Jason Houston is a freelance photographer and picture editor at Orion magazine. Over the past two-and-a-half years, he has visited five Rare Pride campaign sites. (View previous blog posts.) This month he is exploring conservation campaigns in Belize, traveling with environmental journalist and High Country News contributing editor Matt Jenkins.

From atop the great Mayan temple at Caracol National Monument, Rafael Manzanero looks to the Belize/Guatemalan border. 

Belize is well-known as one of the world’s top ecotourism destinations among those seeking outdoor adventure and pristine nature. And though it’s one of the smallest countries in the Americas, it holds numerous areas of incredible biodiversity and ecological importance—a significant portion of which are set aside as designated protected areas. The area we’re visiting in the first part of our trip to Belize is Chiquibul National Park in the northern portion of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor — one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. And who better to have as our host than a leader in Belizean conservation, and an alumnus of Rare’s training program, Rafael Manzanero. With Raf and his team at Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD), we are in good hands.

In addition to running one of the first ever Rare Pride campaigns in 1993, Raf has built a 20-year career in conservation. To bring everyone up to speed: He began in environmental education at the Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center, where he pioneered environmental education programs and school curricula nationwide. After the zoo he worked in the Forest Department of Belize, where he ran one of the early Pride campaigns (visiting, literally, every school in Belize with his conservation message), and then later as an officer for the Forest Department, helping to facilitate the consolidation of a national park system for Belize. He then worked for Rare for nearly 10 years, mentoring conservation campaigns and adding much-needed capacity to the Pride program in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Along the way he founded several NGOs, the first when he was just 19 years old, and the second, Friends for Conservation and Development, which he has led as director for over a decade. Through FDC, Rafael continues to use Pride and other methodologies to instill a conservation ethic in this important corner of the world.

Friends for Conservation and Development’s current work is primarily focused on the Chiquibul National Park. This is the largest protected area in Belize and part of a vitally important system of 14 contiguous protected areas. It is incredibly remote (there are still significant unmapped areas of dense jungle and steep terrain), yet it is also threatened from all sides. On the west, along the Guatemalan border, the park is threatened by unsustainable farming and forest harvesting practices. In Belize it is threatened (though to a lesser extent) by the encroachment of various illegal and unsustainable practices in rural communities as they expand through the buffer zones toward the park’s boundaries.  Rafael’s challenges are great, and involve coordinating his efforts with multiple governmental organizations and other partner organizations, all in the midst of complex cross border politics in a truly wild, often nearly impenetrable corner of this small country.

Visiting Rafael and his staff at FCD was an amazing experience. The programs are innovative and comprehensive, the dedication of all ten employees is inspiring, and every moment was filled with a generous sharing of insights and observations from the wide range of perspectives of his staff, their partners, and the local communities themselves.

A major part of our visit focused on a Rare Alumni Fund-supported campaign to engage local communities in the protection of the water resources in the Chiquibul-Maya Mountains, the headwaters for more than half of Belize’s water supply. Running this outreach program is FCD’s newest staff member, Environmental Educator Pedro Chan. While the immediate threats to the Chiquibul National Park from the Belizean communities are much less acute than those posed by illegal settlers along the Guatemalan border, this effort fits squarely in Rafael’s ’system’ approach to conservation. This is something he refers to frequently and which essentially means stepping back during the planning phase and looking at both short-term and long-term goals, and all the different variables that need to be in place for them to work. The problems along the border have become so bad that they need to be dealt with through direct enforcement of rules and regulation, and often conflict can even become violent. FCD’s goals in this campaign are to establish a conservation ethic in the Belizean communities in the buffer zones around the towns and villages before they find themselves simply addressing problems, and while such a shift in perspective can still help guide sustainable community development. Consistent with this system strategy is Rafael’s generous patience and willingness to train and trust his people. Numerous times throughout our visit his staff members were given the unqualified opportunity to explain to us their areas of responsibility and show the leadership—and pride in their work—that it will take for them all to succeed in the challenging tasks they face protecting one of the most special natural areas in the world.

The Chiquibul-Maya Mountains campaign message competes with heavy hitters in the marketing world—Hannah Montana and Coca-Cola—on a store front in San Jose Succotz.

The timing of our visit aligned with several of Pedro’s first school presentations. The first was done together with Rafael’s mentoring, then the second, to this large crowd of children at Eden Primary School in Santa Elena, Pedro completed entirely on his own.


Competing with attitude and adolescence for high-schoolers’ attention requires a mix of information and involvement. Pitting boys against girls in a trivia contest based on his presentation engaged the entire room of several hundred students at Eden High School in Santa Elena.

Eliodoro Perez, head of the newly formed Cayo Quality Honey Producers Cooperative, loves his bees with passion. He is working with FCD to share his knowledge and enthusiasm with others in the forest buffer zones who are interested in shifting to bee keeping as a more environmentally sustainable—and financially lucrative—alternative livelihood. Adding this sort of practical benefit to adult community meetings encourages those who are more skeptical to attend. Once there, they also hear the campaign’s conservation messages.

Another goal of the campaign is to educate the community about, and involve members in support of, an environmental service fee to be paid by utility companies and others using the forest resources. The first step is securing 3,000 signatures from people in the 22 communities in the Chiquibul-Maya Mountain region.