APECAFORM’s name tells you a lot about the organization’s members. APECAFORM is the Maya-Mam Association of Smallholder Organic Coffee Farmers. Its 472 members are Maya indigenous people who speak predominantly Mam, one of more than 20 languages spoken in Guatemala. They are also smallholder coffee farmers committed to organic shade farming. What the name doesn’t […]
The Santa Anita Coffee Producers Association is comprised of 117 revolutionary ex-combatants in Guatemala’s civil war. They laid down their arms in 1996 as part of the Peace Agreements, but they have never stopped talking about revolution. For decades, they sacrificed to achieve their vision of equality and justice in all of Guatemala. In 1998, […]
ASOCAMPO – Asociación Campesina Pochuteca – is comprised of 112 members who are working to be able to give their children what their parents couldn’t give them – land to call their own.
A few weeks ago I posted some photos of “coffee coins” — private currency that used to circulate on the coffee estates here in Guatemala before the system was abolished in 1925. Today, two examples of paper coffee currency.
I am now the proud owner of a handful of fichas de finca — the coins with which plantation owners here in Guatemala used to pay their workers in lieu of government-issued currency. As I understand it, they were only good at the “company stores” that estate owners set up for workers (along with housing, […]
Unfortunately for the people — and coffee — of Guatemala, the year of superlative rains continues. More rain fell in the month of August than normally falls in an entire year. And this weekend, 30 mudslides were reported along a particularly tragic 30-mile stretch of the Pan-American highway that cuts through the coffeelands here.
Last week I suggested that the violence hasn’t stopped in many parts of the coffeelands even though the revolution has. Mostly, navigating that violence that is a pretty awful thing for coffee farmers and their families to have to deal with. In some cases, however, violence and shared struggle have forged powerful bonds between coffee farmers and given new life to farmer organizations. There are few better examples of this than Santa Anita de la Union in Guatemala.
I have recent posts to reflections on massacres in the coffeelands that happened more than a decade ago in the context of armed revolution. These were not idle reflections on the remote past. Many parts of the coffeelands are still — quite literally — in flames.
n Santiago Atitlan, I strapped my baby boy to my back and we walked along the main road leading out of town. Along the way, I pulled a few cherries from the coffee trees that rolled down to the road from the foothills of the Atitlan Volcano on the left the road and further down to the lakeshore below on the right. There, in the middle of the coffee fields, 14 men, women and children were murdered for standing up to the Army.
The mountainous terrain where quality coffee thrives provides welcome cover to revolutionary groups, and invites the presence of the counter-revolutionary forces that stalk them. This dynamic has put coffee communities in the cross-fire from Mexico to Peru since the early 20th century. The cries of innocent victimes continue to echo loudly through the coffeelands.
