Casebook: Guatemala's tomb raiders

Are robbers threatening the last Maya finds?

The main plaza at Tikal is the staple image of Mayan ruins. Swollen jungle cloaking the edges of empty limestone edifices; vertiginously steep stairs ascending the pyramids to cubic temples; spider monkeys hanging from the lianas, puzzling over tourists.

“Man, we loved Apocalypto!” Our Mayan guide, Orlando beams when asked about the most recent representation of his ancient nation. “We loved it for what it was – an action movie about the Maya. It was the first Mayan Rambo!” Orlando works for the Tikal National Park, one of 80 full-time employees that protect the 375 square miles of jungle in rural Petén province, far from the crowded cities of south Guatemala.

High on the plateau, it was once a conurbation of 90 square miles, with 100,000 residents. Founded in 800BC, the city-state flourished until the post-classic period, some 1400 years later. A lifespan comparable to Rome itself – and like Rome, Tikal is a site of remarkably rich pickings.

Drug runners in the forest

Petén province makes up 33% of Guatemala but is only home to 500,000 of Guatemala’s 13 million people. It’s underrepresented in government, and chronically under-funded. The place is a patchwork of slash-and-burn cattle ranches and rainforest. 40% of Petén’s forests are protected now, but this brings its own trouble.

“Drug runners come up from Colombia and dump their coke and marijuana in the forest where it’s well hidden,” Orlando explains.  “Then they pay local villagers to move it for them – people are poor here and they’re happy to have a hundred dollars in their pocket in return for transporting some drugs. The runners then take it overland or by boat up to Mexico. There’s only really two ways you can make money up here in Petén – cows or drugs.”

There is another way, of course. But it’s hidden deep within the limestone pyramids of Tikal. Dozens of tombs have already been discovered under pyramids, including the Mayan find of the century: a king buried with all his jade. The man buried in what is now called the Temple of the Jade Jaguar was found with over 100 items of jade wear, including two rings on each finger, anklets, earrings, and tooth encrustations. He was found with a jade chest also full of jade artefacts, the whole find amounting to over 2 lbs. Jade was the most treasured material for the Maya here, they had little silver and gold.

The missing tombs?

So far excavations have turned up two tombs for every pyramid. But some of the large pyramids have yet to be surveyed properly with modern imaging equipment. The government has given Tikal just 3 million Quetzales over the last three years – which works out to just £85,000 per year. It’s barely enough to build new wooden ladders to enable tourists to climb the pyramids.

Guatemala’s jungles are scattered with thousands of other Mayan sites, many still waiting to be discovered by archaeologists. The risk to other troves of artefacts is the poverty of the people that happen upon them.

Carla Molina is President of Ecotourism & Adventure, the group that runs Tikal National Park alongside other Mayan sites in Guatemala. Speaking to her about the dangers faced by these sites, she’s keen to point out the success that the last ten years has seen in protecting major Mayan areas.

“Looting is not a widespread problem anymore, thanks to the joint efforts of our country's government, archaeologists who employed former looters as legal archaeological workers and the US and European governments putting legal mechanisms in place to be able to process looters and get back pieces.”

“Looting is the past”

“The truth is,” admits Carla, “the north eastern part of the Petén region was the epicentre of a 10-million dollar a month industry as recently as the 1990s, but this is now a case of the past. The pieces that one can find in the black market would be of very poor quality and pieces mostly from around Lake Atitlan in the highlands & from other lesser, post-Classic sites.”

“It is not that those guys go out to find pieces - they may go hunting & stumble upon something, or go gum sapping and find something by sheer coincidence. Most places have been looted already and what is left for them to find is of no value.”

There has undoubtedly been a change in the way that Guatemala protects its heritage. A co-operation between archaeologists, Mayans and government agencies is brilliantly illustrated by the last major incident of looting, back in 2005. Villagers near Cancuén, another major site in Petén, contacted Arthur Demarest, an anthropologist with Vanderbilt University, and alerted him to a large altar that had been uncovered by rains and hidden by looters.

The men in masks

“One night four Maya elders showed up at my tent in the project camp,” Demarest recalls. “They told me that a woman had been brutally beaten by men in ski masks who were searching for a great altar that had been looted from Cancuén, one that I hadn’t even known existed.”

Demarest went to the local drug lord of the region, persuading him not to interfere with recovery of the altar. A savage drug war erupted soon after, but the altar had gone, taken to the Belize border. But coordinated efforts by the authorities to alert the archeological community to the altar’s existence had made the artifact too ‘hot’ to handle: it was reburied near its site by the looter who aimed to wait out the controversy.

It was the Cancuén Archaeological Project that inspired the villagers to aid its recovery. “The local shamans and leaders have long revered these sites as sacred, but because of their involvement in managing the sites, they now also see them as vital to their economic future and to that of their children and grandchildren,” says Demarest. “Because of this, some local Maya leaders took great personal risk to inform us about looters in the region, help apprehend the looters, and eventually to testify against them.”

Tombs are robbed every day

Zachary Hruby, an archaeologist working the region today, is doubtful that big finds are waiting to be unearthed from the virgin forest. Small household groups are still hidden, and there are still pyramids in the main site itself that could hold tombs.

“Tombs are robbed every day in Guatemala,” he says. “There are very few sites that have not been negatively impacted by looting.  It is an activity that continues regardless of the status of the illegal art market.  There is a culture of looting in Central America that will likely never go away without constant armed guardians for these sites.  Pyramids are seen as a local economic resource like lumber, gold, oil, or wild animals.”

“Sites are looted or developed out of existence every day.  This can only stop through education and the active protection for these resources.  Much of this is connected to the natural resources and rain forest.  These resources are being destroyed by invasores, narcotraficantes, and highly impoverished farmers... the same people doing the looting.”

WideWorld would like to thank the team at Zacapa rum for their assistance. Zacapa is dedicated to producing their premium rums in a way that benefits Guatemala and its people – for details see their site www.ronesdeguatemala.com