After spending several weeks deep in the Yucatan forest of Quintana Roo, Mexico, Jose Martinez-Reyes became aware of one very important fact in life: for many indigenous communities, power is land.
Over the years, Martinez-Reyes has made several trips to Quintana Roo, a state in Mexico renowned for its beautiful beaches and bustling tourist economy. Among its main attractions are Cancun—the resort city famous for its nightlife—underwater caverns, and seaside Mayan ruins.
But while tourists may see the ruins and imagine the Maya culture to be a thing of the past, these Mayan ruins are only one hour’s drive from the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, where the Maya people and culture are alive and immersed in a hotly contested feud over land rights. Once again, the survival of an entire way of life is at stake.
Professor and environmental anthropologist, Martinez-Reyes teaches about the complexities of land management at the University of Massachusetts: Boston. He first ventured into the Yucatan as a student on a grant to study the Masawal Maya language. His initial trip was a six-week long homestay, but something about the Yucatan captivated him. He has returned many times since. Through his work, he draws attention to an issue seldom discussed in the Western world. When large environmental NGOs (ENGOs) conflict with indigenous communities over land usage, its not just an issue about conservation: its also an issue of indigenous autonomy and rights.
What puts ENGOs in conflict with indigenous communities in the first place?
To answer my question, Martinez-Reyes began with the land market in Mexico. Land is in high demand in Quintana Roo. Forestry companies compete for rights to harvest mahogany. The Yucatan’s proximity to Cancun lures foreign investors hoping to break into the tourism industry. Conservationists in particular flock to the biodiverse Sian Ka’an forest.
“There has been an initiative to try to privatize those lands in order to preserve them” Martinez-Reyes says. But some ENGOS fail to understand the depth of the Maya’s relationship with the forest, and in privatizing the forest, they try to buy it away from the Maya.
The Maya are historically disenfranchised, relying on their land for food, shelter, and community. The Maya don’t view nature as merely a resource that people own—and neither does Martinez-Reyes. As foreign and Mexican buyers alike clamor to buy up land, Masawal Maya are encouraged to sell to conservationists and turn to the tourism industry in Cancun for jobs. However, when the tourism economy fluctuates, the Maya who refused to sell their land were able to return home to the forest. Their homeland was, and remains, a safety net ensuring the survival of Maya community, language, and heritage. “The Maya culture, language survives as long as the people continue promoting knowledge while living in that particular environment,” Martinez-Reyes says.
To demonstrate the problem with larger NGOs in Quintana Roo, Martinez-Reyes told the tale of two environmental NGOs working with communities during his time in the Yucatan.
The first, Amigos de Sian Ka’an, began as a grassroots organization meant to monitor the Si’an Ka’an Biosphere Reserve. It was founded with financial support from The Nature Conservancy, an environmental NGO based in Washington D.C.
As Amigos de Sian Ka’an grew, so did its adherence to Western conservation values. More and more of its members were Western conservationists, biologists, and businessmen, rather than local community members. Western organizations like The Nature Conservancy and The World Wildlife Fund provide most of the funding for its conservation projects. Western conservationists, Martinez-Reyes explains, employ “fortress conservation,” which preserves nature by emptying it of all human influence.
For the Maya who rely on the forest for many of their needs, this presents an immediate problem.
Amigos tried to steer indigenous communities’ interactions toward conservation projects called aprovechamiento, which included monitoring parrot populations or creating artworks from dead butterflies. According to Martinez-Reyes, these projects were really structured to make the Maya less reliant on the forest. “[Amigos de Sian Ka’an] may claim that they respect the traditions, but it’s pretty much grounded in a Western way of protecting nature” Martinez-Reyes says.
The Amigos funding was often cut short, and aprovechamiento projects cancelled with little or no communication to the communities involved. Three members of Amigos, disillusioned, broke away and founded U Yool Ché. U Yool Ché, Martinez-Reyes found, had much more success building strong relationships with the local communities. Some workers, he exclaimed, even became godparents to local children. Instead of moving on without a word when projects lost funding, conservationists communicated with the locals about what was going on and stuck around.
While many of U Yool Ché’s conservation projects still had to be cancelled when funding fell through, its relationship with the community was rooted in mutual respect and led to several years of successful community engagement.
Martinez-Reyes acknowledges the importance of international ENGOs, but not when Western conservation ideals place pressure on an already vulnerable community. U Yool Ché was able to form relationships with indigenous communities where many ENGOs fail.
So what can foreigners invested in indigenous rights do to support these goals, if many international NGOs have strained relationships with indigenous communities?
Martinez-Reyes has an answer: look past the big NGOs. “There are other more local NGOs, indigenous NGOs, that are much more underground and way less supported,” he commented. The more local ones will likely have more long-term personal relationships with the community. With improved trust and collaboration, smaller NGOs help encourage both conservation and the traditional heritage of the surrounding people. He himself maintains close connections with the people he met in the Yucatan, and is happy to see that many in the Masawal Maya community continue to defend their rights to their land and resources.