Counterinsurgency Ecotourism in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve

Abstract

Through analysis of a Guatemalan ecotourism project, this paper examines how tourism development is driving the militarization of conservation through a modality of violence I identify as counterinsurgency ecotourism. I look at four manifestations of counterinsurgency ecotourism: the repurposing of the army to enforce conservation law; the creation of an environmental ‘predator’ discourse; the eviction of peasants from protected areas; and the construction of military outposts. These practices illustrate that ecotourism development has become a means by which the Guatemalan state is militarizing conservation spaces in ways that revive and repurpose tactics of counterinsurgency warfare from the country's civil war (1960–96). Furthermore, this militarized approach to ecotourism development obscures the structural production of poverty, insecurity, and deforestation in northern Guatemala and undermines environmental conservation and social justice efforts. The counterinsurgency ecotourism practices identified in Guatemala resonate with many other conservation and ecotourism spaces found across the world, such as UNESCO Biospheres, as well places across the Global South with histories of counterinsurgency warfare.