I'm afraid you have the wrong idea of what was actually done at Tikal for Star Wars. There were few actors present, there was no practically no action shot. It was literally a case of going there to shoot some footage of the structures there to establish it as being the landscape for Yavin IV.

I was actually under the impression that there had been NO actors involved, but there's one photo on starwarslocations.com that shows them rolling film on the sentry that uses a hand-scanner or something on incoming ships.

You can see the entirety of that scene here. There were no protests because, really, there was nothing to protest.