (Devine et al., 2020;McSweeney et al., 2017), usually distant from law enforcement presence (Pearson et al., 2022). ...
Since the 2000s, Honduras has expanded its role as a transit hub for international cocaine trafficking, with tonnes of cocaine passing through the country every year. Nevertheless, research on illicit drug flows in the country – and more generally across transit areas – remains limited. This resides in a tendency within both academic and institutional discourses to depict illicit flows as detached from societal structures, with little implications for the realities they touch. Drawing on the qualitative analysis of publicly available official US court documents on drug trafficking in Honduras and semi-structured interviews with experts on the country’s drug economy, this article addresses this gap by exploring the movement of US-bound cocaine shipments across Honduras. It explores whether, and how, transient activities such as illicit drug flows become embedded in the territories they traverse. The discussion shows the extent to which the drug trade has become embedded within Honduras’ political and territorial realities, concluding that drugs do not merely pass through transit spaces but become integrated into them. Drug traffickers rely on relationships they establish with both legal and extra-legal actors – including other drug traffickers and state officials – to receive and move drugs across the country. These relationships allow them to obtain access to ‘points of passage’ such as clandestine airstrips, security checkpoints and road networks – all of which are crucial infrastructures for facilitating the transit of drugs. Furthermore, the article reveals both legal and extra-legal actors’ role in exerting control over these logistics infrastructures and therefore in enabling the transnational flow of illicit goods. These insights contribute to broader debates on illicit flows, organised crime and the control of passage points along trade routes, while also shedding light on the often-overlooked role of transit countries like Honduras in the transnational cocaine trade.
... Además de la ya mencionada construcción de infraestructura vial, resaltan aquí los proyectos de extracción de recursos naturales y de agroindustria orientada a la exportación que imponen lógicas capitalistas por sobre otros usos de suelo en el espacio amazónico (Ballvé, 2020;Sauls et al., 2022). En vista de la creciente evidencia sobre la canalización del dinero procedente de las economías ilícitas hacia esquemas agroindustriales legales en zonas de frontera, la conexión entre estos esquemas de desarrollo con las economías ilícitas es cada vez más clara (Devine et al., 2020a(Devine et al., , 2020bMurillo-Sandoval et al., 2023;Richani, 2012;Sankey, 2022;Tellman et al., 2021). Por otro lado, la literatura también resalta que los Estados pueden mostrar cierto nivel de tolerancia hacia las actividades ilícitas cuando no pueden ir directamente en contra, como en el caso del VRAEM en donde representan una actividad económica omnipresente que cuenta, además, con una amplia plataforma política para la defensa de esta actividad (Paredes & Pastor, 2021). ...
Este artículo presenta una síntesis narrativa de la literatura académica sobre el cultivo de coca y la minería ilegal en la Amazonía peruana. A través de fuentes secundarias, analiza la expansión de estas economías ilícitas hacia la Amazonía oriental. Asimismo, el artículo presenta y discute cuatro mitos sobre las economías ilícitas prevalentes en el debate público y los medios de comunicación, que impiden una comprensión de la complejidad detrás de estos fenómenos. Los mitos en cuestión giran en torno a i) un conocimiento cabal sobre la extensión y distribución del cultivo de coca y la minería ilegal, ii) la existencia de una relación directa entre economías ilícitas y violencia, iii) el rol de los pueblos indígenas frente a la expansión de estas actividades y, finalmente, iv) la ausencia o poca presencia del Estado en estos contextos. En base a una revisión narrativa de la literatura, este artículo utiliza los hallazgos de la evidencia empírica reciente para cuestionar la validez de dichos mitos. El artículo finaliza con conclusiones de investigación y recomendaciones para el estudio de las economías ilícitas.
... This is supported by Ardizzi et al. (2018) who used an econometric model in their study and found that financial deepening of Italian municipalities is positively affected by the local intensity of criminal activity and money laundering. Some researchers study the relationships between money laundering and drug trafficking activities, such as research conducted by Other researches relate money laundering with illicit proceeds from piracy ventures (Gikonyo, 2018), bitcoin (Fletcher et al., 2021), terrorism financing (Rusanov and Pudovochkin, 2021), illegal cattle ranching and deforestation activities (Devine et al., 2020), contraband smuggling (Shen et al., 2021) and also tax evasion (Kemsley et al., 2022). ...
Money laundering is one of the financial crimes that has become a major concern in most countries worldwide. The rising number of reported instances of money laundering could be driven by several reasons. With this growth, there is a growing academic interest in money laundering research; therefore, opportunities should be created for interested academics to evaluate the evolution of research in this field. This study was intended to evaluate published studies in this field from the origin of the idea of money laundering to the present to identify major trends or issues in money laundering research and to propose a research agenda for the future. A qualitative research design was adopted using a content analysis approach. It was found that most of the research focuses more on the relationship of money laundering with other offenses and the detection methods but lacking in the understanding of money laundering and the rules and regulations related to money laundering. This study is intended to be useful to current and future scholars in the field of financial crimes who are interested in the evolution of the literature and in identifying areas for future research
... 161 These industrial cattle operations exist using illegally clear-cut pastures in Guatemala's national parks. 162 Likewise, drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) also use slash and burn methods to make way for makeshift airstrips facilitating jets used to traffic cocaine through the lush jungle. 163 Astoundingly, "narco-ranching" and ecological crime caused by DTOs results in 59-87% of all national park deforestation. ...
... This last is a common issue in Latin America countries. The use of PhACs and illicit drugs not only indicates a negative environmental impact but also produces public health problems [Fernández, 2012;Bijlsma et al., 2016;Ondarza et al., 2016;Campestrini and Jardim, 2017;Devine et al., 2020;Wrathall et al., 2020;Grisaffi et al., 2021]. Campestrini and Jardin assessed the occurrence of cocaine in natural waters (surface and rivers) from utmost watersheds in Brazil [Campestrini and Jardim, 2017]. ...
... Guatemala's deforestation rate hovered around 2% in the 1990s [19] but declined to around 1% in the late-2000s [20]. Rapid deforestation in the 1990s was attributed to ranching and smallholder farming [19] but recent scholarship suggest narcotrafficking [21] and expansion of export crops [22] are driving much of the current forest loss. Some research also suggests that migration is driving agricultural expansion through the re-investment of remittances into smallholder farming [23,24] and that Guatemala's forestry incentive programs might be responsible for the declining rates of forest loss [24]. ...
International environmental initiatives, such as the Bonn Challenge and the UN Decade on Restoration, have prompted countries to put the management and restoration of forest landscapes at the center of their land use and climate policies. To support these goals, many governments are promoting forest landscape restoration and management through financial forestry incentives, a form of payment for ecosystem services. Since 1996, Guatemala has implemented a series of forestry incentives that promote active forest landscape restoration and management on private and communal lands. These programs have been widely hailed as a success with nearly 600,000 hectares enrolled since 1998. However, there has been no systematic assessment of the effectiveness of these programs on preserving and restoring Guatemalan forests. This study evaluates the impacts of over 16,000 individual PES projects funded through two incentive programs using a synthetic control counterfactual. Overall, a program for smallholders resulted in lower rates of forest loss, while a program for industrial timber owners led to greater gains in forest cover. Across policies, we found dramatically higher forest cover increases from restoration projects (28% forest cover increase) compared to plantation and agroforestry projects (3-6% increase in forest cover). Projects that protected natural forest also showed a 6% reduction in forest loss. We found forest cover increases to be under 10% of total enrolled area, although positive local spillovers suggest this is an underestimate. Restoration projects show the most promise at promoting forest landscape restoration, but these benefits need to be weighed against priorities like resilience and rural development, which may be better served by other projects.
... Therefore, it is no surprise that numerous examples for disrespected logging bans, wildlife trade or even 'narcodeforestation' (forest clearing for cocaine production and trafficking) are known for the study area (Navarrete et al 2011, Clerici et al 2020, Tellman et al 2020, Wade et al 2020, Gluszek et al 2021. For example, in a case study for the Guatemala Maya Forest Reserve 15%-30% of forests were transformed to agricultural land within only 15 years, largely driven by illegal cattle ranching as part of drug trafficking activities (Devine et al 2020). ...
Central America hosts many key biodiversity areas (KBAs), areas which represent unique and irreplaceable ecosystems of global importance for species conservation. However, large extents of these areas are not under legal protection and could be threatened by pressures from land use change (e.g., deforestation and agricultural expansion), high human population density (e.g., population growth and urban sprawl) and climate-driven biome shifts.
Here, we simulated future biome stability under the influence of climate change across KBAs in the Mesoamerican biodiversity hot spot and combined the results with projections of land use and population density up to the end of the 21st century. We applied four forcing scenarios based on two global climate models (GFDL-ESM4 and IPSL-CM6A-LR) and two shared socio-economic pathways (SSP1-2.6 and SSP3-7.0), which represent a range from low to high emission pathways.
Our model projected decreased biome stability in 39-46% of protected areas in KBAs, whereas this number even increased to 59-60% for unprotected areas in KBAs (depending on the climate scenario). While human interferences in protected parts of KBAs are expected to be limited, large parts of unprotected areas in KBAs were projected to be pressured by multiple factors at once and are reason for concern. In particular, high human population pressures (>10 people/km2) emerged as a main threat over 30-44% of the unprotected area in KBAs. These were largely accompanied by pressures from land use and sporadically reinforced by pressures from climate-driven biome shifts. Among the hot spots facing multiple high pressures are some of the last tropical dry and montane forest ecosystems in Central America, which stresses the need for urgent conservation action.
... Extractive industries, including oil and timber, as well as expanding commercial agriculture, have also played a significant role (Cuéllar et al., 2011;Grandia, 2007). Illegal logging of rosewood (used to make musical instruments and high-end furniture) and infrastructure expansion for cocaine trafficking (Devine et al., 2020;Guo, 2019;McSweeney et al., 2014) are recent drivers of deforestation. Rates of oil palm-related deforestation vary by departamento: 14% in Petén, 3% in Izabal, and 2% in Alta Verapaz. ...
Although causal links between tropical deforestation and palm oil are well established, linking this land use change to where the palm oil is actually consumed remains a distinct challenge and research gap. Supply chains are notoriously difficult to track back to their origin (i.e., the 'first-mile'). This poses a conundrum for corporations and governments alike as they commit to deforestation-free sourcing and turn to instruments like certification to increase supply chain transparency and sustainability. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) offers the most influential certification system in the sector, but whether it actually reduces deforestation is still unclear. This study used remote sensing and spatial analysis to assess the deforestation (2009-2019) caused by oil palm plantation expansion in Guatemala, a major palm oil source for international consumer markets. Our results reveal that plantations are responsible for 28% of deforestation in the region and that more than 60% of these plantations encroach on Key Biodiversity Areas. RSPO-certified plantations, comprising 63% of the total cultivated area assessed, did not produce a statistically significant reduction in deforestation. Using trade statistics, the study linked this deforestation to the palm oil supply chains of three transnational conglomerates - Pepsico, Mondelēz International, and Grupo Bimbo - all of whom rely on RSPO-certified supplies. Addressing this deforestation and supply chain sustainability challenge hinges on three measures: 1) reform of RSPO policies and practices; 2) robust corporate tracking of supply chains; and 3) strengthening forest governance in Guatemala. This study offers a replicable methodology for a wide-range of investigations that seek to understand the translational linkages between environmental change (e.g. deforestation) and consumption.
... Evidence today suggests that areas under community management, with sustainable forestry, non-timber forest product collection, and community-based tourism, are better conserved than several of the reserve's national parks, which are characterized by high rates of biodiversity and forest loss (Radachowsky et al. 2012;Davis & Sauls 2017;Devine et al. 2020). Community forestry economically benefits more than 30,000 people a year, which includes revenues from sustainable resource extraction and community-led tourism, including to El Mirador (Butler & Current 2021). ...
... This division meant habitat fragmentation and an increase in human movements. Furthermore, many ranchers have increased their herd sizes (Cavalcanti et al., 2012) and have begun to practice several harmful ranching activities to provide new pastures for their cattle, such as deforestation, conversion of natural habitats to planted pasture, and grazing in protected areas (Devine et al., 2020;Eaton et al., 2017). ...
Passive acoustic monitoring coupled with automated signal recognition software has been widely used in recent years as an effective and affordable tool for wildlife monitoring and to combat illegal activities within protected areas. Here, we evaluate this technique to monitor the patterns of illegal cattle occurrence in the Brazilian Pantanal over a complete annual cycle. We aim to provide one of the first assessments of the performance of automated signal recognition software to detect ungulates. Cattle occurrences reached their maximum during the end of the dry season when lowland areas provide excellent pastures for cattle. In contrast, cattle occurrences were very low during the rainy season when the study area was seasonally inundated. Automated software was an efficient tool that was able to detect approximately three-quarters of cow calls within the recordings. Passive acoustic monitoring can be used to direct patrols to areas where illegal activities, such as cattle and poaching or logging, have been confirmed, which could be a method that would be especially well suited for remote areas, such as tropical forests. Future studies should evaluate whether there is a relationship between cattle grazing intensity and its associated impacts on wildlife and flora. Rapid advances in automated recognition and the recent development of low-cost recorders foresee a new era of acoustic ecology for improved conservation in the short term.
... K. E. Escalante et al. (Ponce, 2017, p. 202) Over the past decade, wildfires and deforestation have increasingly threatened both forest conservation and archaeological preservation near La Corona, particularly in the Laguna del Tigre National Park where La Corona is located. Although much of the Petén is divided into community-managed forest concessions that exhibit lower rates of deforestation (Stoian et al., 2018), the Laguna del Tigre National Park is not part of a forest concession and is therefore subject to encroaching wildfires, illegal settlement, and land clearing for ranching related to drug trafficking (Devine et al., 2020;Sieff, 2020). Analyses of the fires in the Petén indicate a higher frequency of fires occurring within the Laguna del Tigre National Park compared to the adjacent forest concessions (Fig. 6), outlining the continued threats to the cultural and natural resources of this region and the need for empirically informed preservation strategies. ...
The fascination with ancient flora and fauna is a centuries-old phenomenon and is one of the main drivers of fossil crimes. Fossils have been sought by the rich and famous since the advent of colonialism, propelling development in the field of palaeontology but also in how fossils make their way through various, sometimes illegal, corridors to end up in museums and collections across the world. As demand for fossils increased in the nineteenth century, so did commercial avenues for these objects that were being sold not only to private individuals but also to scientific institutions. The most complete and visually impressive fossils in terms of size or uniqueness determine the market value of these fossils with some selling for millions of United States dollars. This has also led to the tampering or forging of fossils by many dealers in an attempt to inflate prices. While fossil crimes have been prevalent for centuries, the legal frameworks within which these crimes can be controlled or stopped are regularly challenged or even circumvented not only due to the lack of enforcements of these regulations but also due to how paleontological objects are classified in the first place as well as other legal loopholes.
... However, cattle and coca are not mutually exclusive activities during armed conflict. Narco-cattle has served as a common strategy for territorial control and money laundering using coca surplus (Devine et al., 2020). To enhance regional security and halt the narco-cattle expansion, strengthening governance at the local level through community-based and land management must be prioritized. ...
The link between remote sensing and armed conflict processes has been evaluated through discrete landscape representations, deforestation, and static land cover maps. Yet, the landscape is dynamic -- not discrete, and recognizing its evolution through armed conflict processes provides better-informed management and a more profound understanding of landscape dynamics. We must create continuous variables that provide compelling landscape representations that account for armed conflict processes as a driver of land cover and land-use change. Here, we present the advancements in monitoring landscape changes in Colombia from sub-annual forest change and annual land cover maps to elucidate illicit land use and habitat connectivity status. This evolution delivers critical elements to understanding the consequences of armed conflict processes on the environment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. © 2022 SETAC.
... While Guatemala saw high levels of consecutive/persistent and oscillating/sporadic hot spots, including in protected areas, the core non-deforested zone coincides with lands managed by community concessions, rather than state or private interests. This spatial analysis provides additional evidence as to the robustness of that conservation and land use model in the face of significant drivers of land use/cover change (Bebbington et al 2018, Stoian et al 2018, Devine et al 2020. ...
Despite the importance of preserving contiguous tropical forest areas to maintain biodiversity and terrestrial carbon stocks, methodological challenges continue to hinder broad-scale analysis of threats to these forests. Emerging Hot Spot Analysis (EHSA) is a spatial-statistical method that conveys complex information about the temporal dynamics of deforestation across a range of moderate to coarse spatial scales. Using Global Forest Change (GFC) data as inputs, EHSA produces spatially comprehensive, gridded outputs that represent a standardized, reproduceable way to instantiate contiguous forest tracts as spatial objects. Doing so allows aggregation of other GFC-derived values and analysis of alternative geographic configurations besides sub-national jurisdictions or protected areas, which can limit observation of finer scale variations. This paper illustrates the method’s utility to comprehensively characterize the magnitude and temporality of pressures facing the Selva Maya, a transboundary forest region with extensive areas under conservation that covers portions of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.
... Petén's Community Managed PAs boundaries have maintained larger carbon stocks and avoid more emissions compared to neighboring Sustainable Use PAs and Strict PAs between 2003 and 2015. According to Devine et al. (2020), Laguna del Tigre National Park (Strict PA) and Multiple Use Zones (Sustainable Use PAs) that share boundaries with some Community Managed PAs have been subject to forest clearing, land speculation, and land grabbing. Acre's Community Managed PAs between 2007 and 2015 reduced their effect on carbon stocks and avoided emissions, which contrasts with relatively stable carbon dynamics in Other Lands and Sustainable Use PAs in their vicinity. ...
Protected Areas (PAs) represent a broad spectrum of outcomes and governance systems. Among PAs, Community Managed PAs have emerged from communities that are not exclusively indigenous and have developed social organizations to acquire land rights, participate in forest governance, and in some cases, engage in REDD+. However, regardless of the scale or counterfactual, there is no clear consensus about Community Managed PAs’ effectiveness in forest conservation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, previous studies have been devoted to estimating PAs’ effects on deforestation before REDD+ projects began to operate. Based on Community Concessions in Petén (Guatemala) and Extractive Reserves in Acre (Brazil), we analyzed Community Managed PAs’ temporal and spatial effects on carbon stocks and avoided emissions relative to unprotected lands, other Sustainable Use PAs (IUCN V-VI), and Strict PAs (I-IV). We used carbon density maps, matching methods, geographic discontinuity designs, and sensitivity analysis between 2003 and 2015. After controlling for the influence of market access and agriculture suitability, our analysis shows that Community Managed PAs were more effective than Other Lands (i.e., unprotected) and Sustainable Use PAs, and at least as effective as Strict PAs, in preserving carbon stocks and avoiding emissions. For instance, relative to Other Lands between 2011 and 2015, Community Managed PAs resulted in net avoided emissions of 4.6 tCO2-eq/ha in Petén (Guatemala) and 2.15 tCO2-eq/ha in Acre (Brazil). While these net avoided emissions were lower than in previous years, they seem to be driven by a reduction in carbon emissions outside Community Managed PAs. Spatially, the boundaries of Community Managed PAs varied across jurisdictions. For example, the boundaries of Acre’s Community Managed PAs’ have become less effective in avoiding emissions, which translates into reduced effects on conserving carbon stocks. Our results highlight the need to assess temporal effects to exhibit jurisdiction-wide land-use dynamics and spatial effects to identify local land-use pressures emerging inside or around the boundaries of PAs. Our analysis also shows that decentralized governance in Community Managed PAs may contribute to climate change mitigation through REDD+ and forest conservation targets.
... Numerous LULC studies have since asked local stakeholders to validate satellite imagery by assigning their own land cover classes to locations in an image (Baldwin and Oxenford, 2014;Brewington, 2018;Lauer and Aswani, 2008;Runk et al., 2010). In Guatemala, Devine et al. (2020aDevine et al. ( , 2020 combine remote sensing, participant observation, and hundreds of interviews to examine narcocattle ranching and its detrimental effects on LULC. Other examples of participatory and communityintegrated remote sensing include participatory land-use mapping (Hoover et al., 2017), household surveys (Vadjunec et al., 2011), and sketch maps (Wakie et al., 2016). ...
We offer a review and research agenda for critical remote sensing, defined as inquiries and scientific practices cognizant of the embedding of power within the production, analysis, and instrumentalization of satellite imagery. First, we consider critiques of the satellite gaze. Second, we chronicle remote sensing’s evolving political economy, examining the technology’s use by governments, scientists, and commercial and non-governmental actors. Then, we review practices of critical remote sensing, categorized as research 1) exposing injustices; 2) engaging situated knowledges; and 3) empowering marginalized actors. Lastly, we suggest five areas for intertwining critiques and practices and consider possibilities for counter remote sensing.
... 2 In Cruce a la Colorada, the concession was nearly canceled after narco-ranchers cleared forest. Narco-ranchers assassinated the concession leader, David Salguero, who filed a land seizure complaint to Guatemala's Commission on National Protected Areas (CONAP) (see Devine et al. 2020). ...
On frontiers dominated by illicit activities such as narcotrafficking, criminal organizations’ usurpation of land and resources is profoundly changing rural livelihoods and prospects for biodiversity conservation. Prior work has demonstrated how drug trafficking catalyzes forest loss and smallholder dispossession but does not make clear the extent to which the long-term control of land is moved from state, Indigenous, or smallholders to criminal or other actors. This study attempts to describe those shifts. Specifically: we develop a typology of land control, and use it to track how drug trafficking initiates shifts from public lands and Indigenous territories to private large holdings. We examine an array of secondary sources indicating shifts in land control related to narcotrafficking, including illegal land seizure documents, news media, and surveys of land managers. In absence of formal land registries, frontier actors may signal their control over land through land use change. After establishing where changes in land control have taken place, we analyzed land use and resulting changes in spatial patterns of forest loss. We found that large scale sustained forest losses (over 713,244 ha and 417,329 ha), in Guatemala and Honduras, respectively, from 2000–2019) corresponds with areas undergoing shifts in control towards large landowners, often related to narcotrafficking. Incomplete empirical data on land control prevent comprehensive attribution of all sustained forest loss related to narcotrafficking. Yet the limited evidence gathered here indicates drug trafficking activities initiate widespread and sustained shifts and consolidation of who controls land and resources at the frontier. Our work suggests that in Central America and likely elsewhere, control over land—quite separate from property rights—is the key factor in understanding social and ecological change.
... During this period, illegal land clearing, increased in the reserve's protected areas and the buffer zone (Radachowsky et al. 2012). Recent studies have shown that the majority of deforestation occurring in the MBR is driven by cattle ranching associated with illegal drug trafficking rather than subsistence farming (Devine et al. 2020). While powerful illegal actors account for much of the deforestation in the MBR, CFEs are still held responsible for maintaining forest cover in their concessions (Taylor 2012). ...
This paper focuses upon the organizational governance of community forest enterprises (CFEs) in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) of Northern Guatemala. The MBR's community-forest concession system has become an international model for community-based forest management and community forest enterprise (CFE) development due to the socio-economic and ecological benefits that it has achieved. Many CFEs managing forest concessions within the reserve have been able to curb deforestation rates and improve local forest quality while enjoying jobs and income gained from selling timber and non-timber forest products. Income generated by CFEs supports sustainable livelihoods and incentivizes forest protection. However, while the forest-management practices in the reserve have been well documented, less is known about the internal governance of these CFEs and how these systems have developed over time. This paper focuses upon research conducted on the evolution of CFE organizational governance. Research involved interviews, document review, and observation. CFEs face unique challenges during different phases of their development. This paper outlines the challenges described by key informants in the MBR as well as how they were able to overcome these challenges. It then provides suggestions for future research and application.
... One of this paper's key objectives is to demonstrate the power of integrating qualitative and NTL data to understand inaccessible and complicated geopolitical spaces. In pursuit of this aim, we adopted a critical remote sensing approach [71], contributing to an emerging subfield that interrogates the political economy of satellite data [81] and employs remote sensing alongside ethnographic methods [66,[82][83][84][85]. Such approaches are useful in data-scarce environments such as Myanmar and across the Lower Mekong Region, where a lack of geospatial infrastructure and accessible, standardized datasets inhibits mapping efforts and geospatial analysis [86]. ...
A critical remote sensing approach illuminates the geopolitics of development within Myanmar and across its ethnic minority borderlands. By integrating nighttime light (NTL) data from 1992–2020, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and a review of scholarly and gray literature, we analyzed how Myanmar’s economic geography defies official policy, attesting to persistent inequality and the complex relationships between state-sponsored and militia-led violence, resource extraction, and trade. While analysis of DMSP-OLS data (1992–2013) and VIIRS data (2013–2020) reveals that Myanmar brightened overall, especially since the 2010s in line with its now-halting liberalization, growth in lights was unequally distributed. Although ethnic minority states brightened more rapidly than urbanized ethnic majority lowland regions, in 2020, the latter still emitted 5.6-fold more radiance per km2. Moreover, between 2013 and 2020, Myanmar’s borderlands were on average just 13% as bright as those of its five neighboring countries. Hot spot analysis of radiance within a 50 km-wide area spanning both sides of the border confirmed that most significant clusters of light lay outside Myanmar. Among the few hot spots on Myanmar’s side, many were associated with official border crossings such as Muse, the formal hub for trade with China, and Tachileik and Myawaddy next to Thailand. Yet some of the most significant increases in illumination between 2013 and 2020 occurred in areas controlled by the Wa United State Party and its army, which are pursuing infrastructure development and mining along the Chinese border from Panghsang to the illicit trade hub of Mongla. Substantial brightening related to the “world’s largest refugee camp” was also detected in Bangladesh, where displaced Rohingya Muslims fled after Myanmar’s military launched a violent crackdown. However, no radiance nor change in radiance were discernible in areas within Myanmar where ethnic cleansing operations occurred, pointing to the limitations of NTL. The diverse drivers and implications of changes in light observed from space emphasize the need for political and economically situated remote sensing.
... The lands and forests managed and governed by IPs, LCs, and ADs are able to suppress fires [130] and resist forest loss, [131,132] and consequently experience lower rates of deforestation. [130,[133][134][135][136][137][138][139] Their lands have enhanced carbon storage capabilities, [139][140][141] contain important populations of threatened terrestrial vertebrate species, [125,[139][140][141][142] and protect biodiversity in general [47,60,61,143] as well as or better than publicly-owned protected areas. Secure tenure rights contribute towards the effective stewardship of forests and territories. ...
... In addition, these narco-corridors impact negatively on ecosystems and rural communities (Wrathalla et al. 2020). In the case of Central America, for instance, drug traffic leads to increasing deforestation (Tellman et al. 2020), sometimes combined with illegal breeding of cattle as a way of laundering money (Devine et al. 2020). The work of Ballvé (2018) shows how narco-frontiers are characterised by colonial logics, uneven development, violent politics and deforestation as a result of the production of cocaine. ...
Hydropower developments not only have far reaching consequences like ecological degradation and the disappearance of livelihood resources. They also spur micropolitical processes of territorial and productive re-ordering within and between communities. This article
analyses the response mechanisms of the inhabitants of a community located in the reservoir
of a hydroelectric project in Mexico, facing the construction of a hydroelectric dam and the
related arrival of new actors involved in illicit activities. In doing so, it examines the strategies for protecting their territory and livelihoods, and minimising risks at the same time at
three levels: intensification, intentional transgression of rules and regulations, and the objection of the imposed system. The article concludes that the response mechanisms are informed by, and produce micropolitics of illegality and violence as well as new codes of
governance. Keywords: Mexico, hydropower, resistance, violence, narco-environments.
... The coercive character of the prohibition of these crops and their derivatives has caused the militarization of the landscapes in which they are produced and traded and this, in turn, has led to the death of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions of people (Ballvé, 2012;Paley, 2014). Scholarly work has analyzed the nexus between illegal drug economies and agrarian and socio-ecological change (e.g., Ballvé, 2013Ballvé, , 2019McSweeney et al., 2017McSweeney et al., , 2018Devine et al., 2018Devine et al., , 2020. Regarding IDC cultivation, specifically, four main processes of transformation have been studied to-date: 1. Land use and land cover change, by deforestation for the creation of new fields, laboratories, settlements, roads, and clandestine airstrips (e.g., Bocarejo and Ojeda, 2015;Dávalos et al., 2016;Rincón-Ruiz et al. 2016;Ingalls and Mansfield, 2017;Ingalls et al., this volume); 2. Biodiversity change, through habitat loss due to deforestation and the contamination of soil and bodies of water by the chemicals used for IDC cultivation, processing, and eradication (e.g., Bradley and Millington, 2008;Dávalos et al., 2011;Rincón-Ruiz and Kallis, 2013;Smith et al., 2014); 3. Livelihood change, related to the monetary income and instability for growing and selling IDC (e.g., Coyle, 2001;Steinberg, 2004b;Goodhand, 2000Goodhand, , 2005Steinberg and Taylor, 2007;Dube et al., 2016;Mansfield, 2016;Grandmaison et al., 2019); and 4. Forced displacement, caused by the fear of violence and processes of dispossession through land grabbing and gunpoint eviction (e.g., Ibáñez and Vélez, 2008;Dion and Russler, 2008;Maldonado-Aranda, 2013). ...
Drawing on political-ecological vulnerability theory, this paper analyzes the impact of illegal-drug cultivation and its related violence on smallholder agrobiodiversity in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca is a global agrobiodiversity hotspot where cannabis and opium poppy have been widely cultivated for decades. The study is based on 76 structured/semi-structured interviews with imprisoned farmers, harvest gatherers, and former soldiers in four state prisons. Results show that illegal-drug crops and native-food crops complement each other until a threshold of violence is crossed, which leads to the abandonment of agriculture due to murder, imprisonment, and out-migration. The specialization of smallholder agriculture in illegal-drug crops tends to favor crossing the threshold of violence. In most municipalities in this study, however, rather a diversification process took place in which illegal-drug crops were incorporated to food production systems, reducing both the exposure and the sensitivity of smallholders to structural and direct violence. Other adaptation strategies involved local organization and militarization of smallholders for collective-risk management and territorial control. Ultimately, by comparing five vulnerability scenarios, this paper argues that the combination of peasant organization, militarization, and crop/livelihood diversification in Oaxaca mitigates the violent agrarian change associated with this illegal economy, while conserving agrobiodiversity.
... Alternatively, partnerships between governments and indigenous peoples have emerged resulting in the effective protection of critical ecosystems worldwide, but especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In territories that lack the resources of prestigious national parks (e.g., UNESCO World Heritage sites), community agroforestry programs have shown to be more resilient than restricted access models to competing pressures such as narcotrafficking and land grabbing [90]. Despite the social challenges and important knowledge gaps regarding occupation, use rates, and social effects of different conservation models, the international goals of setting aside large portions of the world's wild lands and oceans has resulted in the global conservation of 20 million square kilometers of land (15% of world land surface) and 25 million square kilometers of marine areas (6.96% of ocean surface) [91]. ...
Recently, there has been increasing evidence of the emergence of systemic strains that threaten international cooperative efforts on global issues, especially climate change, biodiversity loss and security. Non-state actors have responded by declaring their commitment to work together alongside nations as climate agreements struggle to deliver the necessary global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, conservation goals are not met, and security issues diversify. A principal constituent of the world’s non-state actors are cities. With many cities now home to more than 10 million individuals and several cities of more than 20 million, the urban world has come to dominate the global economy as well as the resource needs and environmental burdens imposed upon the planet by our species. Urban economies are responsible for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions and substantially affect the world’s biodiversity by driving the extraction of resources and the degradation of global natural capital. Cities have become concentrators of diverse risk that complicate and broaden global security priorities. Cities are also crucibles of innovation in technology, business and governance and strong alliances between the world’s cities have formed to address the challenges of climate change, biodiversity and more. This paper asserts the unique potential for cities to assume a greater role in global priorities, including climate change, biodiversity loss and a realignment of security priorities. The transformative changes required in these three domains calls for a renewal of the city as a semi-autonomous neo-state, an ecological city-state.
... This capital accumulation spurs subsequent investment in local land acquisition and development for commercial agricultural activities (McSweeney et al. 2018). This type of land acquisition sometimes displaces or evicts peasant farmers who may otherwise engage in subsistence-level agriculture (Lunstrum and Ybarra, 2018;Devine et al., 2020;McSweeney et al 2018). Agricultural development and cattle ranching by narcotraffickers may involve illicit transactions which undermine traditional governance structures and norms through bribery, coercion and violence. ...
Illegal activity, such as deforestation for illicit crops for cocaine production, has been inferred as a cause of land change. Nonetheless, illicit activity is often overlooked or difficult to incorporate into causal inference models of land change. Evidence continues to build that narcotrafficking plays an important, yet often unreported, role in forest loss. This study presents a novel strategy to meet the challenge of estimating the causal effect of illicit activity in land change using consolidated news media reports to estimate the relationship between drug trafficking and accelerated forest loss in Central America. Drug trafficking organizations engage in illegal land transactions, money laundering, and territorial control that can manifest as forest conversion to agriculture or pasture land uses. Longitudinal data on 50 sub-national units over a period of 16 years (2001-2016) are used in fixed effects regressions to estimate the role of narcotrafficking in forest loss. Two narcotrafficking activity proxies were developed as explanatory variables of forest loss: i) an “official” proxy from drug seizures data within 14 sub-national units; and, ii) an “unofficial” proxy developed from georeferenced news media accounts of narcotrafficking events. The effect of narcotrafficking was systematically compared to the other well-known causes of forest loss, such as rural population growth and other conventional drivers. Both proxies indicate narcotrafficking is a statistically significant (p<0.01) contributor to forest loss in the region, particularly in Nicaragua (p<0.05, official proxy), Honduras (p<0.05, media proxy), and Guatemala (p<0.05, media proxy). Narcotrafficking variables explain an additional 5% (media proxy) and 9% (official proxy) of variance of forest loss not captured by conventional models. This study showed the ability of news media data to capture the signal of illicit activity in land use changes such as forest loss. The methods employed here could be used to estimate the causal effect of illicit activities in other land and environmental systems. Our results suggest that current drug policy, which concentrates drug trafficking in remote areas of very high cultural and environmental value, has helped to accelerate the loss of Central America's remaining forests.
While cocaine production is reaching unprecedented levels, a comprehensive review of its environmental impacts throughout its value chain remains absent. This article presents the first bibliometric analysis and systematic review of the literature on the environmental impacts of the cocaine value chain in Latin America, aiming to uncover its specific effects across four stages: (i) coca cultivation, (ii) coca farming, (iii) cocaine manufacturing and (iv) cocaine trafficking. Using a four-step selection process, we reviewed 121 studies published between 1979 and 2022, retrieved from 10 search engines and scientific databases, complemented by an extensive screening of gray literature. The article identifies and quantifies most frequent study sites, research methods, data sources and metrics, followed by a critical review of the research findings. Key findings highlight that land use land cover change and deforestation in the coca cultivation and cocaine trafficking phases, along with soil degradation under the coca farming stage, are the main variables examined to evaluate impacts. Nevertheless, substantial gaps remain in our understanding of how these impacts are distributed across study areas, their applicability to the broader region, and the consistency and rigor of the research methodologies used. The article concludes by incorporating research and policy recommendations that underscore how these environmental impacts are deeply intertwined with the failures of the drug war, emphasizing the need to develop more comprehensive and evidence-based policy responses.
Transnational cocaine trafficking, or ‘narco-trafficking’, networks often move large shipments of harmful and illegal drugs by sea through the use of unregulated boats in remote maritime spaces. This study presents a framework for identifying narco-trafficking drop-off zones by detecting and analyzing Unreported and Unregulated Boats (UUBs) potentially linked to narco-trafficking in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste and Puntarenas regions, utilizing a combination of high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning, and spatial analysis. By training a YoloV5 convolutional neural network model, we detected boat wakes in PlanetScope satellite images, which were then cross-referenced with legal vessel traffic data (Automatic Identification System and Vessel Monitoring System) to isolate UUBs. A spatial autocorrelation analysis revealed a positive association between UUB locations and narco-trafficking activity indicators, such as drug-related media reports, court arrest records, and cocaine seizure data. High-high clusters of UUBs and trafficking indicators suggested that particular coastal districts may serve as primary landing zones for illicit shipments, a finding consistent with secondary data on cocaine trafficking in the region. By integrating geospatial intelligence with contextual data sources, this study advances methodology for identifying narco-trafficking drop-off zones and contributes a spatially explicit perspective to the broader understanding of cocaine and other illicit supply chains. Despite the limitations of cloud cover and restricted nighttime visibility, this framework offers a proof-of-concept approach for identifying UUB concentrations and cocaine drop-off shipment zones. Future work should consider expanding temporal coverage and multiple imagery to further enhance the identification of narco-trafficking zones.
Geospatial analyses of human-environment interactions are challenged by the multi-scale, multi-dimensional nature of human-environment systems. Research in such contexts must often rely on integrating multiple, independently produced data sources, which presents heterogenous data qualities and interoperability challenges. Understanding data quality and transparency becomes increasingly important in these contexts, and multi-granularity and context specific spatial data quality indicators are needed. We develop a data pedigree system that accounts for multiple data quality aspects, geospatial ambiguities that may hinder inter-operability, and the fitness-for-use of each data source for indicating causal linkages between human activities and environmental change. We demonstrate its application to a particularly challenging and data sparse case study of identifying the location and timing of transnational cocaine trafficking, or 'narco-trafficking', in Central America with five spatial and temporal data quality indicators: geographic clarity, geographic interpretation, provenance, temporal specificity, and narco-trafficking certainty. The proposed data pedigree system provides a systematic and coherent analytical framework for interoperability, comparison, and corroboration of fragmented and incomplete data, which are needed to support advanced geospatial analyses, such as causal inference techniques. The study demonstrates the transferability and operationalization of the data pedigree system for examining complex human-environment interactions, especially those influenced by illicit economies. ARTICLE HISTORY
El territorio de la Ciudad de México está integrado por Suelo Urbano (SU) y el Suelo de Conservación (SC); este último está destinado a proteger los servicios ecosistémicos de la Ciudad. El SC pierde 0.8 Km2 cada año por el crecimiento urbano provocando problemas ambientales, entre ellos una menor calidad del aire y la baja calidad de agua para uso agropecuario. A pesar de esta problemática, hay familias que han preservado por generaciones sus parcelas en áreas de SC operando Microempresas Familiares Agropecuarias (MEFA ́s). El estudio analizó, a través de estudios caso, el proceso de sucesión familiar en ocho MEFA ́s ubicadas en SC de cinco Alcaldías. Estos estudios se seleccionaron a través de la teoría fundamentada. Los hallazgos reportados remiten al origen de la propiedad tierra donde se ubican las MEFA ́s al año 1880, la más antigua y se ha preservado por identidad productiva y convicción familiar; La G2 dio viabilidad ambiental, economica, social, política y cultural a través de movimientos estratégicos a las MEFA ́s; sin embargo el proceso de sucesión entre G2 y G3 aun no está en los planes de G2, situación que pone en riesgo a las MEFA ́s y al SC.
En este artículo se presenta un análisis de la construcción discursiva de la conservación en torno a dos reservas de la biosfera, la cual es una categoría global establecida para denominar a espacios con características ecosistémicas de interés para la conservación. En cuanto a la propuesta teórico-metodológica, se utilizan herramientas del análisis del discurso multimodal que permiten la integración de diversas formas de producción y difusión discursiva. Finalmente, se comparan los discursos de la conservación en torno a las Reservas de la Biosfera Maya (Petén, Guatemala) y Montes Azules (Chiapas, México), mediante la identificación de los contrastes (semejanzas y diferencias) entre las formas de comprensión de la conservación ambiental que expresan los actores sociales vinculados a dichos espacios.
The Colombian Amazon has experienced rapid forest loss in the past decades due to growing colonization, infrastructure development, and commercial agriculture expansion. While much of the analyses of deforestation in the Amazon have been in Brazil, there is a need to extend to Colombia where forest and land use exploitation are driven by post-conflict social and political dynamics. This research contributes to this knowledge gap by unpacking the mechanisms underpinning deforestation on the northwestern side of the Colombian Amazon. We used theory-building process-tracing to guide us in conceptualizing the underlying logics of deforestation in the region through qualitative text analysis of policy documents, articles, reports, and grey literature, and virtual semi-structured interviews with key national, regional and local actors. Findings indicate that the power vacuum resulting from the demobilization of FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Marxist-Leninist guerrillas, acted as a window of opportunity for peasants, squatters, narco-traffickers, cattle ranchers, landlords, and other investors to access public lands and capitalize from converting forests to coca crops and pastures for cattle ranching. Accumulation of land and surplus primarily from cattle ranching and coca production has increased the ability of these actors to reshape the landscape and societal structures. Traditional elites and old and emerging narco-bourgeoisie have capitalized on preexisting power asymmetries by disproportionally accumulating land, money, gun power, influence, and prestige seeking to consolidate territorial hegemony, and controlling the means for material reproduction in society. Powerful actors use their resources and prestige to displace historically marginalized groups – such as indigenous communities, peasants and squatters – from their means of subsistence and production, resulting in the installation of a capitalist economy based on land rent and drug trafficking, where less powerful and marginalized actors engage in deforestation as means for capital accumulation and subsidizing their peasant and subsistence economies. All this has deepened forest loss, inequalities, and conflict over land access between actors.
Este artículo ofrece un análisis de la literatura internacional producido entre el año 2012 y 2022 sobre el abordaje del Cambio de Cobertura y Uso del Terreno (CCUT), a través de una metodología mixta. El fenómeno involucra múltiples interacciones con los factores físicos, sociales, económicos, políticos y culturales. Por esta razón, se requiere comprender de manera integral las causas, efectos y procesos que inducen estos cambios a nivel local y regional. La metodología mixta ofrece una perspectiva de análisis integral que combina datos cuantitativos (teledetección) y cualitativos (percepción social). El objetivo de esta investigación fue la revisión de estudios científicos que utilizan la metodología mixta aplicada al CCUT, para conocer el estado actual del conocimiento sobre los enfoques teóricos, metodológicos, y tendencias en este campo de investigación. Se encontró una literatura limitada en revistas de acceso abierto que aborden la problemática con este enfoque, una diversidad del término “metodología mixta”, no existe información explícita del método en los artículos revisados. Se identificaron herramientas y técnicas más empleadas de la investigación cuantitativa y cualitativa, las estrategias, los alcances y limitaciones que se han reportado en los diversos estudios. Se destaca la capacidad del enfoque metodológico para obtener una comprensión integral de la problemática, debido a que proporciona una información más completa de las causas y los efectos que conducen al CCUT. También se identificó una limitación importante como establecer vínculos previos de confianza con los actores locales para que puedan colaborar en el diseño y ser parte fundamental de la investigación.
Illicit cattle ranching and coca farming have serious negative consequences on the Colombian Amazon’s land systems. The underlying causes of these land activities include historical processes of colonization, armed conflict, and narco-trafficking. We aim to examine how illicit cattle ranching and coca farming are driving forest cover change over the last 34 years (1985–2019). To achieve this aim, we combine two pixel-based approaches to differentiate between coca farming and cattle ranching using hypothetical observed patterns of illicit activities and a deep learning algorithm. We found evidence that cattle ranching, not coca, is the main driver of forest loss outside the legal agricultural frontier. There is evidence of a recent, explosive conversion of forests to cattle ranching outside the agricultural frontier and within protected areas since the negotiation phase of the peace agreement. In contrast, coca is remarkably persistent, suggesting that crop substitution programs have been ineffective at stopping the expansion of coca farming deeper into protected areas. Countering common narratives, we found very little evidence that coca farming precedes cattle ranching. The spatiotemporal dynamics of the expansion of illicit land uses reflect the cumulative outcome of agrarian policies, Colombia’s War on Drugs, and the 2016 peace accord. Our study enables the differentiation of illicit land activities, which can be transferred to other regions where these activities have been documented but poorly distinguished spatiotemporally. We provide an applied framework that could be used elsewhere to disentangle other illicit land uses, track their causes, and develop management options for forested land systems and people who depend on them.
The looting of La Corona, Guatemala is one of the most well-known examples of Maya archaeological looting. Known only as ‘Site Q’ before its location was positively identified, dozens of carved stone panels were looted from La Corona before the site was studied archaeologically. The recent application of a remote sensing technique called lidar enables the mapping of the ground surface in forested regions, which has been revolutionary for Maya archaeology. In addition to the thousands of archaeological features visible in lidar imagery, lidar also shows the devastating impacts of looting on Maya archaeological sites. This chapter revisits the looting of La Corona in light of new lidar data, combining geospatial analyses and an in-depth review of archaeological excavation records from 2005–2019. Through this preliminary analysis of looting at La Corona, we aim to demonstrate the immense potential of lidar for understanding looting practices in the Maya region.
The Selva Maya represents the largest expanse of tropical forest in Mesoamerica, encompassing parts of Belize, northern Guatemala, and south-eastern Mexico. Patterns and processes of forest loss in Belize are less comprehensively studied than other regions in the Selva Maya. Hence, this research tracks twenty years of forest loss in relation to Protected Areas (PAs) and transborder activity in the country. Results show that since 2000, Belize lost 11% of its forest cover. In that same period, 39.7% of this loss has seen forest recovery, predominantly in southern portion of the country, and within PAs. Ongoing forest loss in the north has expanded towards central and southern Belize. Forest loss in PAs account for 14.3% of overall loss nationwide, with fires and agricultural expansion playing a prominent role in the encroachment on forestland. A better understanding of forest loss in Belize reinforces distinctions between forest loss in the north and the south of the country and demonstrates the need for enhanced forest protection. This research provides new information to conservation planners to better understand the dynamics and drivers of forest loss and regrowth in the Selva Maya region.
Este documento busca aportar información socio ambiental que permita contribuir a comprender el papel cambiante de los bosques en la historia reciente de Petén. Analiza las dinámicas de cambio de uso de suelo que muestran diferencias a nivel de los espacios de la región, especialmente durante los últimos 20 años que lleva establecida la Reserva de Biósfera Maya (RBM) en el Departamento de Petén, Guatemala. Tiene como objetivo comprender los factores que han incidido en las dinámicas diferenciadas de uso de suelo en Petén, enfocándose en analizar los principales cambios económicoproductivos que implican trayectorias diferentes de uso de la tierra , así como sus implicaciones para la gestión de los recursos naturales a nivel de la RBM. Partiendo de una combinación de métodos cualitativos y cuantitativos y análisis de información geográfica busca aportar datos e información a los diversos procesos sobre la toma de decisiones en materia de recursos naturales. Los resultados apuntan a cambios en las trayectorias de política que tienen impactos en la percepción de los bosques, el uso de la tierra y la relación entre las poblaciones locales y los recursos naturales.
National parks and other preserved spaces of nature have become iconic symbols of nature protection around the world. However, the worldviews of Indigenous peoples have been marginalized in discourses of nature preservation and conservation. As a result, for generations of Indigenous peoples, these protected spaces of nature have meant dispossession, treaty violations of hunting and fishing rights, and the loss of sacred places. Bridging Cultural Concepts of Nature brings together anthropologists and archaeologists, historians, linguists, policy experts, and communications scholars to discuss differing views and presents a compelling case for the possibility of more productive discussions on the environment, sustainability, and nature protection. Drawing on case studies from Scandinavia to Latin America and from North America to New Zealand, the volume challenges the old paradigm where Indigenous peoples are not included in the conservation and protection of natural areas and instead calls for the incorporation of Indigenous voices into this debate. This original and timely edited collection offers a global perspective on the social, cultural, economic, and environmental challenges facing Indigenous peoples and their governmental and NGO counterparts in the co-management of the planet’s vital and precious preserved spaces of nature.
Rural spaces are garnering new attention in illicit economies. At the confluence of the American continents, illicit commodities are being moved through rural Panama’s communities and iconic Darién forests. Over the last decade, the international media have focused on the uptick in human “migration” while the Panamanian press has chronicled dramatic illegal logging. Less acknowledged is the surge in drug smuggling and arms trafficking. Using media reports and mapping over the last twenty years, we ask how multi-commodity trafficking and human exploitation are remaking rural space. We provide the first synthetic and spatial overview of eastern Panama’s multiple trafficking, showing how it is altering social and environmental relationships. Media reports, many based on government seizures, indicate trafficking routes throughout the region, implying the involvement of much of the local population and resulting in new clientelistic social relationships between traffickers, residents, and the state. Increasingly, trafficking is driving land cover change, diminishing forest cover in private lands, protected areas, and indigenous lands and connecting them via a growing road network. Indigenous peoples’ conservation of forests hampers surveillance and makes their lands ideal for trafficking. This also means that they are the only ethnicity frequently named in the media, threatening indigenous sovereignty and land legalization efforts. We conclude that trafficking is a form of settler colonialism, continuing processes of taking that began in this area of the American mainland centuries ago. Rather than incidentally holding indigenous residents culpable, maligning them in trafficking’s transit area is fundamental to capitalist expansion, integrating it with the country’s dollarized economy, highly developed banking sector, and the canal’s global commerce. The continued transit of people and illegal commodities in eastern Panama is quickly transforming conservation, indigenous sovereignty, and sustainable development.
Among geographers, recent focus on the illicit and illegal has tended to fall into two camps. Economic geographers focus on regimes of illicitness and corresponding production of specific forms of economic space; political ecologists and land change scholars, on the other hand, have scrutinized how illicit commodity flows shape land and resource use, especially in the global South. This paper offers an initial integration of these two relatively separate subfields, specifically in terms of their complementary attention to uneven development. Specifically, it uses the concept of ‘global commodity chains’ to explore the ways in which the regulation of agricultural commodities shapes how they are trafficked and embed in space, with particular attention to sites of international transshipment. When a commodity is illegal, spaces of transit take on significant analytical importance, particularly with respect to their socio‐ecological embedding. As a heuristic, we present a comparative mapping of two agricultural commodity chains linking Colombia and the U.S.: coffee and cocaine. Their comparison highlights how ‘illicitness’ fundamentally transforms cocaine’s spatiality, requiring risk evasion that results in characteristically enlarged transit spaces and a huge differential between producer and consumer price. We show how rents circulate in those transit spaces, socially and geographically embedding the commodities in diffuse, fluid networks with severe consequences for people and environments. We conclude with implications for work on illicit commodities and the collateral social and environmental harms they produce.
Central America exemplifies a dynamic unfolding around the world where transnational illicit economies are driving land use change. Despite an extensive network of protected areas, Central America has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world in the past 20 years. Some of this forest loss is due to the international cocaine trade, as drug trafficking organizations launder money into extractive economies and seek to control territories along their supply chain. While research documents land change from nar-cotrafficking in transit nodes, or narco-deforestation (e.g. Sesnie et al., 2017), less research exists examining other environmental impacts near cocaine transit nodes in protected areas and biodiversity hotspots, which we term ''narco-degradation." We conducted i) interviews and participatory mapping exercises with 65 actors working in protected areas in Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica and ii) 11 workshops with 76 protected areas managers to understand and document spatial concentration of different types of narco-degradation. Coded interviews and maps yield 500 narco-degradation activities occurring between 2000 and 2018. Our analysis reveals that narco-trafficking affects multiple ecosystems , not only forests, and that variations in narco-degradation types and intensities reflect differences in the three nodes' transportation practices (air, land, maritime), their age and activity levels (emerging nodes, hotspots, and declining nodes), and their physical geography. In all three protected areas, narco-trafficking accelerates the conversion of natural resources into commodities (such as land, lumber, minerals , and fauna), their extraction, and entry into legal and illegal markets. We conclude by arguing that narco-degradation negatively and disproportionately impacts the livelihoods and governance structures of Indigenous and peasant communities living in and around Central America's protected areas. These insights contribute an integrated socio-ecological analysis of the role of narco-capital and cocaine traf-ficking's contribution to illicit global environmental change.
While there is a growing literature on criminal governance, to date limited work has focused on rural spaces and transit zones. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in drug trafficking hubs along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras, I provide evidence and offer an initial theorization of forms of criminal governance in rural Central America. I show how both structural and individual level factors increase community support for illicit economies. I argue that rural and marginalized communities where there is widespread corruption and limited state capacity are more inclined to be supportive of and form collaborative relationships with traffickers. I argue that traffickers who are native to the community, limit their use of violence in the community, and invest economically in the community are the most likely to win the community’s support or even become viewed as Robin Hood-esque figures. In spaces where community support is low, I find traffickers may still take actions to limit crimes unrelated to their business (e.g. theft) which could draw attention from state actors and result in community frustration. Understanding community-narco dynamics is crucial to formulating effective policies to address violence in the region. Current international counter-narcotics policies are counter-productive; therefore, it should be unsurprising that certain marginalized communities support drug-traffickers who offer tangible benefits instead of counter-narcotics forces who seem to increase conflict and suppress economic activity without providing viable alternatives.
In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco‐ganadería , narco‐cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco‐cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote‐sensing methods, we describe narco‐cattle ranching's money‐laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorisations of “political forests” to explain how drug trafficking organisations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community‐based resource management improves forest and protected area residents’ abilities to resist drug‐trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.
Based on historical and ethnographic research conducted in a region of northwest Colombia and drawing on the stories of novelist Gabriel García Márquez, this article develops the analytical concept of “narco‐frontiers” to help disentangle the confusing political economy of agrarian spaces affected by the violence of the drug war. As socially produced spaces, narco‐frontiers emerge through the convergence of four interlocking processes: uneven development, internal colonialism, political violence, and narco‐fuelled dispossession. Although often depicted as “ungovernable” or “stateless” spaces, narco‐frontiers are wracked by extra‐legal regimes of rule in which the state is simply one actor among others. With the drug trade inducing violent agrarian change all over the world—from Colombia to Afghanistan, Burma to Central America—this article offers a spatial‐historical framework for understanding these dramatic transformations.
A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal activities associated with drug trafficking networks are a progressively important driver of forest loss in Central America. However, the scale at which drug trafficking represents a driver of forest loss is not presently known. We estimated the degree to which narcotics trafficking may contribute to forest loss using an unsupervised spatial clustering of 15 spatial and temporal forest loss patch metrics developed from global forest change data. We distinguished anomalous forest loss from background loss patches for each country exhibiting potential 'narco-capitalized' signatures which showed a statistically significant dissimilarity from other patches in terms of size, timing, and rate of forest loss. We also compared annual anomalous forest loss with the number of cocaine shipments and volume of cocaine seized, lost, or delivered at country-and department-level. For Honduras, results from linear mixed effects models showed a highly significant relationship between anomalous forest loss and the timing of increased drug trafficking (F ¼ 9.90, p ¼ 0.009) that also differed significantly from temporal patterns of background forest loss (t-ratio ¼ 2.98, p ¼ 0.004). Other locations of high forest loss in Central America showed mixed results. The timing of increased trafficking was not significantly related to anomalous forest loss in Guatemala and Nicaragua, but significantly differed in patch size compared to background losses. We estimated that cocaine trafficking could account for between 15% and 30% of annual national forest loss in these three countries over the past decade, and 30% to 60% of loss occurred within nationally and internationally designated protected areas. Cocaine trafficking is likely to have severe and lasting consequences in terms of maintaining moist tropical forest cover in Central America. Addressing forest loss in these and other tropical locations will require a stronger linkage between national and international drug interdiction and conservation policies.
In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory that reversed a green land grab in the Maya Biosphere. The fight over this space, the Mirador Basin, provides valuable contributions to analyses of global land grabs, grassroots politics and power relations underpinning environmental governance. First, the fight for the Mirador Basin illustrates how green land grabs create new natures, rather than simply enclosing existing green spaces. Second, it contributes to recent scholarship detailing land-grabbing practices of resistance, acquiescence and incorporation ?from below? by describing how Maya Biosphere community forest concessionaires were able to reverse a green grab. Lastly, I argue this successful reversal largely rests on the articulation and mobilization of a new rights-bearing subject ? the forest concessionaire. Struggles for land in the Maya Biosphere illustrate that practices and relations of green governance do not always create disciplined, neo-liberal, green subjects. Rather, community forestry has provided a political platform turning reserve residents into influential actors participating in the re-territorialization of power in contemporary Guatemala.
A T LAST, THERE IS gOOd NEwS fROM HONduRAS. Well, maybe. In September, the government of President Porfirio Lobo granted Miskitu people formal ownership over almost 3,000 square miles of their ancestral territory in the northeastern region known as La Mosquitia. This appears to be a vital victory in indigenous Hondurans' struggle for territorial autonomy. But it can also be read as a deeply cynical gesture by a government that, facing an upcoming election , was keen to distract attention from its otherwise appalling record on native rights and its avaricious approach to indigenous lands and resources. In just the past few months, the Honduran army has shot dead an indigenous Lenca leader protesting the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, and has imprisoned indigenous leader Berta Cáceres for her support of the protests. A few days after the killing, the " Law for the Promotion of Development and Reconversion of the Public Debt " was passed, which authorizes the administration to leverage the country' s " idle " resources as collateral to woo investment in resource extraction and agroindustry. Then, in mid-August, the administration K. McSweeney is a geographer, and Z. Pearson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University. An additional author has chosen to remain anonymous out of concern for the safety of colleagues in Honduras.
Domestic and international capital controlling Guatemala's sugarcane and oil palm industries are deploying a dual investment strategy in the context of global financial, energy, food and environmental crises. They allocate current booming revenues to high-cost, long-term investments and they open and adapt new territories for cultivation. Under a new “extractivist governmentality”, corporate land grabs aim to control land and natural resources as well as land-based wealth and the labour that produces it. Land ownership is being (re)concentrated and social relations reshaped: compensation to dispossessed indigenous peasants for their land is insufficient to boost non-farm livelihoods or to regain access to land. This paper describes efforts to institutionalise and legitimise this project, as well as the ongoing resistance to it.
Les capitaux nationaux et internationaux qui contrôlent les industries guatémaltèques de la canne à sucre et de l'huile de palme déploient une double stratégie dans le présent contexte de crise mondiale financière, énergétique, alimentaire et environnementale : ils consacrent leurs bénéfices croissants à des investissements coûteux dans une perspective à long terme et ils ouvrent de nouveaux territoires à la mise en culture. Selon cette nouvelle « gouvernementalité extractive », l'accaparement des terres par les grandes entreprises vise au contrôle du sol, des ressources naturelles, des richesses agricoles ainsi que du travail qui les produit. La propriété foncière est ainsi en voie de re-concentration et les rapports sociaux refaçonnés. Les compensations versées aux paysans indigènes dépossédés de leurs terres sont insuffisantes pour stimuler des revenus non agricoles ou pour leur permettre d'acquérir de nouvelles terres. Cet article décrit les efforts visant à institutionnaliser et à légitimer cette tendance ainsi que la résistance qu'elle suscite.
Drug trafficking is taking a toll on Central America's biodiverse forests.
The signing of the Guatemalan Peace Accords in 1996 sought to end nearly four decades of civil war and to rectify what many have identified as the root cause of the violent conflict: the country's extremely unequal distribution of land. To achieve this aim, the agreement embraces the strategy of market-assisted land reform. The agrarian strategy has done little to level the country's agrarian structure, however, as the quantity of land that has been transferred is minimal and often of poor quality. Moreover, rather than alleviating poverty, the market-led strategy has indebted its intended beneficiaries. In part, the failure of the programme results from the limited political and financial support that it receives from policy makers. But its shortcomings are also rooted in the inherently flawed model of market-led agrarian reform, a strategy that disembeds land from its political and cultural contexts and envisions it as nothing more than a transferable commodity. To placate demands for land, Guatemalan officials have implemented a land rental programme that does little to redress the deep economic inequalities that plague Guatemala and underpin its political instability. A more comprehensive land reform is justified.
This paper employs cross-tabular analysis, and multivariate and logistic regression to explore demographic, political-economic,
socioeconomic, and ecological patterns of farm households and land use outcomes in an emergent agricultural frontier: the
Sierra de Lacandón National Park (SLNP)-a core conservation zone of the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), Petén, Guatemala. Data
were obtained from a 1998 probability sample of 241 farm households, the first large detailed household land use survey in
Guatemala’s Selva Maya-the largest lowland tropical forest in Central America. Virtually all settler households were poor maize farmers who colonized
the SLNP in search of land for subsistence. While they faced similar ecological and economic conditions, land use strategies
and patterns of forest clearing varied with demographic, household, and farm characteristics. Findings support and refute
elements from previous frontier land use theory and offer policy implications for conservation and development initiatives
in the Maya Forest specifically, and in tropical agricultural frontiers in general.
This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsible for extensive patterns of deforestation in Central America. This pattern is most pronounced in the region's large protected areas. We wanted to know how cocaine trafficking affects conservation governance in Central America's protected areas, and whether deforestation is a result of impacts on governance. To answer this question, we interviewed conservation stakeholders from key institutions at various levels in three drug-trafficking hotspots: Peten, Guatemala, Northeastern Honduras, and the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. We found that, in order to establish and maintain drug transit operations, drug-trafficking organizations compete with and undermine conservation governance actors and institutions. Drug trafficking impacts conservation governance in three ways: 1) it undermines long standing conservation coalitions; 2) it fuels booms in extractive activities inside protected lands; and 3) it erodes the territorial control that conservation institutions exert, exploiting strict “fortress” conservation governance models. Participatory governance models that provide locals with strong expectations of land tenure and/or institutional support for local decision-making may offer resistance to the impacts on governance institutions that we documented.
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.
Abstract
For decades, cocaine trafficking has been a key factor in accelerating the social and eco
-
logical transformation of rural landscapes across Latin America. In this review article,
we explain why and how. Drawing from scholarly, journalistic, and policy sources we
identify and theorize the political-economic logics and grounded processes underlying
the pervasive nexus of agrarian change, clandestine activities, and illicit capital. We first
outline three key elements of the political economic context that create and enable land
acquisition by drug traffickers. We then elucidate narcos’ multiple motives for acquiring,
transforming, and holding rural landed property. Ultimately, we make a case for under
-
standing drug traffickers as a “narco-bourgeoisie” due to their use of cocaine profits to
establish and extend private property relations into erstwhile communal and protected
lands that were previously unavailable for capital accumulation. We argue that theorizing
drug traffickers in this way better captures the relationship between drug control policy
and capitalism, and the role of illicit capital in land use change.
Keywords:
Cocaine, drug traffic, land grab, agrarian change
Resumen
Por décadas el tráfico de cocaína ha generado bruscos y violentos cambios socioeconómi
-
cos como ecológicos, transformando las economías rurales en todos los países afecta
-
dos en América Latina. Este artículo presenta un análisis del impacto multidimensional
del narcotráfico sobre las economías rurales de Colombia, Centroamérica, y México. El
artículo analiza los elementos fundamentales que han impulsado a los narcotraficantes
(narco burguesía) a la adquisición masiva de tierras. En este sentido, el artículo discute
tres factores interdependientes que explican el impacto de la economía del narcotráfico:
cambio en las economías rurales, las actividades clandestinas del narcotráfico, y el capital
ilícito. El articulo analiza elementos de los contextos internacionales (como la guerra con
-
tra las drogas) y de los contextos locales (corrupción, leyes de tierras) que posibilitaron
el acaparamiento de tierras por la narco burguesía. Finalmente, el artículo argumenta que
los narcotraficantes, y su emergente burguesía, son instrumentales en la expansión de la
propiedad privada y en la concentración de tierras, impulsando el sistema capitalista selva
adentro, perjudicando comunidades indígenas y afrodescendientes, el medio ambiente y
la seguridad alimenticia.
Palabras clave:
Cocaína, narco-tráfico, acaparamiento de tierras, transformación agraria
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Despite foreign policy efforts and attempts to combat supply lines, the United States has been for decades, and remains today, the largest single consumer market for illicit drugs on the planet. This volume argues that the war on drugs has been ineffective at best and, at worst, has been highly detrimental to many countries. Leading experts in the fields of public health, political science, and national security analyze how U.S. policies have affected the internal dynamics of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. Together, they present a comprehensive overview of the major trends in drug trafficking and organized crime in the early twenty-first century. In addition, the editors and contributors identify emerging issues and propose several policy options to address them. This accessible and expansive volume provides a framework for understanding the limits and liabilities in the U.S.-championed war on drugs throughout the Americas. © 2015 by Bruce M. Bagley and Jonathan D. Rosen. All rights reserved.
This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world-repeated displacement from their lands. © 2012 by the University of Washington Press All rights reserved.
Using grounded theory as an example, this paper examines three methodological questions that are generally applicable to all qualitative methods. How should the usual scientific canons be reinterpreted for qualitative research? How should researchers report the procedures and canons used in their research? What evaluative criteria should be used in judging the research products? The basic argument we propose is that the criteria should be adapted to fit the procedures of the method. We demonstrate how we have done this with grounded theory and suggest criteria for evaluating studies done in this mode. We suggest that other qualitative researchers might be similarly specific about their procedures and evaluative criteria.
In the Multiple-Use Zone of Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, the usufruct rights to timber and non-timber forest resources were granted through concession agreements to 12 community organizations and two private timber companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After more than a decade, some concessions are successfully managing forests for multiple uses while others have had limited success or failed completely. This paper provides a management unit-based analysis and evaluation of the evolution of these forest concessions. First, we present a critical assessment of the current state of ecological integrity, socio-economic development, governance, and financing within each of the 14 forest concessions, using a series of quantitative and qualitative indicators. Next, we categorize the different trajectories that the concessions have experienced, and describe the key biophysical, socio-economic, and market events and drivers that may have influenced their outcomes. Lastly, we provide suggestions for the continued consolidation of multiple-use forest management practices in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, and draw out lessons for multiple-use forest management elsewhere in the tropics.
This article is a case study of phase one of the World Bank's land administration project in Petén, Guatemala. Although the project's stated aims are merely to formalize an existing set of individual landed property rights, this development intervention necessarily changes the property regime, thereby changing underlying relationships that land as property embodies. Impact evaluations conducted by development economists may fail to substantively address displacement and violence that occur as a short-term effect of the project and long-term disparate impacts of the project that may exacerbate existing inequalities. The case of Petén also highlights the possibility for violent enforcement of property boundaries, where conflict surges between the disenfranchised and those who gain power under the new property regime.
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