By Megan Ybarra

This article examines the significance of the role of the military in conservation in Guatemala through an analysis of discourses about the lowlands over time. Historically, Guatemala’s national imaginary of the lowlands has been that of a dangerous jungle (selva) that must be tamed. During the civil war, the military employed this imaginary in its counterinsurgency campaigns, positioning the jungle as a dangerous space with suspect citizens, or potential guerrillas. In the 1980s, international conservation agencies called the region part of the “Maya Forest” in a political project to create an international park system, but they never tamed the jungle. I argue that the transnational conservation alliance, comprised of international NGOs and national elites, continues to evoke the violence of counterinsurgency in the territorial project of conservation. Both counterinsurgency and parks as territorial projects position nature as separate from agriculture. I argue that the use of jungle and forest discourses in successive territorial projects produces a racialized landscape that connects a violent past to a potentially violent present. These two divergent yet articulated signifiers also attach to peoples living in the northern lowlands. In recent years, the jungle discourse has articulated with advocacy for increased militarization of conservation to fight the “war on drugs” in parks. As such, I argue that conservationists and the military are complicit in reproducing social inequalities, often through violent exclusions.