Chiquibul threatened by continued cross border incursions

While most of the media focus along the border has been on the now dismantled settlement of Santa Rosa in Toledo, the fact is that in terms of destruction of Belizean resources, most of the problem lies further north. News Five’s Kendra Griffith reports from a familiar forest: the Chiquibul.

Kendra Griffith, Reporting
When the N.G.O., Friends for Conservation and Development, took on the task of co-managing the Chiquibul National Park in 2006, they were well aware of its importance …

Rafael Manzanero, C.E.O., Friends for Conservation & Dev.(Nov. 16, 2006)
“It is a part of a tri-national bioregion, forming part of the largest remaining contiguous block of tropical forest in this part of the world. It is an area of outstanding biological diversity and provides critical habitat for many endangered species.”

… And the challenges they would face due both to the sheer size of the area, as well as its proximity to the border with Guatemala.

Derrick Chan, Park Manager
“There’s like about fifty communities, sixty communities lined up along the border. They are peasants or farmers that depend largely from resources of the forest. In this case it would be hunting, illegal logging, xate and all the slash and burning. A lot of these people or the majority I would say are poor farmers, so what they do is they just take land.”

Efforts to deter the incursions include collaboration with their Guatemalan counterparts, patrolling the national park, and increased military presence in the form of a B.D.F. base near the border at Rio Blanco. F.C.D. also conducts reconnaissance flights over the park.

Derrick Chan
“This year we’ve done about five flights. We notice that as the dry season peaks, the incursions increase, the slash and burnings and right now, maybe until the end of this month, there is a lot of burning because what they do, they cut the forests, they wait about a month and then they burn it.”

This week News Five accompanied Park Manager Derrick Chan on one such mission along the border. It was easy to spot the barren areas of land dotting the green forest. Chan would then record the location of each clearing on a GPS.

Derrick Chan
“The clearings we just passed are all in Belize and how we know is because we have the correct line that was given to us by the O.A.S. This is where the plane is right now and we are heading south. So that is how we can confirm where our exact location is right now.”

The one hour and forty-minute flight revealed approximately twenty-five clearings. Using the G.P.S. coordinates, F.C.D. will conduct a ground patrol to locate the areas, destroy the fields, and expel the intruders. According to Chan, the magnitude of the destruction is alarming.

Derrick Chan
“The amount of damage, of forests that have been damaged that could be direct slash and burning and also fields of forests that have been burnt down and destroyed completely amounts to fifteen thousand acres of primary forests in the Chiquibul National Park and that is about the size of Belize City.”

It is a problem that seems to have no end in sight, but the F.C.D. says they are in it for the long haul.

Rafael Manzanero (Mar. 14, 2008)
“We have a lot of challenges to deal with. That’s a constant, a constant battle, if we can call it like that, in terms of trying to regain the integrity of the Chiquibul National Park.”

Derrick Chan
“It’s important that we constantly just keep working on this. Our mission, our goal is that 2012 we will have eliminated all these incursions. We know it’s far fetched, it’s probably very ambitious, but that is what we want to do.”

Kendra Griffith reporting for News Five.

Conservationists fear that in addition to harvesting xate, Guatemalan interlopers are also searching for scarlet macaw nesting areas and stealing the chicks. It is reported that captive scarlet macaws sell on the Guatemalan black market for as much as ten thousand quetzals.