Background

The north-eastern lowlands of Guatemala harbored some of the most complex polities of Classic Maya civilization, including the behemoth city of Tikal. Today, Guatemalans remark that 100% of the department of the Petén is blanketed by pre-Hispanic cultural patrimony. Other vestiges of pre-Hispanic Maya civilization are found throughout the nation in the form of archaeological sites (called sacred sites by Maya people today), caves, and places of spiritual pilgrimage.

The vast richness of Maya cultural heritage in Guatemala has, in many ways, been subverted or otherwise impacted by modern social, economic, and political factors. The deep fissures between Maya and Ladino (mixed European and indigenous) identity led, in the 1960s, to an intense climate of fear in which many Maya leaders were assassinated or otherwise forced to abandon their role as advocates for the country’s nearly two-dozen indigenous Maya groups. Thirty-years of civil war (with the most brutal period taking place in the 1980s) eventually gave way to the signing of Peace Accords in 1996 and the ratification of human (and, specifically, indigenous) rights legislation in 2000. Today, over half of Guatemala’s population identifies as ethnically Maya and the political and social Maya “movement” has increasing impact and visibility within the daily lives of many.

Whereas Maya people maintain large populations and strong cultural traditions and language skills in the highlands, the region of the Petén has experienced a very different trajectory. In later pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, the Petén was inhabited by lowland Maya groups speaking Itzaj and Mopan Mayan languages derivative of Yucatec Mayan. While descendants of these groups remain in the Petén, they are the two Guatemalan Maya ethnicities most deeply impacted by ladinization. While community leaders work toward the reclamation of language and spirituality, presently only a handful of fluent Itzaj speakers remain; Mopan speakers, somewhat more numerous, are only a tiny fraction of the local population.

Left largely uninhabited until the 1970s, the population of the Petén now consists of two dominant groups: Ladinos and Q’eqchi’ Maya (immigrating from the Alta Verapaz region to the south). With new communities springing up throughout the region, archaeological remains once hidden deep in the jungle are now in close proximity to small communities. Poverty in Petén is extreme. Jobs are scarce and wealthy landowners with cattle farms possess a large percentage of the available farmland. Simultaneously Peteneros are intensely familiar with the value of Classic Maya artifacts on the black market. It would not be presumptuous to say that today every significant site in the Petén has been ravaged by looting on some level whether opportunistically by local people or xate and chicle collectors, or as was more common in the 1980s and 1990s, by large organized gangs of men working for employers with ties to the North American and European art markets.