New B.D.F. base to protect Chiquibul’s natural resources
The Belizean border has often been criticized as porous, making it highly vulnerable to illegal hunters and gatherers. It’s a situation that could easily overwhelm the limited resources of response agencies but as News Five’s Kendra Griffith reports, managers of the vast area that comprises the Chiquibul are not giving up on the site’s valuable resources.
Kendra Griffith, Reporting
The Chiquibul National Park is home to the highest point in Belize and has the largest known network of caves in Central America. But those are only two of the reasons why its more than two hundred and sixty five thousand acres are under environmental protection.
Marcelo Windsor, Deputy Chief Forest Officer
“The Chiquibul is one of the areas that do maintain the highest biodiversity within not only Belize, but within the Meso-American region. Our situation is that there is much that the Chiquibul has to offer that we do not even at this point in time know what we do have. That is why that is very important for us to keep what we do have.”
Kendra Griffith
“The Chiquibul forest stretches for forty-five kilometres along the border with Guatemala. According to conservationists, incursions by residents of the sixty-five communities located in that span have become a major problem for this natural resource.”
Marcelo Windsor
“They want from hunting for food. They want the materials for building houses, cutting down our forests for them to plant and everything else that goes with it. actually, they are finding a livelihood, a better livelihood than what they can actually get in Guatemala.”
Rafael Manzanero, C.E.O., Friends for Conservation & Dev.
“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.”
This morning Friends for Conservation and Development, co-managers of the National Park, unveiled the latest weapon in the battle for Chiquibul: the Rio Blanco Observation Post located five hundred and thirty-five meters from the border, which according to F.C.D.’s Rafael Manzanero, is an ideal location.
Rafael Manzanero
“This base is really strategic for monitoring and surveillance and monitoring of Guatemalans coming in. Our hope is that we are able to contain them because this really has been—the Montillus Olivus has been one of the key communities with a whole network of trails coming into the Chiquibul. Right in front of me there are large areas that were denuded last year, so this is going to be really a sort of gateway in which we can control actually Guatemalans from coming in.”
The sixteen by twenty-six foot structure was the fifty-sixth project to be completed in Belize by British volunteer organisation Trekforce.
Greg Coe, Country Manager Trekforce Belize
“We are very lucky. Fortunately, people know of Trekforce already. They know that if you want to come and do some conservation project, work very hard and live in the jungle for a prolonged period, then Trekforce is the company to do it with, so we get a lot of people interested and then it’s up to them to raise the money to cover the cost, make a contribution to the project and over they come.”
For thirty-one days, eleven Trekkers laboured under harsh conditions to construct the base and today they were beaming at their success.
Jonathan Boocock, Trekker
“I’ve absolutely loved it. It has been an amazing experience and it has been a lot of hard work, but that’s why I came, I wanted to challenge myself and it has been everything that I hoped it was going to be.”
Katherine Brewer, Trekker
“I am the actually medic for the group so I kind of come semi as a professional anyway but it’s just so great to have the opportunity to actually not just do that aspect of it but also getting involved in actually doing the building. I’ve got no building experience and I think it was a massive challenge to almost all of us. Some people have a little bit of experience, but really when we came here before, you look at those bushes and that’s what it looked like, this whole area. So we cleared the entire lot from that and put in all the foundations in and absolutely everything you see, we’ve actually done from scratch.”
John Sullivan, Rio Blanco Project Leader
“I told you it was going to be hard, I told you that you will get blisters, that your lungs would burn, your back was gonna break and you would possibly cry. But you chose to do it and that says a lot about you. It shows that you got a lot of courage and that’s something you just can’t teach people.”
Their mission completed, today the Trekkers packed up and set off on foot for a nine-day journey across the Chiquibul, leaving the real work in the hands of the Belize Defence Force.
Col. Dario Tapia, Deputy Commander, Belize Defence Force
“Over the years we have maintained a sporadic presence here, not permanent and this post will now give us that presence here to have presence twenty-four seven. As of today I have instructed the commander of the Belize Defence Force here that as of today once we go through all the formalities, his troops are to come up here and take over the building.”
The plan is for the observation post to be manned by ten soldiers, one police officer and the occasional park ranger.
Col. Dario Tapia
“We will be able to patrol, to prevent any Guatemalans from slashing and burning of the Chiquibul Forest Reserve before they plant. We’ll also be able to stop any xateros. As you can see, this is deep in the jungle. There is no Belizean communities here, so the Guatemalans cannot use any excuse that they are coming in to do trade of business in Belize. We will be able to Guatemalans from entering Belize, something that we couldn’t do because of the remoteness of the area.”
To bolster the soldiers’ efforts, Manzanero has committed to continue working along with conservation organisations across the border.
Rafael Manzanero
“We have a work plan with Guatemalans, particularly with CONAP, which is like the Forest Department in Guatemala. The idea of that is even to conduct even bi-national patrols. We are able to do bi-national patrols with our Guatemalan counterparts. We also exchange information.”
“We are also about to launch a full environmental educational programme across in those communities in Guatemala as part of the bi-national effort. Other things here in Belize, one of them is to have even much more aggressive patrol systems. In that level we have what we call multi-agency patrols. So we can bring up to twenty-two people around these areas from several organisations to be able to help us and deploy them in particular areas of the Chiquibul.”
While the environmentalists realize they won’t be able to stop illegal incursions, the idea is to get the situation under control.
Rafael Manzanero
“With multiple strategies it can be contained. That doesn’t mean that it can be stopped altogether perhaps, but I think we can contain it.”
Kendra Griffith reporting for News Five.
The soldiers manning the observation post will be rotated every two weeks because while it only took forty-five minutes to reach the Rio Blanco by helicopter, to get to the base on foot is a two to three day hike through the jungle. Our transportation to Rio Blanco was made possible thanks to BATSUB and the B.D.F.
