The poorest of Guatemala's poor are the Mayan Indians. They live for a greater part in the mountains, although the poverty and landlessness of the last decades have brought many to the shacks and slums of the cities. In the mountains a small percentage of them own minuscule plots of their ancestral lands. Others work as sharecroppers or day laborers. Many of them try to develop cash crops for their basic needs if they have handy access to arable soils.
Firewood commands a good price in Guatemala if it can be delivered to the cities.
It is used for cooking in nearly all the households of Guatemala aside from those of the very rich. Given the incredible poverty and the tremendous demand for firewood, the result is massive and unsustainable deforestation. Farms creep higher and higher into the mountains, and firewood is transported by backpack to cities. Legislation that is designed to protect the forests of Guatemala is often used to persecute and prosecute the poor rather then mitigate the process of deforestation. Extortion abounds, for it is very difficult for the poor to prove whether their cutting of wood for a cash crop is legal or illegal.