May 23: Adventures at La Florida

The broken-down rust bucket of a pick-up truck was already crammed with about forty people and bags of every imaginable commodity, but the old man with the floppy hat driving nodded to me that there was, indeed, room. I sort of shrugged, looked around and realized that there were no other options, and hopped on to the running board. As the truck pulled onto the highway I clung tightly to the metal framework, thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if I fell—until I looked back and saw the cargo truck bellowing behind us. The highway stint was short lived—we soon turned onto a narrow cobbled road. For the next hour we passed coffee finca after finca as we headed deep into the jungle. Some of these fincas were well-maintained, with clearly operational coffee processing facilities and even a few heavily armed guards, but many of the owners houses seemed in various states of disrepair. I almost forgot how tightly I was holding on as the stunning scenery enveloped us. We plunged deep into a valley, surrounded by thick vegetation and waterfalls, and then crept up the other side (with the men having to get off and walk several times when the sheer climbs were too much for our little truck).

I had left Xela in the morning, dropping steadily from the Highlands into the Pacific Coast region. My journey had already been longer than necessary—a tout had convinced me his bus was heading to Colomba, my dusty destination—home of a furiously busy market that served as the only thing remotely resembling a town for farmers miles away. Indeed the bus did head to Columba, but only after a very, very long loop bringing me just a few minutes from the Mexican border. Thus I missed the guide who was supposed to take me out to the cooperative I was visiting. To make things worse, my arrival was greeted by a torrential rain storm that seemed to turn the town’s earth into a thick soup. I found a payphone though, got directions to board the truck, and there I was, bouncing along with absolutely no idea where I was going.

I thought the journey would never end, but at one random bus stop a spry old man was waiting for the gringo. It turns out that the finca, or coffee plantation, I was visiting, La Florida, was set another few kilometers off the road, so we began our hike, alternating between the road and paths through small campesino (small-holder farmers; generally subsistence growers) land plots—some legal and others squatting in the thick jungle. The climate was definitely different here. Unlike the temperate mountain temperatures in Xela, the air here was thick, hot, and heavy. I was promptly pouring sweat and swatting at all sorts of bugs, but this really was the jungle; I was surrounded by all sorts of colors and a thick leafy canopy.

I was to stay in the former patron’s house—something I had read about the place described it as a bit run down but full of atmosphere. It was certainly atmospheric, but a bit run down was a rather generous description. Traces of the former splendor were visible enough to instantly see how the foreign owners had constructed their own little world far removed from the struggle of their workers. Nothing could have seemed more out of place than the bidet in the house bathroom, with its carefully detailed brightly-tiled floor. The house design was graceful, with two floors of rooms and wide verandas and balconies. There is even a swimming pool—a rock basin filled by a constantly flowing mountain stream and set back from the house surrounded by thick jungle. The trickling water, views across the entire valley, and leafy canopy create one of the most picturesque settings imaginable.

The cooperative hopes to promote an active ecotourism program on their finca. I think, though, that beyond the pool, there is a ways to go. The house is pretty far run-down at this point. Some rooms on the bottom floor has been turned into a make-shift school, while others seem designated for guest rooms but are currently only filled with dust and moldy mattresses. Besides the fact that there was never enough water for more than a trickle, the bathroom featured some of the biggest roaches I have ever seen anywhere in the world. All night long rats scurried back and forth behind the walls in my room (I later learned that a previous visitor had even found a rat in her bed). The cooperative doesn’t really have electricity--only a tiny bit of power to make light bulbs glow a bit, generated by a frequently-broken hydroelectric system. Broken windows, doors, and floor boards create a perfect haunted house, but leave a bit to be desired in the ecotourism department. The worst part, though, as far as I was concerned, were the relentless swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes; I have never, ever been so completely chewed up. Literally hundreds of bites covered my entire body, despite my efforts to always wear pants and socks and shoes, allowing me to wake up several times every night itching all over.

All that said, the house I was living in was absolute luxury in comparison with anything the workers themselves lived in. I had an opportunity to visit most of the housing for the approximately forty families living on the plantation. What I saw resembled pictures I’ve seen of early US slave housing; most of the families were living in the original worker housing—big, bare rooms in which two or three whole families were crowded. Absolutely no one had even a modicum of privacy (I have to admit, I kept wondering where all the babies were made when the kids are sleeping right next to mom and dad!). My bathroom might have been roach-infested, but for the workers, it was simply a hole shared by several families. The less lucky families had to construct their own housing out of sticks or tarps, and seemed to have very little protection from the torrential downpours. When the rain turned the hydroelectric system, some of the houses had a bulb emitting a dim glow, but everyone was forced to rely on candle light to really see.

As the only English speaker on the cooperative, I had ample opportunity to practice my Spanish as I worked to learn the history and objectives of the cooperative—definitely a fascinating story to share. First, though, I want to share a funny, yet somewhat concerning anecdote. While I was visiting, two development workers from Guatemala City were conducting a workshop for the cooperative on health and sustainability. Although this meant that I didn’t get to experience everyone on the cooperative working together, I did get to see the collective in a different setting, learning and discussing pressing issues for their own growth. Generally the workshop seemed useful, if a bit repetitive. We especially discussed pollution and trash control and spent time cleaning up the land as a group (prior to the actual clean-up, we had a long discussion about what was and wasn’t trash, reminding me of an ill-fated attempt to do environmental clean-up in Vietnam last summer where this step was skipped and Vietnamese college students decided trash should be defined as logs but not candy wrappers). However, the amusing parts of the workshop came when the development workers began to discuss health, both with the children and adults. With the children, I listened to an interesting but grossly inaccurate interpretation of adolescent development, topped off when one girl asked what exactly breast milk was. The response: blood, with lots of pigments to turn it white. With the adults, an “alternative medicine” workshop, perhaps to compensate for the fact that the nearest hospital was well over an hour away, consisted of picking several weeds with supposedly helpful properties (though, as a witness to the picking, it seemed pretty random to me). Then, when one old woman complained of a headache, the woman development consultant began to rub weeds all over her head and breasts. When the old woman began to cry, the male consultant urged her “Cry, Cry! Let it all out.” Thus, the poor old woman was bawling in front of the assembled community while rubbed all over with weeds. Hmm…and these were the trained experts?

However questionable the workshop’s content may have been though, I had an amazing opportunity to watch the community collaborating. Young and old participated in the conference—including the hordes of screaming children. Certainly some members were more outspoken than others, but what shone through was a commitment for collective success—from trash removal to a chance to share their history for others to learn and grow.

May 24, 2007: Stories from La Florida

I spent four days at La Florida, listening and collecting stories from the members of a cooperative that had transformed a formerly abandoned coffee plantation (finca) into a organic cooperative growing their own Fair Trade coffee, as well as macadamia, chocolate, and honey. Everyone was as welcoming and friendly as I could ever imagine, and the stories I heard offered exactly what I had come to Guatemala to find—a glimpse into how indigenous people had been able to organize and create something from nothing—and a story I will attempt to share.

The forty families currently composing the cooperative and sharing ownership in the land today have shared an incredibly long fight in a country where peasant land-ownership is seen as the single largest structural barrier to rural development. Don Esteban (Don is a title of respect for men, Doňa refers to women), a prominent elder in the community, shared with me the early history of the group, and throughout the weekend I heard additional tidbits from other members. Members of this group are part of a local development organization called the Sociedad Cvil Para El Dasarollo de Colomba (SCIDECO, Civil Society for the Development of Colomba). The organization formed in 1982 as a group of campesinos who wanted to form a union to demand land, with the inspiration and assistance (though unclear exactly how much) from the local Catholic Church. I noted that 1982 was a dangerous time for organizing—this was the heart of Guatemala’s Civil War and organizers were often conflated with guerrillas and summarily tortured and executed across the country. Lorenzo acknowledged that it was a difficult time—the plantations were heavily militarized by both soldiers and guerrillas. He noted that the guerrillas were sometimes known as Communists, but was quick to refute this, stating that the guerrillas just wanted rights.

During the thirty-six year civil war, many foreign owners abandoned their plantations, and land was repossessed by the banks. In 1990 many SCIDECO members decided to form their own cooperative society with the ultimate dream of finding land to call their own. It is important to note that while all members shared the experience of working in a finca under a foreign owner, exploited and disempowered, the members came from a number of communities and did not even know the other groups prior to the beginning of their struggle.

Finding a plantation that had been abandoned during the war, the group applied for a loan from the government, but their application was simply ignored. When the war ended in 1996, provisions of the peace accords did indeed grant the right to campesinos to organize and obtain land. The members were encouraged that the government would then act. Such was not to be; by 2002 the group still had not heard about their petition for a loan. The cooperative members decided to take matters into their own hands and occupy the land they had found.

In 2002 La Florida’s members left their homes around their coast to begin “The Occupation.” Everyone I talked to during my stay talked proudly of their entrance to the abandoned finca and the details were always the same; at 2:00 pm on October 10, 2002 the group marched down the hill and pitched camp right in the middle of La Florida. It sounded like quite the parade of threadbare farmers of all ages and a truck or two to carry all their earthly possessions. For more than the next two years the farmers occupied the land without a legal title, living in huts of bamboo and plastic tarps. The army had a history of arresting or simply massacring similar protesters; the group had good reason to be living in fear. This was clearly a defining moment in the lives of every individual of all ages I spoke to. One young man told me how difficult it was to spend two years living under a thin sheet of plastic. Another two young men simply looked at each other and exchanged a look that spoke volumes of the difficulty. For the older residents, this was perhaps not as difficult as their years of seasonal migrations from mountain to coast for forced labor or the uncertain periods of widespread military massacres, but for the first time, these people were on a quest to own their own land. For everyone, there was a strong sense of pride and empowerment. Landless peasants had succeeded in achieving a government concession. There was no doubt this had brought the group closer together.

Of course, this is not a fairy tale, and there were certainly complications. Another group occupied the land at the same time as the SCIDECO members and declared that they too had a right to the land. This other group did not share the vision of a cooperative; each member wanted his own plot of land. The two groups did not want to work with each other and the government was not going to give the land to two groups in conflict. Never mind that there was more than enough land for both groups—the conflict was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

The two groups finally reached a shaky truce and in April 2005 the government granted SCIDECO the title to La Florida. However, for the first fifteen months of work prior to a harvest the workers didn’t receive any money. The second group of occupying farmers announced that they didn’t really want to work as a cooperative anyways and split from the first group, moving a ways away on the land and declaring their right to land divided how they chose. The conflict has really been problematic for both groups since inception. Again, neither group has anything like the capacity to farm all the land on the property, but there has been incessant fighting. I heard stories about how terrible the second group was, resorting to intimidation and threateningly carrying machetes on their belts at all times. However, some e-mails I read from previous researchers noted that the other group was nice and reasonable and the real problem was a complete failure for both groups to communicate. The conflict has really sapped significant morale and was often the first thing I heard about in my conversations with members. In addition to thoroughly disrupting the cooperative work patterns, the government stopped sending teachers to the primary school when the break-away group withdrew their students. The departing group had also taken to recruiting as many of their friends as possible, seeking to overcome their legal lack of legitimacy with numbers. Thus, the members of SCIDECO I talked to feared both physical violence and potential legal threats to the land. The groups have been unable to reach any sort of settlement so far, but an NGO representative I talked to was hopeful that in the future an agreement to divide the land and the debt could be reached.

In any case, SCIDECO members have managed to create what thus far has been a sustainable cooperative structure. The vast majority of the land is to be farmed cooperatively, and the group primarily grows coffee, though there seems to be some experimentation with cocoa and macadamia. Each family also is given 10 cuardas of land (about .6 acres) to grow whatever they’d like. Many grow vegetables to consume and sell to other families on the cooperative. From Monday to Friday everyone past primary school-age works from 6:30am to 1:00 pm, and then the rest of the days are free for laboring on the family plots and working around the plantation. A board of directors divides the labor, with most people working on the fields but others assigned for a variety of maintenance duties and all harvesting and processing jobs split among members. The board also divides salaries based on jobs assigned and everyone receives a wage every two weeks. Hearing that an administrative board was divvying up profits, I expected to hear dissent or complaints, but everyone I talked to fully trusted the board, composed primarily of respected elders and elected for a two year term, and no one complained of inequities of any kind. Wages currently are very low, but instead of complaints I heard of how the structure was far and away an improvement on the preceding, almost feudal system.

What will happen to the cooperative in the future? It’s certainly hard to say. There generally seemed to be a bit of an age gap between primary school children and young adults in their late twenties. From what I gathered, many of these teenagers and young adults and gone to nearby (certainly a relative term) cities either for education or to look for employment. There was high hope that these people would return, but I definitely detected some uncertainty. I talked extensively with one eighteen year-old girl who had finished primary school on the cooperative but was attending secondary school only on Saturdays. She was one of a few girls working quite hard to do a week’s worth of work independently, and she harbored high hopes of a university education, but really didn’t know what she would do afterwards. In terms of economic prospects, the group has the advantage of growing purely organic coffee. Don Enrique proudly took me through the drying yards to explain how all the coffee was harvested, dried, and sorted without chemicals. The process is organic almost by default—by being unable to afford pesticides or chemical fertilizers, they painstakingly compost and fertilize naturally and use shade-grown methods to raise their coffee. The niche market for organic coffee is substantial, and the group has negotiated some sort of contract with a European buyer who has promised to purchase the cooperative’s entire harvest. In the meantime, a number of local and international NGOs are assisting the group in training, capacity building, and local marketing; products from the cooperative are currently on sale in Xela in a Fair Trade NGO outlet. At this point the group does seem to depend somewhat heavily on the outside assistance they are receiving—both training and capital. The NGO worker I spoke to from the capital didn’t think the group could make it entirely on their own at this point. However, the investments being made were almost exclusively one-time needs as opposed to recurring expenses, and if foreign market links can be firmly established, the group will have an assured annual income.

Perhaps most importantly, in my conversations I noted universal pride in what the group was doing. Inter-group conflict notwithstanding, morale seemed high; members of all ages I spoke to were confident that each year would bring an increase in profits, as they had seen between years one and two. Don Enrique sagely pointed out that it is much work to put together a cooperative, but it takes very little work to destroy one. However, with the strong bonds of shared economic status, a common historical experience in the finca occupation and a shared vision of cooperative labor, the group is strongly unified. Combining these strong social ties with outside financial and technical assistance and a seemingly unlimited and sustainable market for their crop, all signs seem to point to much potential future success.