(Photograph by CONIC)
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Green Wars (December 2017, University of California Press) challenges international conservation’s claims to save Guatemala’s Maya Forest, revealing how conservation facilitates dispossession in today’s so-called drug war, the country’s 36-year civil war, and a longer history of 200 years of settler colonialism. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned lowlands Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land. Even as they participate in these processes, Green Wars reveals how Q’eqchi’s work for material decolonization through relationships of mutual recognition with other Indigenous peoples and the land itself.
Download the Introduction below: 
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Advance Praise for the Book
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“Bold, raw, and discomforting, Green Wars plainly documents contradictions, expulsions, and abject violence in the Maya Forest. Indigenous communities, for whom peace in Guatemala never came, have been rendered illegal and criminal through acts of conservation and narco-control. To make real change, we will need to pass through the truthful darkness at the heart of Megan Ybarra’s account.”
— Paul Robbins, author of Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction |
“Green Wars is a theoretically rich and sophisticated analysis of conservation politics in Guatemala that advances significantly our current understanding of such conflicts. Drawing on indigenous studies, feminist political ecology, and postcolonial and critical race theory, Megan Ybarra illuminates the hemispheric dynamics that created Mayan dispossession, how the Maya are typically misread, and how we might begin to forge a new future. A must-read!”
— Laura Pulido, author of Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles |