by JENNA PETERSON & JONATHAN PARK
(Jenna Peterson | Daily Trojan)
? PINNED | April 23, 2023 6:55 p.m.
Police have arrested one person for committing battery at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
The arrest followed a moment of tension at the L.A. Times En Español Stage, where archaeologist Richard Hansen was giving a talk at 4:15 p.m. Sunday. Hansen’s work in El Mirador Basin, the site of ancient Mayan cities and towns, has been the subject of controversy since at least December 2019, when Hansen proposed to Congress a bill calling to “prioritize continued tropical forest and archeological scientific research, law enforcement, and sustainable tourism” in El Mirador.
Protesters rushed the stage where Hansen was speaking, chanting, “Los mayas no fueron descubiertos, ya existíamos” — “The Mayans were not discovered, we already existed.” One person was arrested for battery; footage obtained by the Daily Trojan shows one person sustained injuries following the altercation.
Correction: An earlier version of this update misstated the day of the incident as Thursday.
April 23, 2023 10:37 p.m.
Another video, captured by the same person, shows one protester confronting a man behind the camera, presumably Richard Hansen.
The protester, whom the Daily Trojan could not identify, gives Hansen the middle finger, calls him a “fucking colonizer” and tells him to “go back to Europe.” Hansen responds, “Tell me what I did,” and “I’m fucking here all day.”
April 23, 2023 10:37 p.m.
New footage, captured by a bystander and obtained by the Daily Trojan, offers a closer look inside the violence that erupted Sunday afternoon between protesters, stage crew members and police officers.
One protester can be seen repeatedly punching the head of a stage crew member before another protester shouts at them to stop.
April 23, 2023 9:50 p.m.
Who is Richard Hansen?
Hansen, an affiliated researcher at Idaho State University, is the director of the Mirador Basin Project, which, according to its website, is the “largest multi-disciplinary research program in the history of Guatemala.” He began working in the area in 1978 as a student, investigating and mapping at least 51 ancient Maya cities and towns over the five decades since then.
The project, supported by the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies and the United States Department of the Interior, among others, states its mission as “helping families gain productive jobs, bring revenue to the region, and preserve the natural beauty.” The Guatemalan government awarded Hansen the highest award in the country, the Gran Cruz of the Order of Quetzal, in 2017 for his work in El Mirador Basin.
On June 17, 2020, VICE News reported that Hansen “has been trying to build a privately-managed park in the area for the last 20 years” in what he said was an effort to protect the basin. This effort included introducing a $60 million bill to the U.S. Senate in 2019, after several years of lobbying and cultivating relationships with U.S. and Guatemalan politicians. The report also suggested that Hansen’s curriculum vitae was disingenuously inflated and questioned the interests of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the sites: Brigham Young University funded one of the first excavations of the basin, and Hansen himself identifies as a member of the faith.
Subsequently published petitions, open letters and opinion articles decried Hansen’s work, and the proposed bill in particular, as an “imperialist and colonial drive to expropriate our territories and sacred sites,” and called for his removal from the University of Utah — where he was an adjunct professor of anthropology until 2021 — and an end to the bill.
The bill itself calls for the Secretary of the Interior to “prioritize continued tropical forest and archeological scientific research, law enforcement, and sustainable tourism” in the basin. In an interview with VICE News as part of its 2020 report, Hansen rejected existing — and, according to research, arguably successful — systems to protect the area as “not sustainable,” and suggested Guatemalans were too busy smoking to understand his vision.
April 23, 2023 6:58 p.m.
Footage obtained by the Daily Trojan shows at least one person sustained injuries.
An anonymous source familiar with the matter identified the person injured as a stage manager at the En Español Stage; the Daily Trojan could not independently verify this.
April 23, 2023 6:58 p.m.
Protesters distributed flyers and pamphlets to attendees at the festival.
“HANDS OFF EL MIRADOR RICHARD HANSEN,” read one such pamphlet, obtained by the Daily Trojan. “NO LAND GRABS NO WHITE SAVIORS.”
