Column One

MACAWS ABOVE, OUTLAWS BELOW

Drug Traffickers, Illegal Tree Cutters, Migrant Smugglers -- It's the
Law of the Jungle in Guatemala's Peten.

EL NARANJO, GUATEMALA -- Here in the Wild West of the Central
American isthmus, tough hombres like "the Bald Guys" make mahogany
trees disappear in the middle of the night. Here, "cattle ranch"
cowboys wrangle cocaine that falls from the sky.

This is the Peten, for centuries a thinly populated frontier where
jaguars ruled an unspoiled natural kingdom and the rainbow-colored
scarlet macaw flew unmolested over towering Maya temples.

Now the jungle region is a lawless no man's land, prized by smugglers
for its proximity to the lightly guarded border with Mexico and for
the swamps and dense forest undergrowth that give them an advantage
over the ragtag forces of law and order. It's a place where the
immigration police have no guns, the park rangers have neither radios
nor automobiles, and the Guatemalan air force can't see or chase the
"kamikaze" cocaine-smuggling pilots.

Drug trafficking is the most profitable activity here, with the Peten
serving as a key way station in a vast air-and-land route from
Colombian coca fields to U.S. consumers. But many other illicit
enterprises thrive too.

A recent journey to the Peten involved encounters with good guys and
bad, including an undercover army colonel on a motorcycle and a
happy-go-lucky migrant smuggler who feared no one.

Every working day, young boatman Juan Izquierdo ferries small groups
of illegal immigrants into Mexico along the San Pedro River, one of
several busy smuggling routes along the Mexico-Guatemala frontier.

Izquierdo helps his passengers avoid a nearby Mexican border post,
their first serious obstacle on the long journey from Honduras, El
Salvador and other Central American countries to the United States.

He charges them about $5 each, though for some reason a tourist like
me must pay eight times as much for a round trip.

"Couldn't this get you in trouble?" I ask Izquierdo.

"No, nothing ever happens," he says with a slightly perplexed look
that suggests no one has asked him that question before.

Izquierdo, in fact, has little to fear. The officers staffing the
nearest Guatemalan immigration office, in the river port of El
Naranjo, have no guns, no boats and just one vehicle. The post
consists of a teetering shack overlooking the river.

Immigration agent Manuel Salguero points out a passing boat that
appears to be ferrying immigrants and says, "To tell you the truth,
all we do is watch them go by."

Even if they wanted to arrest the smugglers, they'd face one big
obstacle: They have no holding cells.

Staff and equipment shortages are endemic to every law enforcement
and military agency operating in the region, officials say. An
overstretched army brigade of about 700 soldiers covers an area the
size of Belgium. Guatemala's air force owns two helicopters and no
tactical radar capable of detecting low-flying aircraft.

Last month, in response to the growing sense of lawlessness in the
border regions, the Guatemalan government announced that it would
dispatch 500 more federal police officers and soldiers to the Peten
and other areas along the Mexican frontier later this year.

Large chunks of the Peten are ostensibly protected as national parks
and nature reserves.

"The wood poachers have satellite telephones, and we don't even have
two-way radios," says Claudia Mariela Lopez, regional director of the
National Protected Areas Commission, which oversees the reserves.

Lopez has invited me to tour her domain, several hundred square miles
of jungle, savanna and swamp intersected by unpaved roads. Her
driver, a park ranger supervisor, manages to hit speeds of about 50
mph on scary, gravelly tracks, but never puts on his seat belt.

Our caravan includes the army colonel on the motorcycle, at least one
other officer and a squad of soldiers with machine guns riding in the
back of a pickup. The soldiers are there to protect the colonel, who
is in disguise. He doesn't want the local criminals to realize a
high-ranking officer is on an "intelligence mission" in their
territory, so he wears jeans, sunglasses and a bandanna over his head.

Often, we stop when the road is overgrown with vines and tree
branches, forcing our driver to hack open a path with a machete. When
we arrive at the few ranger stations in the reserve, we encounter the
sad sight of park rangers short on just about everything.

Guatemala's park rangers often go hungry for lack of food at their
remote outposts.

"So, you don't have any supplies," Lopez says at one stop, a
collection of hammocks underneath a precarious roof of rough-cut tree
branches. The rangers have run out of beans, though they do have a
few live chickens around.

"They didn't come this week, no, " one ranger answers.

Back in the capital, Guatemala City, 200 miles to the south, security
officials think of the Peten as a vast "aerodrome" where planes of
various sizes land on grassy fields carved out of the ancient forest
by drug traffickers posing as cattle ranchers.

"The plane comes in, and they pick up the fences of the pasture and
in an instant they have a landing strip," says a security analyst and
former military official who speaks on condition of anonymity for
fear of antagonizing Guatemala's powerful drug lords.

The planes unload in about 10 minutes, and get topped off with
aviation fuel carried in pickup trucks, the analyst said.

About 40 clandestine strips and airfields are in operation in the
Peten at any given moment, says a Guatemalan security official who
asks not to be named because he is not authorized to speak publicly.
The strips vary in length from 2,500 feet to about 4,500 feet.

"Those pilots come in low over the jungle, and we can't see them
because our radar is blind under 400 meters," or about 1,300 feet,
the official says. "They're real kamikazes."

To help fight the drug trade, the U.S. government lent Guatemala four
helicopters in March as part of a $21-million aid package. A senior
Guatemalan official said the helicopters are being flown by U.S.
pilots because the Guatemalans lack the necessary training.

Drug traffickers have acquired thousands of acres in the region for
their airstrips and transport operations, intimidating and buying out
local farmers and communities, officials say.

North of Flores, the Peten capital, a criminal band known as Los
Pelones, the Bald Guys, holds sway, according to federal and local
officials. Unpaved roads run through here, among smoldering trees and
brush set aflame by farmers. We enter a village where, the rangers
inform me, the Bald Guys operate an illegal airstrip.

"There's no way to oppose them," one official says. "The only way you
can come in here is with heavy weapons."

Soon we see two men on a motorcycle riding in the opposite direction.
One of the men has a chain saw slung over his back. A park ranger
tries calling one of the checkpoints down the road to alert the
rangers there, but there is no cellphone service in that part of the
jungle. And he has no radio.

The targets of the poachers are exotic woods in the jungle,
especially the umbrella-shaped mahogany trees that rise from the
landscape. Mahogany lumber brings the poachers a small bonanza -- the
wood is prized for furniture and guitars. They cut roads in the
jungle to skirt the ranger posts on the highways, then load up
several trees on flatbed trucks for the journey to sawmills outside the region.

Marlon Hernandez, a ranger supervisor, says he was attacked this year
by a mob of 200 people in the town of San Andres, north of Flores,
when he and other rangers tried to arrest wood poachers.

"They would have killed us, but we ran away," Hernandez says. A
prosecutor with the country's environmental crimes unit was wounded
by gunfire during the attack. "We spent four hours in the mountains, hiding."

As we travel through the jungle, Hernandez lifts his shirt to reveal
a revolver tucked into his pants. "It was thanks to this that I got
away," he says.

But the money wood poachers make is small compared with the drug trade.

"The amounts of money they deal with are so large they can buy any
politician, any judge, official or police officer," says Yuri Melini
of the Center for Legal, Environmental and Social Action in Guatemala City.

Organized crime groups have bought the loyalty of large numbers of
poor farmers who take over broad swaths of jungle as squatters,
Melini says. The squatters present themselves as needy migrants from
other regions of this overpopulated country and offer the drug
dealers cover and protection.

These "narco cattle ranches" and "narco communities" have spread in
ostensibly protected regions of the Peten, Melini says, wreaking
havoc on an environment normally lush with towering canopies of
trees, spider monkeys, river turtles and countless other flora and fauna.

The "farmers" level the mahogany and tropical cedar trees with power
saws, and then set fire to the underbrush. Low-lying grasses quickly
grow in the blackened soil, providing pasture for cattle and horses
and flat landing strips for overloaded Cessnas.

The combined effects of deforestation and poaching have reduced the
scarlet macaw population to just a few hundred; the bird's stunning
plumage can fetch thousands of dollars on the black market.

But if such enterprises seem too dangerous, there is always migrant
smuggling, a safer, if less lucrative, line of employment.

The seven passengers on Izquierdo's skiff look frightened as they
cross into Mexico. All residents of the Honduran city of San Pedro
Sula, they say they're headed for the United States and that they
believe a Mexican freight train provides migrants with a free ride of
500 miles or more.

I tell them that the train is no longer running. Some of them turn to
me with a look of despair, but a younger man in the back says
defiantly: "I heard they started running again."

No matter. They plan to make their journey on foot, mostly, paying
locals to escort them around the Mexican immigration checkpoints ahead.

"If we don't catch that [smuggler's] truck, we'll be walking for a
week," one of the men shouts over the roar of the engine as the boat
speeds westward.

Moments later, they are stepping onto a Mexican riverbank, leaving
the verdant Peten behind them.

Izquierdo's boat pushes back into the water with me as his only
passenger on the short return journey to Guatemala.