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 against 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."
