Richard Hansen in an interview with Vice News, 2020.
Richard Hansen is a white, Mormon archeologist and capitalist from the United States. He has been working for over 40 years in Petén, Guatemala in the Maya Biosphere Reserve among the ancient Maya city of El Mirador. Coupled with his archeology, Hansen has been working toward building a privately-owned ecotourist wilderness resort in the forests of El Mirador. Most of the Maya Biosphere Reserve is occupied by concessions communities that manage these forests through sustainable logging. These communities are made up of Indigenous Maya and local Ladino communities, some of which have been stewarding these forests for generations despite decades of anti-leftist, genocidal, “scorched earth” campaigns enacted against them by their own government (funded-and-backed by the U.S. and Israel, of course). Hansen’s project would ban logging, turning Maya and local communities from collective stewards of a forest to employees of a park. It would also bring “spiritual tourism” from Book of Mormon-themed companies like Anderson Tours, LDS Tours Cancun, Helaman Tours, Alma’s LDS Tours, and LehiTours (Helaman, Alma, & Lehi are Book of Mormon names).
“Any use of this particular area of forest other than ecotourism would be, to me, the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump.” Hansen told Smithsonian Magazine while they flew over the Reserve. Just as many U.S. National Parks were created through settler enacted massacres & forced displacements of Indigenous Peoples of this land, Hansen’s project would also take a militarized anti-Indigenous approach to establish this private park in Maya land.
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