- Wildfires in 2024 heavily impacted the Maya communities of southern Belize, burning 43,987 hectares (108,695 acres), a staggering 10.2% of the region’s forest and farmland.
- Fire has always been a sacred element to the Maya people, central in ancestral Mother Earth celebrations and in the traditional practice of slash-and-burn. But it has now become a debated topic, after the 2024 wildfires, exacerbated by the climate crisis.
- The Julian Cho Society, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the conservation of the Indigenous lands of southern Belize, is working for a rebirth: distributing 30,000 seedlings of ancestral trees to restore fire-scarred farms and implement agroforestry.
PUNTA GORDA, Belize — Rosa Mis walks on a carpet of cracking dry leaves under the scorching sun of late May. Her green T-shirt blends in with the newly grown grass, medicinal herbs and plantain trees. One year ago, this land went up in flames.
“Our 3 hectares [7.4-acre] farm burned for six days and nights,” remembers Mordy Kayo Mis, Rosa’s 31-year-old son. “We did everything possible to stop it by building a fire break line with dry leaves, aware of wind directions. All the community came to help, bringing water from the nearest springs.”
Rosa Mis, 62, is the alcalde, or leader, of the Laguna community, one of the most affected by the wildfires of May 2024. Laguna is part of the 41 communities inhabited by the Maya Indigenous people of southern Belize, in the Toledo district. In the region, the 2024 wildfires burned 43,987 hectares (108,695 acres), a staggering 10.2% of the region’s forest and farmland. The flames turned tropical forests and farms into ashes. Residents and firefighters say the fires were brought on by multiple factors: traditional agricultural fires that go out of control, electric line management or discarded cigarettes. The climate crisis is also exacerbating fires around the world.
But for the Maya people, fire has always been a sacred element, central in ancestral Mother Earth celebration ceremonies. It has also been used in the traditional practice of slash-and-burn for millennia, where vegetation is cut down and burned off before new seeds are sown to regenerate the land and increase nutrient-rich soil. But after the 2024 wildfires, use of Maya traditional slash-and-burn became a debated topic in the communities.
“Last year, wildfires were the most devastating. It was just another survival pressure on the ancestral lives of [the Maya] people, fighting a long land struggle,” says Cristina Coc, former director and co-founder of the NGO the Julian Cho Society (JCS). Founded in 2004, the JCS seeks to keep alive the legacy of activist Julian Cho. “Fire has always been central in our agricultural practice and ceremonies, but now has become a challenge,” Coc adds.
Now, Laguna hopes to become the center of a community-built agroecology renaissance with the help of JCS. The JCS is distributing 30,000 seedlings of ancestral trees, like copal (Protium copal) and cacao (Theobroma cacao), to restore fire-scarred farms, during the rainy season.
“Can you please give me a machete to cut the plantains?” Rosa asks Mordy while her grandson Erder, 5, is playing with some collected seeds. Today, they check for ripe fruits, before clearing vegetation for the planting season. Here, the family is cultivating a complex agroforestry system with cohune palm (Attalea cohune) — used for thatching roofs of houses and shelters — cedar (Cedrela odorata) for timber and fruit trees like mango (Mangifera indica).
“When the wildfires came, we felt hopeless,” Mordy says. “But we can’t give up after great losses. Despite the climate crisis, we need to regenerate our lands and start with replanting.”
Here, the JCS has built a nursery where seedlings are prepared by Laguna community women. Three hundred fifty people live in Laguna, practicing subsistence agriculture and selling extra production of fruits, vegetables and traditional jippijapa palm (Carludovica palmata) to the local market.
“We are doing our best to distribute seedlings, motivate farmers to regenerate lands and promote sustainable practices,” Coc says. The JCS is funded by several international organizations, such as the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility (TF), The Christensen Fund, Oak Foundation and the UK’s Biodiverse Landscapes Fund (BLF).
The fight for survival
The recording-breaking 2024 fires left communities shaken and rethinking their relation to fire. Locals say they were the worst fires in living memory.
“We had no rest, no time to sleep and eat, and we inhaled a lot of smoke,” Pedro Teul, 76, president of Toledo alcaldes association, says of the wildfire in Santa Teresa. “I was fighting fires with my wife and son. … We didn’t have any tools; we used any possible bucket to go to the spring at the end of the village to get water. A huge amount of cacao and cardamom were lost, such as the forest, with all inhabitants such as deer, jaguars and armadillos.”
Teul says farmers now fear fire “beyond words.”
“Everything, it’s unpredictable due to climate change,” he says. “Our creeks are getting dry; we have no place to wash the clothes. Definitely, we need to improve water resources for our survival, such as building water collection tanks.”
The wildfires were also unprecedentedly scary for the local fire department.
“It was terrible,” says Jerome Pook, officer in charge of the Punta Gorda fire station. “About 10 villages and farms were affected by fires at the same time.”
His colleague, Rubilio Pop, a Maya firefighter, adds, “We were unprepared to fight wildfires in the jungle; we didn’t have proper gear, respiratory protection masks or fire beaters, but we did our best.”
Now, the fire department is working with the alcades to train 15 people in each community to help manage future wildfires.
Some communities are participating in the training, like Laguna, while others don’t have the human and financial resources to join.
“Our community is full of elderly people that are feeling exhausted and discouraged,” says Ligorio Coy, a resident of Santa Ana. “Most of them are too old to wait five years until the new cacao plant starts to give fruit. For the moment, the only chance to survive is to sell pigs to the market or to migrate to afford the cost of living.” Consumer prices have increased recently in Belize ,with a 2.6% rise reported in December 2024. Food prices have especially risen.
“It’s such a complex moment: Century-old trees were on fire; people have lost everything and are scared. We are aware of farmers’ hesitation to replant young cacao trees that need 3-5 years to graft,” Coc says. “Our challenge is to create a long-term lifeline and regenerate soils with replanting and exploring aid options for affected communities. But also, we want to promote a mentality change on fire practices such as slash-and-burn.”
Some people have abandoned slash-and-burn techniques after the 2024 wildfires. For example, Rosa Mis has begun a slash-and-mulch regime instead — this is where the farmer clears vegetation and then uses it as mulch on the same land instead of burning.
“In this way, I’m regenerating our poor soils with alternative agroecology techniques,” Mis says.
A challenging relationship with fire
“Every [Maya] kid is educated to honor fire, used to light candles and copals, to do ceremonies, but now everything is difficult because of the climate crisis,” Teul says.
This ancestral relationship with fire is generating a debate among the Indigenous Maya revolving around topics such as food security, harvest storage, hydric resources and migration.
“What happened last year is a chance to reflect on adaptation techniques,” Coc says. “Our aim is to create alternatives to the ancestral slash-and-burn process: Increase slash-and-mulch, pay more attention to controlled burns and firing lines and involve the entire community in the controls to ensure security.”
But the new sowing season brings together all those challenges.
“Most of the farmers don’t want to practice slash-and-burn,” says Teul, adding that migration has shrunk some local communities to the point that they no longer have enough people to control agricultural fires. “Instead, they are trying with slash-and-mulch,” he adds.
Drawing on 40 years of data from the Punta Gorda meteorological station, Raquel Chun, a researcher at Durham University in the U.K., is investigating climate variability effects on Maya farms. Her analysis shows a slight but steady decrease in annual rainfall, on average a decrease of 1.9 millimeters (about 0.1 inches) per year from 1990-2023.
Chun’s research also highlights a rise in very wet days (extreme rainfall events), with heaviest rain days increasing by 3.9 mm (0.2 in) annually. This indicates less consistent water for crops but more intense rains when they come. Chun also finds that daytime temperatures are rising faster than nighttime temperatures on a 10-year trend.
“These shifts suggest growing pressure on traditional farming systems,” Chun says.
The unpredictability of rain is an omnipresent topic in the Maya community’s daily chats.
“Local farmers are becoming more aware of how climate crisis affected the crop, and it’s something that is spoken a lot among them,” adds Abidas Ash, a biologist at the University of Belize Environmental Research Institute. “Education is key: Some of them are already doing agroforestry with specific crops, as a practice of adaptation to the climate crisis.”
A continuous struggle for the land
From the death of the charismatic leader Julian Cho in 1998 under mysterious circumstances until now, the struggle of the Maya people of southern Belize hasn’t stopped. In 1998, the government of Belize granted concessions for logging in pristine forests to Malaysian companies operating in Belize. Julian Cho died while opposing those projects. However, the fight for Indigenous rights is ongoing.
“I’m the most targeted activist in Belize, especially with online harassment by some female politicians,” says Cristina Coc, who is Julian Cho’s sister-in-law. “Now the situation is quite calm, but we have security protocols to guarantee our safety and freedom.”
On Jan 27, 2024, the latest Maya mobilization happened against a government proposal that would give only a 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) radius of titled land to each family, far less than the community demanded.
“Ten thousand [Maya] people came to Santa Elena from different parts of the region,” Coc remembers. “It was a powerful demonstration, and the government withdrew the proposal two weeks after. But it’s been 10 years since the government delayed our land title law.”
The Maya people remain worried that their ancestral land could be sold, deforested, used by extractive industries or for tourism. Obtaining Indigenous land title is crucial for their protection. Currently, they are working to conclude a landmark work with maps and GPS. Then, the data will be filed with the government and, they hope, in October 2025, to finally sign land titles.
“Of course, we are scared, but we will continue to protect [Maya] lands,” Coc says, while honking her car horn to greet neighbors in Laguna village. She plans to build a new home for her family at the entrance of the community, an agroforestry-restored farm in a formerly fire scarred area.
Banner image: For the Maya people, fire has always been a sacred element, central in ancestral Mother Earth celebration ceremonies. Image courtesy of the Julian Cho Society.
Editor’s note: The text has been updated to reflect Cristina Coc’s role with the JCS, the funding sources of the JCS, and the spelling of Mordy Kayo Mis’s name, we regret the errors.
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