The Northern Transversal Strip was officially created in 1970 under the government of General Carlos Arana Osorio, through Legislative Decree 60-70, ostensibly for agricultural development. But the region had been contested terrain long before the decree. After the CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, Guatemala's new government reversed his agrarian reforms and created agencies to redistribute land along the northern frontier. The Directorate General of Land Affairs handled the strip while a parallel body, FYDEP, managed colonization in Peten. In practice, both were controlled by the military. The first settler project at Sebol-Chinaja in Alta Verapaz connected to Peten via the Cancuen and Usumacinta rivers, but the only road was a dirt track built in 1928. Into this remote terrain came indigenous Q'eqchi' peasants, Catholic missionaries from the Maryknoll order, and -- increasingly -- army officers with an eye on what lay beneath the soil.

Oil changed everything. In 1974, Shenandoah Oil and Basic Resources began commercial extraction at the Rubelsanto field in Alta Verapaz. The discovery transformed the Strip from an agricultural colonization zone into a strategic resource corridor. Army captain Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, who had inherited and purchased several farms in the Sebol area during the 1960s, became the Strip's most powerful figure. As a legislator, he lobbied for investment in the region; as defense minister, he coordinated the Northern Transversal Strip megaproject to facilitate oil exploitation. Between 1975 and 1979, Shenandoah Oil, the agrarian reform institute INTA, and the Army Engineer Battalion built a dirt road along the Strip -- a road that allowed military officers and connected businessmen to acquire vast tracts of land where timber and petroleum wealth lay. When Lucas Garcia became president in 1978, the pattern was complete: the men who controlled the army controlled the land, the oil, and the roads.

In January 1972, a new guerrilla movement crossed into Ixcan from Mexico. By 1974, it had named itself the Guerrilla Army of the Poor -- the EGP -- and began targeting military commissioners and large landowners. On June 7, 1975, EGP members killed Jose Luis Arenas, the biggest landowner in Ixcan, at his farm La Perla while he was paying workers. The guerrillas spoke to the assembled farmers in Ixil and called the dead man the "Tiger of Ixcan." The army's response was devastating. Indigenous Q'eqchi' people from 24 villages in the Cancuen area had already been evicted in 1971 when oil was discovered. Throughout the late 1970s, communities along the Polochic River fought for land titles that never came, their claims swallowed by a system rigged to favor landowners like Flavio Monzon, who had manipulated agrarian reform paperwork to seize communal lands.

On May 29, 1978, hundreds of Q'eqchi' men, women, and children gathered in the plaza of Panzos, Alta Verapaz, to demand clarification of their land claims. They carried tools and machetes. Soldiers were already stationed nearby. What happened next remains disputed -- some say it began when a peasant leader pushed a soldier, others that the crowd surged forward -- but the result was a massacre. The army opened fire on unarmed farmers in a town square. The Panzos massacre became a defining atrocity of the Guatemalan Civil War. By late 1981, the army had adopted a scorched-earth strategy across Quiche, forcing entire communities from their homes and into the mountains. Those who fled were identified as guerrilla sympathizers and subjected to siege, starvation, and attack. The conflict would not formally end until 1996, leaving an estimated 200,000 dead, the vast majority of them indigenous Maya civilians.

Today the Northern Transversal Strip has entered a new economic chapter. African oil palm plantations have spread across the region, driven by demand for edible oils in Guatemala and neighboring countries. Large agribusiness companies have invested heavily in territories that were battlefields a generation ago. The dirt road the army built for oil exploration is now a paved corridor for agricultural commerce. For the indigenous communities who survived the civil war, the shift from timber and oil to palm oil represents a change in product but not necessarily in power dynamics. The Strip remains what it has been since 1970: a place where Guatemala's wealth and Guatemala's violence have always been entangled.