The colonialist myth of the petty or ignorant local inhabitant

The colonialist myth of the petty or ignorant local inhabitant

Due to a careful media manipulation of the triad, public opinion considers that the accusations of the inhabitants and historical users, the ejidatarios who oppose the attempts at imposition proposed by the triad, are motivated by pettiness or ignorance of the locals. Rafael Robles de Benito, member of the ONGA CEIBA, who Víctor Toledo said was one of the NGOs that "came out of the closet of neoliberal environmentalism" and "be dedicated to attacking the present government", and who has been a close collaborator of CONANP and the former Regional Director and former Secretary of the Environment of Quintana Roo, Alfredo Arellano (Guillermo & De Benito, 2008), in his defense of Protected Natural Areas, clearly exemplifies the perception of public officials, researchers, academics and non-governmental organizations that externalize, without any qualms to the public, their opinion that local people act out of ignorance, manipulated by dark interests (again another type of ignorance) or by excessive cravings for profit.. When we affirm this, we do not do it because we have a problem of paranoia, it is that openly these actors of the triad, promoters of the PNA, Ramsar Site or something similar, stressed it at every opportunity they had: the local inhabitants and those who are against our proposals, are ignorant or petty. The published article, entitled Why Opposition to a NAP? of November 15, 2017 on the portal of the CEIBA organization authored by Rafael Robles de Benito (RdB), who a couple of years later would become the director of the Institute of Biodiversity and Protected Natural Areas essentially for the Government of the State of Quintana Roo, appointed, by Alfredo Arellano Guillermo, began as follows:

RdB:

There is an express, articulated and sonorous opposition to the establishment of a protected natural area in Bacalar. However, there do not seem to be a robust argument to support such opposition. In reality, what seems to exist is a worrying confusion and not because it generates deep questions or substantive questions. It is worthy of concern because it denotes one of two things: either it is not understood what they are, how they work and what protected natural areas are for, or there are voices of bad faith, who pretend to defend private interests, of

increased income and wealth, which are far above (in their conceptions) the public and sustainable interest. According to Robles de Benito it was ignorance of the locals or it was a paranoid vision of external plot. In fact, there is an external plot, but it does not come from the communities, but from characters with foreign interests, like him, who are part of the triad (See in this document What is the triad?). It would be necessary to return here to its conception of "public and sustainable interest", very conveniently defined as justifiable or not, depending on which side the interest is.

If members of communities, chambers, professional associations, academics and individuals are in favor of the PNA, they are in favor of the public interest and sustainability... but if those same groups are against it, then NO The public interest of whom? Arguably, children, families and individuals who have constitutional rights... as if precisely the members of communities, chambers, professional associations, indigenous people and other individuals, and even the owners of the territories, did NOT have that kind of rights... unless they are in favour of the triad initiative.

What is the public interest, in the environment? It seems incredible but very few stop to think what that argument means that has served to allow so many atrocities against local communities and individuals in the name of the environment. It has also been called the general interest or national interest, mainly in politics and speeches of that kind. If we also talk about regulation in favor of the "public interest" from the economic sciences, the concept is used in two aspects: to explain in general terms that regulation seeks to protect and benefit the general public and on the contrary following the Chicago Theory (also known as the Economic Theory of regulation), suggests that regulation does not protect the general public, but only interest groups. Stigler, in his paper, concludes that "... The review of the legal discipline shows that the perception of the public interest has to do with the fulfillment of political and moral values. Considering that the concept of public interest provides the judiciary with a basis from which to decide disputes in the field of community interest…” Overlapping economic and political theories, the neoliberal basis of reasoning for protected natural areas is established, that is, the reasoning is followed that the allocation of scarce resources, such as clean water, clean air, environmental services, carbon sinks, the beauty of the wild landscape,

untouched, is governed mainly by the market (the growing demand for them) so they must be protected to avoid ending with they so that we can all continue to enjoy their benefits, at least the part of society that can continue to pay them. These concepts can be applicable to multiple areas where the government intervenes to generate regulations, in favor of "the public interest", supposedly implying that it is the benefit of the majority of a community. When talking about the "public interest" and "the common good" used as a banner for the creation of environmental policy instruments, it should not be forgotten that in the end these instruments were created responding to the vision and interests of select groups of researchers, environmental nongovernmental organizations, government agencies of the sector, or other sectors or parliamentarians who did not necessarily represent society as an integral entity, but that most of the times they championed the interest of the State or group by naming themselves the emissaries of the public interest.

Paz Salinas, in her research discusses and exemplifies perfectly the issue of participation in the management and conservation of protected natural areas (PNA) focusing it as a conflictive issue in which the public interest, private interests and collective interests converge and diverge, simultaneously (PazSalinas, 2008).

RdB:

“At first glance, it seems to me that there are no relevant voices that are really opposed to the conservation of bacalar's ecosystems and environmental services.

Ejidatarios often say that they agree with the conservation of the forest and the halting of deforestation. Some, like the ejido commissioner of Buenavista, say that "they would like to preserve the mountain, but nothing else knows how to grow the pineapple" (although pineapple is not a traditional crop and much less

Mayan). Why, then, has the proposal to establish a protected natural area that includes the lagoon body and an area of dry land around it caused so much animosity?” This simplistic way of seeing the problems and socio-environmental conflicts tries to reduce the reasoning of the locals, according to the "small world of Western science" of the triad, based on simplistic answers to obvious and even annoying questions that a "outsider" or "wech", like him, perform in a condescending way without understanding the depth of an answer such as "it

is that nothing else is done", and that they understand as if it were a lack of vision, skills, reasoning and even a lack of interest in conservation. This is a very common attitude in researchers and academics, especially from the natural sciences, lacking experience or tools to elucidate the discourses from the intuitive richness of the local ecological knowledge of the historical inhabitants of the communities around the Bacalar Lagoon. This simplified answer for a foreigner who clearly asks the obvious, required a discourse analysis well framed in the context of the Ejido Buenavista of the last 30 years, and more the last 10. If that conversation really happened (because it does not cite sources) it should have considered the following: The Buenavista ejido must be seen from different angles: ethnic composition of its population, its history with the management of natural resources, the migratory processes towards the community in the last 10 years, the interest groups, the coercive manipulation of some groups of newcomers and the complexity of the interactions of its current actors.

No one opposes the conservation of ecosystems, in fact there are many examples of the efforts that for decades all the communities around the Lagoon have been making in favor of Conservation. The community informant, in his answer affirms what is happening: they may be interested in conservation and stop deforestation, but that implies, as we have already seen, ceding their territory, control and justifying funds to the triad, and given that the only support that the communities receive directly comes from the agricultural sector, because "that is the only thing they know how to do"... a sarcastic answer, which Mr. Robles de Benito could not read.

RdB:

If the intention of those who claim to oppose the project is to ensure that they are scrupulously consulted throughout the entire process involving the creation of a protected area (the formulation of a justifying technical study, the design of the polygon of the area, the issuance of the decree that establishes it, the formulation of the management program and the presentation of the corresponding regulatory impact manifest), good and pass; although I believe that too many consultations can be excessive and constitute an unnecessary obstacle to the realization of a project that may well be entirely legitimate. Too many queries? Here it would be very good to understand the concept of participation. Usually this concept tends to be obscure and fuzzy, depending

on who is handling it. Participation, Paz-Salinas says in her research, can mean obedience, or subversion; directed action or independent movement. It can be understood as a critical argument against government inefficiency; or, on the contrary, as a project of the neoliberal State in its thinning and delegation of functions to the citizenry. The processes of "participatory construction" that only include the social base in consultation meetings and not of real participatory construction, that participatory construction that is inclusive, that agrees and allows agreements, considering all possible angles in a socio-environmental, historical, economic and biocultural field; when these consultations are simulated scenarios, which reach only mere presentations, where the vision of the other is forced, where listening is simulated and the opinion of the social base is not heard, nor is it considered, they are doomed to failure (see the PROTUR case, in this document). In this sense, Agrawal & Gibson (1999), contribute to the discussion the argument of assuming the community as an influential and capable heterogeneous entity that must not only be recognized, but assumed. The initiatives fail not because of the "number of consultations" that are carried out, but because the promoters end up with a proposal without a social, local base that supports it, since it is key that the sector that is going to receive said initiative and is going to put it into action, receiving its benefits or negative impacts makes it their own, appropriates it; and appropriation can only be generated with a real, fair and truly consensual construction among the actors. Simulations never work like this, it needs to be really built among the social actors, from their local knowledge, with respect, that is reflected in order to have the drive to participate, follow up, real legitimacy and that is not achieved with presentations and signatures of attendance list. Invariably, when a proposal is received violently and with resistance by the social base, as in the case of the PNA Bacalar, attention must be paid, observed objectively and understood that the lack of legitimacy of an instrument before the eyes and community intuition comes from the inability of the promoters to consider social actors as entities capable of making decisions based on their knowledge and experience. and, therefore, to act accordingly. The actors of the triad rise as possessors of the solutions in favor of the "common good", which justifies them to create instruments of "social participation" that they must induce from above (either by local governments,

environmental organizations, academics or funding agencies), because the population, from the governmental or paternalistic vision, of the contempt of the scientists who consider them "ignorant" or of the NGOs that are always more interested in to please the financiers and score merits, or in the political coup, all of them who are interested in "saving nature to negotiate with it", while positioning themselves before public opinion as those who have the moral, almost spiritual obligation to protect the communities from themselves, as if the locals were immature infants in permanent desire for the destruction of the natural environment.

RdB:

However, it seems that the thing goes beyond the need to be consulted: thirteen ejidos, convened by their commissioners, have generated minutes of assembly where they record their refusal to establish a protected area that interests their land endowments. Apart from the fact that it is not often to see that so many ejidos unite around a single cause (which in principle is encouraging), the fact that they do so to oppose a project that does not harm them at all and that should even contribute to them being able to diversify their productive activities and improve their income, gives a lot to think about. Again, RdB confuses the term participation. The communities DO know what a participatory process of consultation is, convening their Ejido assemblies, informing, discussing and making decisions. It is he and people like him who do not understand that communities are very clear about how real participation works, because they must constantly practice it within their working groups, general assemblies and community committees..

RdB:

Most likely, the root of the refusal of the ejidatarios (who by the way have shown their consent to the promulgation of an ecological management program, which, by the way, is aligned with the Bacalar lagoon conservation project) lies in the already widespread distrust of any action taken by a government agency. He himself exemplifies why the attempt to impose a NAP on communities from the outside failed: because his concept of consultation had nothing participatory and was a lack of respect for the social actors who ended up learning that the "presentation" of a project to which they were invited, was really a participatory consultation, in which they were not asked or allowed

an opinion, and that the attendance list they signed, turned out to be part of an act of agreements to impose a NAPA on them. From there the process lost all legitimacy and to the extent that it continued to insist on imposing it under those terms, it continued to increase the discontent of the social base.

RdB:

Pero la desconfianza, encerrado en el odioso neologismo de “sospechosísimo”, es un arma de múltiples filos: lo mismo desconfiamos de las acciones de gobierno, como de las acciones de grupos organizados que no parecen responder a motivos claros, y que se sustentan en informaciones imprecisas y sesgadas, que generan confusión. En el caso del área protegida propuesta para la laguna de Bacalar, solamente se ha formulado un estudio técnico justificativo, por parte de una organización no gubernamental (Amigos de Sian Ka’an, A. C.), a petición de la Comisión Nacional de áreas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP). The hateful thing is that he tries to discredit the just demand of the social base, as if it were a kind of paranoia. Since, according to him, "... only a justifying technical study has been formulated by a non-governmental organization (Friends of Sian Ka'an, A.C.), at the request of the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP)..." Again, the myopic or perhaps cynical position is almost hateful because a couple of years later it ended up being in charge of the instance that is precisely following up on this study. Arguing that it was only community paranoia that in 2017, by pure coincidence, a document was created that proposes to create a PNA in the Bacalar system, driven by two instances with a long history of creating and imposing restrictive instruments on communities, for their own benefit, as if they had done so because they had nothing better in occupying the $ 400,000.00 pesos that CONANP gave to Friends of Sian Ka'an, so it occurred to them to make a proposal to justify and put 219,000 ha under federal reserve status. Nothing else. This simplistic statement is offensive, and again, it makes very clear the position of these promoters who think that local inhabitants and communities are ignorant and manipulable, to the extent that they can mock with ridiculous observations like that, publicly.

Did he imply that people should have kept quiet, until they already had the PNA decree on them? Generally that they hope, that the communities do not realize until they have practically the instrument on top, and at that time,

according to their reasoning, "now if it would be worth all the scandal they make" (although maybe it is too late). It should be reminded that even with the community uprising against the study that had only been done just because, the instance that he directs now, in 2019 he resumed the study to promote the PNA from the state government, through IBANQROO, and depends on the Ministry of the Environment, whose Secretary was, before he was dismissed for accusations of corruption, Alfredo Arellano Guillermo, former Regional Director of CONANP, where he also has pending allegations of corruption and now led by Efraín Villanueva Arcos, founding partner of Amigos de Sian Ka'an and recognized as its operational arm in the south of the state of Quintana Roo.

RdB:

Throughout the preparation of this study, the consultants held multiple interviews and workshops with representatives of the same ejidos that today oppose the establishment of the area. It may not have been a sufficient consultation for this very preliminary stage of the project. But, and here distrust and suspicion rear their ugly head, it is strange that suddenly these same ejido groups are so reluctant to conservation, that in no way harms them, nor does it strip them of their lands, nor does it prevent them from appropriating the natural resources and environmental services that are in them.

We are not going to wear ourselves out trying to explain the difference between participatory planning and simulated consultation, already explained above.

RdB:

Those who can be affected are the owners and possessors of land on the margins of the lagoon, some of whom have speculatively opted for the detonation of a conventional tourist development, which allows them to sell their land at juicy prices, for the establishment of infrastructure for tourism. Perhaps they perceive the establishment of a conservation project as an element that subtracts surplus value from their real estate. Could it be then that there are "hands that rock the cradle" out there, from darkness and clandestineness? I wouldn't be surprised. According to RdB, they are the individuals who want a Cancun in the Lagoon and who manipulate the other social actors, because as they continue to insist,

the local inhabitants do not reach the intelligence to be dissatisfied, someone had to impose the idea on them. In his article Robles de Benito makes a disguised mockery of the just claim of the communities, as if said claim were by default of ignorance or candidness; perfectly exemplifies the type of colonialist thinking, part superiority complex, part condescension; which is precisely part of the schemes of neoliberal environmentalism driven for decades by the triad, which have managed before public opinion that the local inhabitants are like the "Indians" of the colonial era, who need to be educated, oriented, protected from themselves, cured of their "ignorance", in need of being saved by them, modern environmental feeders, sole owners of absolute truth.

According to this perception, "the rest of society" (communities, nonwestern scientists) are considered as a set of influenceable actors, without the capacity or legitimacy to assess the nature or severity of environmental problems or to do anything about them, in an effective and organized way; let alone solve them. A position that serves as a reference for communities and local actors to identify members of the triad who approach with discourses of urgency, threatened species, pointing out criminals and promising salvation with their instruments.