ABSTRACT
In the Petén rainforest of northern Guatemala, an isolated frontier often compared to a Central American Amazon, authoritarianism and forest conservation share a long, bloody, and mostly forgotten history. There, the military combined woodland management, population control, and the repression of political dissent into a single institution called FYDEP, forging an administrative approach to people and forests that I call counterinsurgent environmentalism. This essay explores two key moments of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war (1960–1996)—which pitted the army against leftist guerrillas and their civilian supporters—to show how militarized forest management changed in response to dynamic political and strategic contexts, revealing the fractious heterogeneity of the military state and the blurry lines separating authoritarian regimes from liberal democracies. The sanguinary past of the Petén rainforest is erased from tourist brochures, but more than twenty years after Guatemala’s civil war ended, the legacy of counterinsurgent environmentalism remains deeply embedded in conservation policy and enforcement, constraining the bounds of democracy for the people who call its “wilderness” home.
