The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The local context
In the early 1980s, the area north of Cobán was heavily affected by counterinsurgency
campaigns because the guerrilla movement operated in the region. Dozens of communities
were destroyed and thousands of inhabitants were killed or ›disappeared‹. At
the height of the conflict, at least 40 percent of the Q'eqchi' were displaced from their
original homelands; they either sought refuge in the towns or went into exile; some
20,000 fled into the mountains where they often remained for years. The physical disappearance
of individuals not only adversely affected the life of the particular families
but also the entire social body of the communities. 45 The army also moved entire
communities, concentrating them in so-called ›model villages‹.
Another cornerstone of the counterinsurgency programme was the establishment
of a system of civil self-defence patrols. By creating paramilitary control groups at the
community level, the army aimed to separate the civil population from the insurgents
operating from the mountainous areas. Since the early 1980s, villages throughout the
highlands were patrolled by groups of men drawn from the civilian population and
armed by the military with the purpose to control subversive activities in the countryside.
46 Adams (1988) comments that the colonial policy of forced labour was reinstituted
by the army with the civil patrols, requiring the unpaid time of all able-bodied
male members of the communities. These men perceived the imposed system as burden
that took time from their agricultural and other productive activities. In 2002, political
debates were ongoing as to these patrullas de autodefensa civil (PAC) in terms of official
negotiations regarding financial compensations the government had assured to
the former patrulleros for their unpaid services. As the state authorities never met their
commitments, strikes were repeatedly called out and main routes were blocked
throughout the country so as to remind of the official obligation to compensate the
peasants for their engagement during the war. An informant living in San Benito, one
of the villages the present study took place in, recalls that he had been a patrullero for
almost 12 years. Sixty men from his community were obliged to patrol every third
night, 10 to 15 men at a time. When asked whether he intended to participate in the
announced strike, he replied indirectly by referring to the possibility of being killed on
an occasion that probably would meet with official mechanisms of violence. In spite
of official assertions concerning reparations and reinforced measures to advance unresolved
questions of land tenure, conflicts between large sections of the landless population
and the government continue to destabilise the ongoing peace process.
suspected of collaborating with the guerrilla to be attacked. Communities with developed local institutions
such as cooperatives or schools were particularly targeted (Wilson 1990: 13).
45 Often the people knew about clandestine cemeteries, but army members or their informants prevented
the people from bewailing the deaths (Flores Arenales 1999).
46 In 1985, the civil patrol system was said to include more than 900,000 men between the age of 18
and 60 who were armed and obliged to protect roads and the inhabitants of their villages from guerrilla
intrusion (Davis 1988: 27). According to Flores Arenales (1999: 138), other civilian and religious
hierarchies were relegated to a subordinate position in relation to this paramilitary structure. The internal
organisation of the patrols remained in place when they were transformed into the above
mentioned local development committees in the second half of the 1990s.
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