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The Oaxaca Incident: A geographer’s efforts to map a Mexican village reveal the risks of military entanglement – The Chronicle of Higher Education (Paul Voosen 2016)

Posted by saviorteam in Human Research Ethics on May 10, 2016
Keywords: Belief, Conflicts of interest, Consent, Culture, Ethnography, First People, Honesty, Human research ethics, International, Media, Merit and integrity, Methodology, Privacy, Protection for participants, Research results, Researcher responsibilities, Respect for persons, Social Science
Screenshot of image from the Chronicle of Higher Education story

An American scholar. A Mexican village. The U.S. military. What could go wrong?

On most maps, Tiltepec doesn’t look like much. A Zapotec village of several hundred indigenous people, Tiltepec clings to the steep slopes of the Sierra Juárez, a formidable range in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Its people have lived there for generations in relative isolation under the shadow of Cerro Negro, where once their ancestors forced conquistadors off a cliff to the Rio Vera below. The valley teems with ancient earthen terraces, platforms, and sacred caves. Yet find Tiltepec on government maps and all you’ll see is bare topography and a name. Viewed on Google Earth, it’s even less — a few patches of white rectangles drowned in forest. For most of the world, Tiltepec might as well not exist.

This Chronicled of Higher Education story is a painful demonstration of the consequences of failing to disclose a source of funding of your research and to manage the conflicts of interest.  When the parties a the US military intelligence and a First People village, it is not hard to see why the situation went so badly wrong.

Peter H. Herlihy was going to change that. A geographer at the University of Kansas, he has been a pioneer in what he calls participatory research mapping, a method that allows indigenous communities to reflect their knowledge on official, standardized maps, empowering them when the state comes to redraw borders. Herlihy was no stranger to Latin America — he had used the method in the early 1990s, in Central America. But he was a stranger to Tiltepec.

In 2006, Herlihy and his team of American and Mexican researchers arrived in Oaxaca under the aegis of the American Geographical Society, an organization, now much reduced, that once rivaled the National Geographic Society in influence. The AGS had pinned its revival, which it saw going hand in hand with the revival of geography as an academic discipline, in large part on the success of Herlihy’s expedition.

The Oaxaca Incident
An American scholar. A Mexican village. The U.S. military. What could go wrong?

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