Paper Short Abstract:

Macehual Maya villagers engage in community forestry, but accusations of illegal logging persist despite government regulations. This presentation suggests that “pachocheo” (timber theft) allows Maya communities to reclaim sovereignty over their territories against environmental regulations.

Paper Abstract:

Since the late 1980s, Macehual Maya villagers in Carrillo Puerto (Quintana Roo, Mexico) rely on community forestry for their monetary income, extracting tropical timber within their commons for the wood and construction industries. Despite heavy government regulation on logging activities to prevent overexploitation and deforestation, accusations of fraud, theft and contraband are rampant in the timber supply chain. Participants often label each other as “pachocheros”, implying that they exceed legal logging limits, operate outside designated forestry areas, and use false permits or lack official documentation.

Drawing from approximately a year and a half of fieldwork (2021-2023) in this indigenous region, I will delve into a specific ethnographic case in the Maya village of Naranjal, where an internal conflict arose after the entire community received fines from the Mexican environmental agency for burning a protected forest area for agricultural purposes. Due to the community assembly’s effort to shift the collective fine onto Timo, the peasant deemed responsible for the fire, he threatened to retaliate by revealing the common, albeit illegal, practice of extracting wood outside the village’s designated forestry areas.

In exploring the accusations and justifications of “pachocheo”, expressed from both moral and ecological standpoints, I will argue that, for my Maya interlocutors, this form of illegality represents a form of ‘social banditry’ or ‘gleaning’, aiming to reclaim individual and collective sovereignty over territories legally theirs but subject to complex and at times contradictory environmental legal frameworks.