Narco-Deforestation, Indigenous Sovereignty, and one of the Best Group Projects of Graduate School

Note:

The final paper of my graduate school career, submitted June 3, 2024, for a course on Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. I took it partly to fulfill a credit and partly because two of my closest friends were in it. That turned out to be the right call on both counts. I miss working with my friends.

There is a version of graduate school where every course is strategically chosen, every assignment is a deliberate demonstration of expertise, and every group project is a minor act of diplomacy between people who would rather work alone. And then there is the version where you sign up for a class partly because your friends are in it, find yourself genuinely gripped by material you had almost no background in, and end up submitting the most collaborative thing you wrote in two years alongside people you actually liked.

This was the latter.

The course was Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. I went in knowing I was not the person in the room with the deepest regional expertise — Jordan and Fernanda had that — and made the conscious decision to let them take the lead on the intellectual framing while I focused on being useful: doing research, building the analytical structure, making sure the argument held together under pressure. It's a different kind of contribution, and one I think doesn't get enough credit in academic settings that reward individual performance. Good collaborative work requires someone to know when to step back.

The topic we chose was narco-deforestation — the phenomenon of drug trafficking organizations using remote forest territories to launder money, build clandestine infrastructure, and control supply chain routes, with the consequence of driving significant forest loss across Latin America. It sounds, at first, like an environmental story. It isn't, or at least not only. The more we dug into the literature, the clearer it became that narco-deforestation is a story about indigenous sovereignty — about who has the right to govern land, who gets to define what "protection" means, and what happens when the state is either absent, corrupt, or actively complicit in the dispossession of communities that have managed those forests for centuries.

The statistics are staggering in the way that statistics about large-scale injustice tend to be: indigenous and tribal territories store approximately 34,000 million metric tonnes of carbon; indigenous peoples make up about 5% of the global population but steward an estimated 20-25% of the Earth's land surface; the forests within those territories contain 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. And yet the over 400 indigenous communities across the Amazon and Latin American forests have almost no institutional capacity to resist organized criminal networks that operate with impunity precisely because governance in these regions is so weak.

Our intervention proposal centered on the "Usos y Costumbres" governance model — a system of customary indigenous self-governance used in parts of Mexico, most notably through the CRAC-PC system in Guerrero — as a framework for strengthening indigenous autonomy in Honduras, which we identified as a particularly acute case. The logic was straightforward: if weak governance is the mechanism that enables narco-deforestation, then strengthening governance from within communities — rather than waiting for state-led interventions that have consistently failed — is the more realistic path. Honduras has a long history of those failures, a narco-influenced political class, and indigenous communities in La Mosquitia that have been negotiating for land tenure rights with almost no institutional support. The CRAC-PC model offered a precedent: municipalities that adopted it saw lower homicide rates, higher trust between community members, and reduced incentives for participation in illicit economies.

Whether that framework would translate cleanly to Honduras is a genuinely open question — one the paper acknowledges honestly. Criminal retaliation is a real risk. State cooperation is not guaranteed. The conditions that made CRAC-PC work in Guerrero are not perfectly replicable. But the alternative — relying on governments that are often implicated in the same networks they're supposed to be dismantling — is not really an alternative at all.

What I carry from this project is not just the argument but the process. I came into it unfamiliar with the regional literature, willing to say so, and committed to being useful in ways that weren't always visible. I left having learned something I genuinely hadn't considered before: that deforestation policy and drug policy are the same policy, that indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection are the same cause, and that the international frameworks meant to protect both are only as strong as the will to enforce them — which, in Honduras in 2024, was not particularly strong at all.

Also, the group chat was excellent. That matters more than people admit.