Sunday, June 10: Piloting Protocols and Procedures

For the pilot survey site, we had selected Tikonko Village, a relatively major rural settlement located about 30 minutes from Bo. Small sedans served as public transport, filling to way over capacity in one of the town’s taxi parks before lurching down the dirt roads to the village center. I surveyed the waiting line of vehicles and quickly noted that not a single car would pass even the most perfunctory of road inspections in the US; windshields were cracked and splintered, windows were missing, and car doors seemed to be hanging by threads. Nevertheless, these cars defiantly continued to take the rough beating the pot-hole stricken roads provided; we indeed arrived at our target area in one piece.

To begin any sort of project or work in the country, one needs the approval of the Paramount Chief, the local leaders responsible for an area somewhat between a US county and state, with nearly absolute local authority for his lifetime term. However, it would be a great breach of protocol to simply approach the chief directly, even though Ali, my second assistant, knew him personally. Thus, we had to engage a local guide who would perform the introduction. One of the youth leaders in town assisted us, and we were granted an audience with the chief and his deputies. The chief spent a good deal of time examining every page of my survey, mumbling that they had values and he didn’t want to see any survey undermine them—apparently past research projects had studied female circumcision and HIV and he wasn’t interested in either. He approved my work, but after the approval when we presented a token of appreciation (about $3), the welcome became much warmer.

I quickly learned how important following the protocol was. The next step of my research, gathering a focus group with the town chief, youth leader, and other important local figures was far easier with the blessings of the paramount chief on our side. Bringing together such a cross-section of the local leadership was a really good way to get an overall picture of the area before we began to focus on individual households. It helped significantly to start with a clear understanding of infrastructure, local governance, active NGOs, community farms and development projects, and even education and health care facilities.

The first survey we conducted was excruciating. It took more than two hours just to get through the social connections—it turned out the household we had selected hadn’t even farmed last year. Obviously much would have to change. Of course this was the exact reason for the pilot—many of the questions took laborious explanations and writing but produced answers completely unhelpful for what I was really curious about. The goal for the week was to create a trimmed down version that painted as complete a picture of a household’s social network and levels of trust and collectivity, as well as capturing their economic performance and assets.

This was a rather daunting task, but my research team was enthusiastic, trying questions and versions all day and then coming back to the hotel to meet late into the night to discuss revisions. I guess this would be a good time to introduce the team I am working with. I’ve already mentioned my lead companion, Sparrow. The man is a fascinating companion—in addition to the research, I am constantly learning first-hand history from him. He’s not only a virtual encyclopedia, but he also personally knows most of the political and military leaders from the war days and today. He is particularly interested in entering politics himself in the future, and seems to really enjoy this opportunity to talk to people, diagnose the problems with the government today, and think of all sorts of solutions. His younger brother Ali is also very bright and lots of fun. Ali is full of questions about everything American. I was quite amused by his description of the annual US diversity immigration visa lottery that as a game that he plays annually. Though he has no real desire to live in the States permanently, he would love nothing more than a visit. Both Sparrow and Ali have never ending schemes to make money, and I am often promised a cut! I have to say, I am pretty tempted much of the time, and I could definitely live here! The last to join us was Abu, the quietest of the three, but certainly brilliant. Having studied applied ecology until the war interrupted his university tenure (so many in the country had to stop their studies at all ages—and things are very slowly returning to normal, with twenty year-olds still in the equivalent of 9^th and 10^th grade even today), he is extremely familiar with agriculture, the land, and farming practices throughout the country. Working together with these three men, I am really confident that I can collect quality data and make the local connections I am looking for.

By the end of the first week, we had begun to see results. The survey was down to a bit over an hour, we were seeing interesting variations, and on the side hearing fascinating stories of how life has changed over the years. As a team everyone was becoming really involved. All four of us were really interested in the results—it was great to see everyone so invested in the investigation. Further, we were learning together the best ways to implement the professional research techniques of random respondent selections, confidentiality protections, consent scripts, and data recording. As a white researcher, there were lots of misconceptions floating among the villagers we worked with—everybody’s first question was how would the benefit? Certainly a perfectly reasonable question, but it was important for us to make clear that we weren’t bringing any development projects, both to avoid false expectations and ensure we got honest responses. Still, since we paid small tokens to our respondents, there was some real jealousy from those who weren’t selected for interviews and we often saw multiple wives or friends invited to interviews in an attempt to raise the payout.

A couple of early observations: I’m seeing a great deal of trust, especially in one of the smaller settlements we have been working in, but I am not really seeing this translate into greater marketing control or even higher market participation. There seems to be the cultural element of unwillingness to surrender one’s individual control despite the professed preference for collective action. This was something I ran up against repeatedly in Uganda and will certainly have to think about all summer. Is the cultural desire for control changeable? Does it need to be changed for the villagers to succeed in the market? Food for thought…

On the anthropological side, it has been interesting to begin to situate the war and its role in national history. I’m not seeing the physical violence as the real moment of transformation in the country, but more of a final manifestation of the structural violence the corrupt regime preceding the war created. Not surprisingly, the rebel fighting was initially due in large part to the isolation and disempowerment most people in the country felt as the government bankrupted the country. However, as one of my history books notes, though the country was ripe for revolution, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), did not know how to lead it, instead reaping terrible physical devastation that made permanent much of the structural isolation by destroying the country’s infrastructure completely.

A humorous anecdote really shows how completely the infrastructure is lacking now. On one of our trips back from the village the local police post stopped our car to tell us that the motorbike ahead of us had committed some sort of violation, they were very upset, and they wanted the driver to come back. Without bicycles, let alone vehicles, there was no chance to give chase, and without telephones or radios of any kind there was no chance of informing the city police, so this was the only way to attempt to enforce the law. Our old drive, Pa Joe, dutifully sped off to try to catch the guy, who easily outdistanced our battered car, but our driver managed to wreck his engine on the chase and ended up out of commission for the next several days.

It is the beginning of the rainy season now, and every day I am seeing the change in weather—but it is not entirely unwelcome. When it is not raining here it is unceasingly hot as hell, usually with little breeze fore relief. Worse, on days between the rains the humidity hangs like a hot, wet towel, smothering everything. The storms bring cloud cover and a bit of welcome cool air. However, these are real, long-lasting, heavy rains that pound for hours, and I’m told the rains will soon intensify—hours of rain for days on end. While the relief from the burning heat is quite welcome, this will certainly make travel more difficult, turning all dirt roads to often impassable slop.

So, it has certainly been an eventful ten days here. With the pilot done, I feel like we have a survey everyone is happy with. Saturday was spent collectively planning our next weeks of work in the rural southern village where we’re headed, followed by buying supplies, running errands, making copies, and generally preparing to leave all forms of communication for the next two weeks. We concluded with a night and rather scandalous fun at one of the clubs in town—perhaps more on dating, the hook-up culture, adultery, prostitution, and other such topics at a later date.

There were no vehicles to the village on Sunday, so our last day in town was a relaxing opportunity to catch up on some background reading and finish all preparations. I’ll conclude just by sharing how much I love researching so far. The overall fascination of working all the time to dig and find the answer to puzzling social and economic questions is really gripping. It is exciting, my ideas are constantly changing, and my team loves to debate what we see. It is a bit daunting to be setting off for two weeks with the work really counting now, but we’re ready.

June 2, 2007: The Arrival Story

Anthropologists often begin ethnographies with the story of their arrival—how did they get to a place and in what way were they inserted into the culture. Arriving in Sierra Leone would make quite the gripping prologue to any publication. Kenya Airways has a practice of announcing when the flight is exactly twelve minutes from landing, so as we neared touchdown time I peered anxiously out the window for signs of Freetown. Instead, spread before me for miles were only swampland and jungle until just a moment before landing, when a tiny concrete terminal appeared. The cement block, a bit smaller than the La Crosse Municipal Airport, was in fact the country’s international airport. The Lungi International Airport is set across the wide Sierra Leone River from Freetown—it seemed quite chaotic, and after arriving from Entebbe in Uganda, that is definitely saying something. There were only a couple of non-West Africans on my flight, so the “Other Nationalities” customs line was a breeze, and my backpack managed to make it along with me (though my shampoo exploded all over the front pocket…grr). I took my place in front of a line of police in all sorts of mismatched uniforms to have my bags officially cleared, exchanged a hundred dollar bill for a very thick wad of dirty currency, and then headed into the hot and sticky afternoon air. Sparrow was indeed waiting for me, having just arrived a few hours ago from Liberia, and together we set off towards the city.

Outside of the airport compound we negotiated with a battered old taxi to take us as far as the ferry port. I was immediately struck by the poverty; there was little order to the dilapidated shacks and shells of houses that crowded the roadside, and though the roads were nicely paved on this short stretch, everything beyond the strip of pavement was a cloud of thick dust. The plan was to take the large car ferry, but when we arrived just after six, we learned the boat wouldn’t leave until 8, and getting into the dock, located in Freetown’s infamous East side crime bed, after dark and loaded with luggage was apparently very, very bad. Thus, our only option was the local motorboats the locals took. We jammed more than ten people inside the small vessel, brightly painted in a variety of flaking paints and fitted with a powerful little motor. The boats couldn’t come all the way to shore, so local men waited to hoist us, swooping me off my feet and depositing me in the boat. And then we were off, roaring out to open sea in our little boat. We hit the rough chop and my stomach began bouncing up and down; Sparrow turned to me and remarked that it had been much calmer when he had left. A few minutes later he remarked, “You would never do this in the US, no?” “No, we wouldn’t send a boat like this into the open water,” I replied. “Especially not without any communications or life jackets, right?” “Right,” I replied again. The same thoughts had crossed my mind and it wasn’t particularly reassuring to hear them repeated. But Sparrow wasn’t finished: “If we sink here, there is no one to know. No one to help us. Maybe if your friend sees you when he is passing by, but otherwise we are finished.” Gee thanks—just the comforting I needed. But the passage was stunning, as we chopped closer to the capital city built around the coastal mountains.

The view upon arrival was less than stunning. The dock was just a set of trash-filled stairs opening up into one of Freetown’s poorer neighborhoods, and Sparrow aptly noted that the “city” looked a lot more like a village. I surveyed the scene as we waited for another taxi; it really was just like many of the trash-filled roadside towns I had been through, with nothing in this portion of the city to suggest it was a nation’s capital.

I’d have to wait until later to see the remainder of the city because Sparrow had decided we’d push onwards to Freetown that night. I certainly appreciate efficiency, and this was a good way to guarantee we’d not lose days beginning, but after my 3:30 am wake-up, the prospect of a 5-7 hour ride was turning this into a very long day! We found a number of vehicles heading south and secured bench space in the back of a Land Rover. The poorly paid government officials logically supplemented their salaries by jamming official vehicles full of paying passengers—certainly convenient, if uncomfortable, for us.

Before leaving we had a chance to grab some snacks. The proprietor of the store we visited pulled out a plate from her shop window of cold, battered, deep-fried hard-boiled eggs and fried whole fishes; so much for beginning gently on my still-recovering stomach. Regardless of how long the food had actually been sitting out, it turned out to be rather tasty, and after a rather long unexplained delay, I folded myself into the back of the trunk for the long ride to Bo, Sierra Leone’s second-biggest city located in the south of the country.

We left at dusk, so soon only headlights lit the countryside otherwise almost completely bereft of electricity. At first I was pleasantly surprised by the excellent condition of the roads, but Sparrow warned me that they would soon change. He was certainly right. Shortly the pavement dissolved into a rutted, corrugated dirt road, jostling our tangled mass of arms and legs all over the place as we passed through the dark savanna lands. We finally arrived in Bo after 1:00 am, but a few motorbikes were waiting on the highway to whisk us to our guesthouse, the Sahara Hotel in town. The place was completely dark, so by candlelight we found our rooms—two single rooms thanks to a bit of institutionalized homophobia that generally prohibits two men to share a room for any reason, regardless of the number of beds. The place seemed decent, if a bit plain, but was it ever hot! I’m glad I was exhausted that night because I was promptly dripping perspiration, which soon gave way to sweat pouring uncontrollably, with incessant buzzing of mosquitoes providing a constant background.

The place wasn’t exactly conducive to sleeping in, but I felt nicely refreshed in the morning to begin our real preparations. Sparrow and I met for a couple of hours to go over the research goals, preliminary questionnaires, and tentative plans. Then, he assured me that he’d be able to arrange the perfect research team and took off to assemble the group.

I had a chance to do a bit of exploring the town. For a city of nearly a quarter of a million people—the hub of all southern regional commerce—exploration didn’t take long. Though more than 2/3 of the country’s workforce are farmers, it is diamonds that offer the nation’s real export income—potentially a blessing but historically mostly a curse for Sierra Leone. Diamond mines are centered in the Eastern and Southern regions of the country, and much of the national diamond trade—and the economy in general—is controlled by the Lebanese, and this was instantly apparent. The dusty town’s streets were crowded with garish signs proclaiming their Lebanese storekeepers prepared to buy all diamonds. Many of these buying centers doubled as electronic stores, where naïve local miners were told they would receive free televisions or stereos in return for selling to a given merchant. Seeing the locus for so much wealth in such humble and unassuming offices certainly seemed surreal. As one book I read noted, diamonds have absolutely no local cultural meaning in the country and the raw stones aren’t even much to look at. Yet their extraction has shaped the trajectory of the country’s history perhaps more than any other single factor. Despite post-war reforms, Sierra Leone still estimates a huge portion of potential tax revenues are lost each year through illicit diamonds—certainly brought home to me as I exchanged money with the black market money traders offering better-than-official rates for hard US currency useful in all sorts of negotiations.

On my walk I was once again I was struck by the poverty and lack of infrastructure. Although the town apparently had a very reliable source of constant hydroelectric power as part of a southern electrification project for Bo and Kenema, the two major cities, the power plant had been down for more than the past two months for upgrading, and as a result the major city had absolutely no power outside of private generators. Finding an Internet connection proved to be quite elusive; the first several attempts offered a host of excuses but no connections. I finally found the one functioning line in the entire city—where the connection was surprisingly fast, perhaps due to the fact that no one else in the region was attempting to go on-line!

I should note that our hotel offers a few hours of generator power each evening, so I do get a fan to stir the hot air in my cubicle—really a dramatic improvement. It was comforting to know that I had such a capable research assistant—certainly far more experienced in research field work than myself. His younger brother would be joining us as an additional assistant, with another agricultural expert arriving later in the week to round out the team. Our plan was to start the pilot survey process the very next morning, and being in the field on only my second full day in the country was tremendously encouraging! Altogether an exciting arrival that seemed to promise a fulfilling research experience.

June 2: Safe in Bo

Hey to all!

This is just a quick "I made it note." After days of travel, I finally arrived in Sierra Leone last night, and after adventures in a dugout boat on the open ocean and a cramped ride in the back of a government vehicle doubling as a corrupt bus of sorts, I'm in Bo, the second major city in the country. I do have a phone here--dial the country code (I think it is 235) and then 33569431 to talk! However, there is no electricity outside of the occasional generator (like at this little joint where I'm typing) so the phone might not be on or charged too often. Anyways, things have started really well, and the country is beautiful and really exciting, so I'm looking forward to quite the adventure.

Hope to keep you posted (though unlikely for awhile given lack of power and internet--we got lucky to find the only line in this town working today!).

Hope all are well wherever you may be!

David

Friday, June 1: Bleary-Eyed Layovers

Day Four of transit. Four flights completed. I’m currently sitting in the Nairobi airport awaiting my next Kenya Airways flight to Accra, and then, at long last, Freetown. The last time I was in this airport I had arrived here with Kim and Katie via a painful journey by matatu—the Swahili word for “taxi”—more than twelve hours in cramped minivans across East Africa’s potholed and fabulously bumpy roads. The airport seemed like a luxurious oasis—certainly a pleasant place for a lengthy layover. Well, I’ve changed my mind. I suppose I need a bit of reacquainting with the continent, as the sweaty, cramped, dank terminal has lost all sense of invitation. Sadly, the Giarrdia I apparently caught in Guatemala (which I have no idea how to spell) has forced me to take an antibiotic that precludes any consumption of alcoholic beverages on these back-to-back eight hour flights.

That said, the trip really has been perfectly smooth thus far. I arrived in Uganda on Wednesday evening after surprising my friend Mary, a fellow SIT alum, in Amsterdam. In typical Ugandan style, power died twice in the process of getting our luggage on the conveyor belt, but my bag finally appeared and another SIT alum was waiting with her pop-star boyfriend to give us a lift to town. As I settled into my guesthouse I heard the ubiquitous CelTel jingle, “Af.Ri.Ca: So Good to Be Home.” Yes, indeed!

Arriving in Kampala really did feel like returning home—a reminder of my love for the city and country. I spent several hours roaming the familiar streets in search of gum boots and a mosquito net for Sierra Leone’s rainy season, and I just sort of grinned the whole time as I wondered favorite avenues and passed through familiar markets and shops. Lunch—greasy deep-fried meat patties called chaps—was in one of my favorite take-aways, and I passed bars and restaurants reminding me of all kinds of fun memories.

The energy in Uganda was always palpable in its laid-back African sort of way, and many of the construction projects underway last year had finally been finished. The British Commonwealth Conference bringing the Queen of England to the country in November had inspired road repairs and beautification projects, and I actually did see a difference. That said, some ripped apart roads and buildings looked identical and one planned hotel was still just that—a plan, filled with complications and featured in today’s paper.

I hung out in the SIT resource center and reunited with my favorite program staff and then had dinner with a good expat friend still working away in the city. Then off to a grimy airport guesthouse for a few hours of sleep before the 3:30 am cab to the airport. If all goes well, in just a few hours I’ll be arriving in Freetown, with a former rebel commander, Sparrow, waiting to meet me. A former Duke PhD student now teaching at the University of Washington made the connection, and Sparrow sounds like a great guy with a huge network of connections. It has been rather exciting to email, call, and wire money to Sparrow in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and if all goes well, the plan is to proceed straight-away tomorrow morning into the heart of the country to find research staff and plan the summer of study. A bit of nervousness has finally set in, though I am ridiculously excited to finally be starting. Only a few hours left to cram information about the country, so for now, back to work!

May 27: The End of Part 1

After four days in La Florida’s mosquito breeding ground, I felt more than ready to return to Xela. I have to admit, for one of the first times while traveling, I was a bit lonely, researching completely independently, and the only English speaker around. While I got lots of reading in, there wasn’t exactly much excitement, and the 8:00 bedtimes were getting a bit old. This is perhaps problematic, as I am studying rural development, and I plan to spend the next several months in isolated villages, but I feel like (or at least really hope) within a week or so, things get easier and new friends help to pass the time.

Anyways, returning to my Spanish school classmates and the vibrancy of Xela was really welcome and fun. The Sunday night I returned was the semi-final of Guatemala’s soccer championships, so the whole town was abuzz. When Xela managed to defeat the Guatemala City team, the entire city erupted. I headed down to the central square to witness the parades of trucks loaded with screaming (and soon quite intoxicated) fans, screaming, honking, waving banners, and setting off incessant firecracker explosions. The park was alive with revelers until the wee hours of the morning; I have never ever witnessed such an explosion of a victory celebration—this somehow even managed to outdo the Duke victory bonfire of a sound Carolina defeat, and it was only the semi-finals! I watched the celebration from a bar rumored to be Che Gueverra’s favorite hangout during his time in Xela. The revolutionary hero actually spent a great deal of time in Guatemala during the Arevalo and Arbenz years of reform; revolutionaries from across Latin America congregated here to witness and learn. The CIA’s overthrow of Arbenz was a catalyst leading Che and others to Cuba and sparking rebellion or caution across the region.

With three cooperative visits under my belt, I decided that instead of cramming in another visit, I would return to the capital area to visit a couple of notable social science archives and the famed colonial capital city Antigua. After a night plagued by the literally hundreds of mosquito bites all over my body, a mishap-laden journey that killed a full day returning to the center of the country and included a drunk urchin urinating on my backpack, and a Rough Guide miss on a budget hotel recommendation that ended up being quite the fleapit, I finally found myself in Antigua.

The city really was quite beautiful; as a UNESCO World Heritage Sight, the streets were meticulously restored. A graceful central park with sculpted fountains and manicured grass surrounded by the former national palace, giant Catholic cathedral, and elegant shopping arcades were jaw-dropping; my tour book noted that the site seemed far-removed from Latin America, but I really don’t know anywhere similar in the world. Wireless cafes, chic boutique hotels, and the glut of white tourists everywhere really did create an enclave life incomparable with the struggles of the rural campesinos I had been staying with.

I was able to visit a highly recommended archive, and found some good leads for future reading before finding a late afternoon bus back to the capital, where I returned to the Hotel Spring for a final two nights. Following the path of Che, I located the rather bohemian pension where he had stayed for several months—and enjoyed a beer under the small plaque proclaiming Che’s residence.

On my last day in the city I visited Asociacion Para El Avance de Las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala (AVANCSO), one of the primary social science research archives in the country, and a place where Professor Nelson, who helped me prepare for my trip, did research when she was writing her first book. The staff was extremely helpful when I explained my project, pulling several of their own studies and a collection of literature on Fair Trade and cooperatives in Guatemala from the shelves for my perusal. I have to say—the greatest complement I received in the country was from an archivist who wanted to know how I had gotten so fluent in Spanish! If only my Duke Spanish lecturers could see me know!

I filled several additional pages with notes from a variety of sources. One conference report from IFPRI dated 1989, in a series of papers regarding commercialization of agriculture, struck me as particularly significant in its discussion of experimental attempts to form small farmer cooperatives. The report concluded that the experimental cooperative had definite benefits for the community that definitely justified initial external investments, and in time the group had become a “highly efficient business enterprise” marketing its produce completely independently. Cooperative strategies are often seen as a new fad, but here was evidence that the strategy had been proved successful years ago with an initial solid infusion of capital and support. In a more recent document I learned that cooperative production accounts for 10.87% of 1997/1998 coffee production, with 82.4% coming from developed fincas. With the Peace Accords signed in 1996 and the amount of time required for organization and initiating production, it is likely that this number represents cooperative production that existed before and during the war. It would be fascinating to learn more of the stories of how these groups were able to maintain themselves during the war, as such cooperatives were usually targeted as Communist conspiracies. The production from cooperatives is certainly higher now as a number of cooperatives have emerged since the war and resettlement, including all of the groups I visited.

I also read a report from the Congreso Nacional Campesino, or National Campesino (Peasant) Conference. I believe this was the organization SCIDECO, the La Florida parent cooperative society, was a part of. Having a national organization working for unified farmer advancement, land and credit access, national and international market openings, and supportive legislature, definitely was a sign of organization at the grassroots level (though I could not necessarily tell from the reports what tangible benefits the group had received for its members).

One assessment of campesino farming in San Marcos District concluded by noting that in whatever strategy farmers had chosen to pursue, the farmers were looking for creative ways to maintain and improve their situation—and generally doing this on their own with little assistance from development organizations. Further, the farmers generally enjoyed community support from each other, which was more or less available to all. This report was not particular to cooperative organizations; these practices were true among peasant farmers in general. As I’ve mentioned earlier, this sort of general widespread support was not something I ever encountered or read about among programs in Africa, and marks a clear culture of cooperation and high levels of cognitive or relational social capital among peasant farmers. I look forward to further writing and analysis of these groups to learn more about their experiences.

My day at AVANCSO concluded my research time in Guatemala. I was eager to get home, with a very long list of necessary preparations for the Sierra Leone project. I left a day early, arriving in Minneapolis on Thursday afternoon to spend the evening with Katelyn and Ben, who was visiting for the week. We had a great time, with Ben actually making chorizo for us—a popular sausage dish Katelyn and Ben discovered in Southern Mexico that was also very Guatemalan. And on Friday morning I took a shuttle home for a very pleasant, albeit way too short and busy, Memorial Day weekend with my parents, successfully concluding Part One of my summer research adventures.

May 25: The Why Behind the Movement

As I wrote when I began, a primary goal in Guatemala is to understand the Fair Trade model here—particularly how groups have formed and have been able to work together successfully. I have certainly seen groups performing at a level hardly imaginable for most of the groups I interacted with across Uganda and functioning more cohesively than most programs I have read about in Africa. So, why?

One school of social capital research argues that social capital is a fixed asset—that a particular group is endowed with a certain level of collaborative ability, and this should be regarded as a static allocation. From my initial research proposal I have attacked this notion as seriously incomplete and even destructive in development planning—imagine development agencies refusing to work in any village that scored poorly on some social capital index. If I had to select the most important lesson from my Guatemalan research, it would be the importance of contextualizing social relationships with local, regional, national, and even global histories and political relationships.

In my research and interviews, I noted influences in the current cooperatives and collectives from colonial structures and the global cold war, national land reforms and the guerrilla conflict, and local shared experiences of collective exploitation and forced migrations. Success is always relative, but I was incredibly impressed with the seemingly assumed notion among the groups I visited that they would work together, and further amazed by how much of the collective formation was initiated by the groups themselves. It was interesting to discuss this cooperation with the foreign staff of Entre Mundos, the NGO umbrella organization in the Xela area. One American who had worked and traveled in several Latin American countries was struck by what he called a lack of cooperation and collectivity in Guatemala. He teaches at a private school in the city and noted how his students were intensely individualistic and hated the idea of sharing. I asked about his experience with community inclusiveness in group formation in the area; from what I had read it seemed that many of the groups were an entire community participating together in a development plan or project. However, he replied that while this was sometimes the case, in the cooperatives and self-help groups he had observed, structures seemed more open and inclusive on paper than in reality. While projects were often organized at the community level, there were many times only a few active leaders coordinating the project. He noted that in other Latin American countries the collective spirit seemed far more tangible.

That said, the idea that a whole community would plan development projects locally and organically was new to me and almost completely unheard of in Uganda. The NGO’s director, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso agreed with me. The locally initiated projects she saw here were way beyond anything she had worked with in West Africa, with a seemingly much more sustainable orientation. As I noted earlier, the colonial history of working on fincas in forced communities may have much to do with the group orientation towards development. The finca workgroups shared not only common exploitation, but soccer teams and sometimes particular dress. The structure of land reforms required peasants desiring change to organize themselves and initiate their petitions, thus forming collectives and strong leadership well before groups had the opportunity to work completely independently.

While the degree of self-organization appeared quite high, it is important to recognize the very significant influence of the Catholic Church in Guatemala. Initially missionaries were forces of conservatism and supported foreign finca owners unconditionally. However, as many priests began to observe the exploitation, the Liberation Theology movement took root. Priests were responsible for the formation of a large number of cooperatives throughout the country. In Paradise on Ashes, Manz details the leading contributions of a Catholic priest in turning an entire village into a powerful social and economic cooperative force. SCIDECO also was initially organized with the assistance of the Church. The effort wasn’t confined to farming alone; I visited a weaving cooperative in Zunil, just a few kilometers from Xela, where local women had been organized by a German Catholic priest, who had even brought in a German woman to help teach the women what would sell in Europe. (This group was an interesting story in itself; the women had been very successful prior to the war when their products were exported to Europe, but when the priest had to return during the fighting, their market suddenly vanished. The women tried a number of alternatives, but lost money transporting their textiles for selling in Guatemala City and were cheated by an American who offered to sell the products in the US. Now they sell just at their store, but the market in a small town in semi-rural Guatemala cannot possibly compare to past sales. This story illustrates the importance of markets; no matter how strong social ties are, if there is nowhere to sell what you produce, you can’t succeed!)

Of course, groups and cooperatives can take multiple forms. La Florida’s model of all working collectively is one of the most difficult structures to coordinate and sustain, requiring complete trust and cooperation. I visited one cooperative, Santa Anita, that had started with the same structure. Santa Anita is unique in the sense that it is one of three cooperatives in the country composed of former guerrilla fighters. Members of the group met in a reintegration camp and decided for whatever reason that instead of returning to their home communities they would come together and try to start a cooperative—an idea supported and funded by the government as part of the Peace Accords, with assistance from a number of foreign donors. Initially, as the group received abundant external assistance, the cooperative functioned harmoniously. The affects of outside assistance are immediately apparent—a well-restored patron house for volunteers and visitors, full electrical processing equipment, and a government primary school and recreation area. Yet, when the outside group funding began to diminish, the success and cohesiveness of the group seemed to waver as well. Some members decided that allocations of labor were unfair, with field laborers working much harder than managers. They successfully lobbied for the division of the cooperative land into individual family plots. According to an American volunteer who had lived with the group for several months, the fissure had produced a great degree of tension, still simmering three years later. It was hard to know if and how production had actually been affected because Hurricane Stan had destroyed most of the plantation’s crops. However, the group did still trust each other sufficiently to sell cooperatively, hiring a member of the organization to lead the processing. Each family brings their coffee to the center, receives a receipt for their production, and then later is paid accordingly. Because the cooperative is working with a number of US Fair Trade roasters and distributors, they receive a substantial portion of their profits in advance, ensuring all have revenue to sustain themselves throughout the year. Further, many families use banana trees as the shade for their shade-grown coffee, further benefiting from the fruit sales on the local market. Each household can also choose to grow other supplementary crops on their land, and it sounded like at least some families saved out a small portion of their coffee production to sell to the coyotes, traders who come right to the farm gate, receiving far reduced prices but instant cash.

Perhaps the cooperative has lost some of its idyllic commune feeling, but it seems to have found a sustainable structure. The volunteer told us how some additional income-generating projects had fallen by the wayside as foreign assistance was reduced. However, he assured me that he was quite confidant that the farmers had a permanent market from their US buyers, with links that could not be easily broken. The nature of the Fair Trade and organic niche markets fostered close cooperation between buyer and seller, and several American representatives had visited the cooperative and had meaningful friendships with the growers. It is hard to know if and how this model could be scaled up. Though the partnerships are economically efficient by reducing middle men and fostering direct ties, the linkages are also difficult to arrange. Fair Trade depends on buyers willing to pay above the market price to purchase coffee where they know the workers were not exploited. It sounds great—but how many consumers are so interested?

While one could debate endlessly about the viability of Fair Trade, what is perhaps more interesting are the bonds and ties of the cooperatives at the local level. The group mentality and trust in collective financial arrangements is a prime example of the cognitive social capital I am studying—the cultural values in a given area that affect production. I am not sure the actual networks among farmers within a village or between villages are any different in Guatemala than elsewhere; I didn’t see evidence of more relationships between farmers (though the generally far better road and transportation infrastructure would facilitate such linkages). What I did see was a culture of trust and cooperation that ensured that existing links could be leveraged successfully.

Without specific economic data from farmer groups, I cannot definitively cite the impact of the relationships, but from what I saw, heard, and read, especially among Fair Trade producers, these groups have managed to find markets and buyers that trust the reliability of their production and have generally moved beyond subsistence farming to at least moderately successful commercialization. With my work with the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) in Uganda, one of the most difficult struggles all over the country was explaining the concept of farming as a business and trying to convey the idea that subsistence farming with small amounts of a wide variety of crops could never be profitable. In the cooperatives I visited and read about here, everyone seemed to know this. I don’t want to convey the impression that all rural peasants in the country are growing commercially; certainly the majority of campesinos are still growing primarily for their own consumption. However, in discussing subsistence versus commercial farming with La Florida residents, I never detected a reticence to buy food, and there certainly wasn’t a cultural taboo against purchasing food as I observed in parts of Uganda (where the need to buy food spoke to one’s insufficiency as a farmer). In fact, Doňa Maria noted that her new ability to purchase food with her work on the coffee cooperative was a sign of real success.

Finally, I should note that my visits were to cooperatives who had managed to obtain large amounts of land for their collective farming projects. While there are a slowly growing number of these arrangements throughout the country, it is still only a tiny minority of campesinos who have access to such large amounts of land. Observing these groups provided significant insight into the social capital and organization of such groups, but can certainly not be used for any sort of generalization about cooperative models in the country. That said, the Catholic Church and other organizations have been involved with the organization of campesinos on much smaller scales as well. I met with one representative of Red Kuchubal, a relatively new NGO working to organize domestic and international markets for the organic produce of twenty women’s campesino organizations with ten to twenty members each (I later found out that La Florida was one of these associations, but my impression was that the other groups were much more isolated, smaller operations). Interestingly, these groups had all already existed prior to the NGO assistance, seemingly entirely formed by the peasants themselves. However, without any training, the groups lacked the capacity to market their produce for fair prices or receive premiums for organic production. Red Kuchubal was working to offer the capacity building necessary to ensure that even the small associations could benefit from their social ties and collective work ability. If I were to conduct further research, I would plan to visit many of these smaller groups to understand the specific marketing challenges they faced with little capital investment and without the economies of scale the larger groups have achieved.

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.

May 22: A History of Oppression

I’m back from a week in the field with pages of notes and lots of ideas and theories and questions bouncing around, and I’m looking forward to sharing them here. However, from my initial research proposal I argued that understanding the context of an area’s history was important to see how social capital has and potentially could act as a force in that village. Perhaps the single most important lesson I’ve learned from this relatively short period of fieldwork in rural Guatemala is that to understand both social capital and market interactions, it is absolutely essential to be able to contextualize a group within the local, national, and global historical trajectories. Thus, before I recount my own experiences at the local level, I want to start with a bit of historical context. Guatemala has Central America’s highest concentration of indigenous residents and includes a long history of physical and economic colonialism and a war where the army was deemed to have committed “acts of genocide” by the official Guatemalan “Commission for Historical Clarification.”

Guatemala is a center of the advanced Mayan civilization, and the ruins scattered through the country and Mexico serve as testaments. Spanish conquest took place in the 1500s, and for the next several hundred years, the Europeans worked to create a highly stratified society. From this point the terms “indigena,” referring generally to “pure” Mayans, and “Ladino,” referring to a mix of European and indigenous, were commonly used. The terms were not purely biological—Ladino was often a political designation indicating a more advanced position or social standing. In fact, one president decreed a whole town of Mayans to be Ladinos in recognition of their development efforts. Of course, European colonialists and landowners were vastly superior in all social standings and could compel both indigenas and Ladinos to serve their needs. Proclamations of independence happened a few times—first as Guatemala joined Mexico for about a year and then for awhile as Central America worked for independence as a collective of states, but the country emerged as an independent republic in 1847.

With the exception of the charismatic and illiterate general Rafael Carerra who secured the country’s independence and fought on behalf of the Mayans but left the nation completely impoverished, all other early presidents were representing the interest of the European elite and cared little for indigenous welfare. Liberal and conservative have a bit of different meanings than our US definitions—liberals wanted an independent state and sought for social reform, but also strove for a highly liberalized economy. Under liberal rulers, Guatemala’s export economy was built, working in close cohorts with the United Fruit Company, the CIA, and European coffee plantation owners—and at the expense of the extremely repressed Mayan peoples. With a few notable exceptions including Carerra, liberal rule lasted from the early 1800s to 1944, stripped Mayans of all their lands, and created a feudal system mandating indigenous labor both on state projects and on coffee or banana plantations, usually owned by wealthy foreigners. In the feudal setup, indigenous laborers usually lived on the plantation (coffee plantations are known as fincas), getting free housing (if grossly substandard—often noted as worse than the animal pens) in exchange for their labor at ridiculously trivial wage rates. This did, however, develop defined communities of laborers who shared their miserable conditions. I think the structure of this colonialist labor structures, as repressive and absolutely terrible as it was, has actually laid the foundations for some of the cooperative successes today; as exploitative as the structure was, workers were largely “in it together.” Working cooperatively was assumed, and in some areas, common finca clothing or soccer teams helped to further unify each community.

Revolts and protests culminated in the 1944 Revolution and a succeeding election sweep by Juan Jose Arevalo, who proclaimed an era of “spiritual socialism.” The reform was dramatic—vast increases in social spending, the transformation of some foreign-owned farms into cooperatives, protections for tenant farmers, the ending of state labor projects. He was followed by Jácobo Arbenz, who was determined to create a modern, capitalist nation independent of foreign dependence. This, of course, did not particularly appeal to foreigners. The 1952 Law of Agrarian Reform was perhaps the downfall of the government—it stated that all lands that were idle or state-owned would be distributed among the landless. This was not intended as a haphazard land grab in any way—the process of determining idle lands was to be carefully managed. The communities that had formed on each finca often acted together, working to form unions. To gain land, the peasants had to actively petition, so the government fostered a great deal of collective action among the disempowered.

Obviously landowners were furious. For peasants, though, the process seemed too slow, and they didn’t really help their case by seeking to take-over lands they felt should be expropriated. The United Fruit Company, an entirely US-controlled company that had a near-monopoly on banana exports lost about half their property (all of it idle), but the US promptly declared the government Communist and a global threat. Arbenz’s government carries the unfortunate distinction of the first Latin American government overthrown by the US CIA. His replacements were hand-picked by the US and flown in on a US Air Force plane.

All land reforms were immediately reversed and the caste-labor structure was reinstated. The highly repressive Guatemalan state, now heavily aided by US military assistance, returned. Not everyone took the repression silently—shortly after the government overthrow, guerilla forces began to form, gradually and in several factions at first. It is difficult to determine when the actual fighting began; the government military was engaging in whatever repressive violence it deemed necessary, but this was initially quite scattered. For thirty-six years, though, from 1960-1996, the country was seized by incredibly bloody, repressive war. For a period in the 1970s and early 1980s, the widespread popular support and unified aims of revolutionary fighters throughout the country led to some optimism—many thought the guerillas could actually succeed in toppling the US-backed state and US-trained military. Ultimately, though, the military’s ruthlessness was unmatchable. More than 200,000 people were tortured and killed, massacred en masse, or “disappeared,” with the Commission for Historical Clarification finding that the military was responsible for 97% of the deaths. I’ve read a number of accounts of the war—the military was incredibly adept at creating a general state of fear and paralysis, completely terrorizing the population with the strategy that defeating the guerrillas required defeating their support base, which was the vast majority of the people. A question I’ve continued to ponder is who constituted this military that would have absolutely no regard for the people it was ostensibly to protect. As a whole, the group was generally seen as a tool for the elite landowners—accounts of the war cite landowners specifically requesting massacres when the locals were threatening. The officers themselves generally were or became rich landowners themselves, and their complete impunity allowed them to take control of enough land to profit enormously. I still do not totally understand how the rank-and-file soldiers, many of whom were conscripted, could have been so inhuman in their tortures, rapes, and murders, but the same questions are asked in every genocidal event.

The war obviously deeply impacted social networks: at times villages were tightly unified in their covert quests to support the guerillas, creating strong bonds of trust and support. However, the military’s primary goal was to undermine these networks, and in many areas they were successful, creating lasting fractures and turning neighbor against neighbor. It would be impossible to make any blanket statements about how networks emerged after the war. Large groups spent years together in hiding in the mountains or as refugees in Mexico, while at times villages were split between those who sought to remain and those who left. In Paradise in Ashes, Beatriz Manz (2004) traces the social ties in one village from the 1970s as impoverished highland residents came together to migrate to Guatemala’s north to colonize seemingly impenetrable jungle in their struggle for land, to today as the northern village works to recover from the war. Colonization forged indelible bonds, but the years since the war divided the village have been a real test; ultimately the village has proved resilient and able to work collectively with a highly successful cooperative, but such cohesion is certainly not the rule in Guatemala. That said, the two cooperative coffee fincas I visited definitely were characterized by workers with a common history and objective shaped by colonialism and the war.

By the early 1990s, the violence had mostly quieted, and in 1996, the government and Guatemala National Revolutionary Union brokered a peace accord that was notably a real two-sided effort. Both sides made tangible commitments to peace and democratic change. Has it happened? The jury is still out. Widespread violence has been generally curbed, though violent crime has skyrocketed and the police seem unable to stem (or are themselves involved in) gang violence, drug trafficking, and corruption.

The most serious problem really is still absolute rural poverty, which has gone statistically unchanged since the war’s conclusion. Land, or a lack of land, remains one of the greatest structural obstacles for most Guatemalans. The feudal labor system was oppressive and exploitative, but in many ways what has replaced the system is worse: finca owners have dismissed almost all of their residential laborers and rehired them as seasonal employees who do not receive any of the benefits of full-time workers and who now have to find their own housing, health care, and transportation, but still receive extremely low wages. While the divide between Ladino and indigenous has certainly blurred (statistics now reflect a much smaller indigenous population, primarily due to intermarriages), there is still a great deal of racism, which often manifests itself in a rural/urban divide. Government social services are grossly inadequate in rural areas—schools don’t have teachers and rural hospitals don’t exist. The current president, Oscar Berger, has developed a reputation for forcefully evicting peasants squatting on land, and repression has not completely disappeared—attempts to organize unions or demand rights are still shrouded in fear.

These are complex problems and there certainly has not been the political or economic will to really eliminate the structural barriers that deepen divides. My homestay father, among many others, talked about the seeming unsolvable nature of the divides, and in hearing any rural peasant talk of their difficulties, one can not help but be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the struggle. As the prominent NGO umbrella organization in Xela wrote, this is really a critical moment in the country’s history: with relative peace and stability present, increasing tourism, and promising signs of economic growth, there is a real opportunity to channel these gains for more widespread benefits and see a real difference. The next presidential elections are this November, and campaigning is in full swing. There are about twenty parties with candidates running (the number seems to fluctuate significantly), and every telephone poll, rock, bridge, and street light has been plastered with someone’s campaign logo. The rural penetration was amazing—more than an hour on a tiny cobbled road out of the nearest pueblo, or small town, I saw crews of campaign workers busily painting away.

There are really only a few realistic candidates, but Rigoberta Menchú deserves special mention as an interesting candidate. A Mayan woman known for her brave publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, detailing the story of her mother, father, and brothers’ deaths at the hands of the military during the war. Menchú has won the Nobel Peace Prize and currently serves as a human rights ambassador for the government. She is quite popular among women and the left, but for obvious reasons hated by the military and the wealthy elite. However, as a presidential candidate, she seems to mostly offer symbolism. My feminist Spanish teacher told me how she loved Menchú but thought it would be terrible for women if a largely uneducated woman with no knowledge of politics was elected and proved unable to tackle the complex political and economic controversies in the country. At this point, Menchú doesn’t have the widespread support to be elected—a more moderate rather bland-seeming man named Colom of the UNE party holds a strong lead over all other contestants—but the race will be interesting to watch and crucial to determine Guatemala’s future trajectory as it enters its second post-war decade.

This history came from a variety of sources: In addition to conversations with a number of knowledgeable Guatemalans and expats, I have drawn from several of the great books I’ve read: Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain, Victoria Sanford’s Buried Secrets, Greg Grandin’s The Blood of Guatemala, and Beatriz Manz’s Paradise in Ashes, as well as my Rough Guide and it’s concise historical summary.

Tuesday May 15: Learning

My past week in Xela has been a flurry of Spanish cramming, background research, reading, and chilling in this amazing mountain city. I read a fabulous satire of Guatemalan traveler blogs describing the carbon-copy nature of so many—detailing intense volcano climbs, wonderful homestay families, and enlightening language experiences with great new friends—all along peppering entries with Spanish vocabulary. Though this could perhaps indeed describe my week of classes, I shall resist the temptation to join the blogging hordes and try to offer a more colorful portrayal of my pleasant week.

First a bit of background to where I am: I had envisioned Xela as a small town, but in reality the city is one of Guatmeala’s most important cities—the hub of business, government, and transportation in the Western Highlands. In 1820 the region even tried to secede from Guatemala; the movement was short-lived and the city never really recovered from a massive 1902 earthquake and a huge eruption of a new volcano that successfully destroyed many of the surrounding coffee plantations. Nonetheless, the city still is the center of the Western region of the country, with a vibrant European-like town square surrounded by majestic buildings, shopping arcades, and now, the ever-ubiquitous McDonald's. Though the winding cobblestone streets of Zone 1 do lend a feeling of bygone centuries, the rest of the city is a frenetic mass of business and industry, with two large breweries, a major university, and a spanking-new shopping mall.

“Intense” is really the only appropriate adjective to describe the Spanish learning experience. The classes are five hours a day of one-on-one tutoring through conversation, reading, writing, and lots of grammar. I’ve really been able to put together a lot of murky rules and conjugations into something somewhat cohesive, and for the first time, Spanish classes are really fun, filled with passionate conversations, debates, and even the occasional teasing (my teacher continues to tease that if I’m going to insult her, I should at least use proper grammar—she’s got me there!)

My teacher is a fabulously spunky young woman full of political opinions. We’ve had a chance to talk about the US and Guatemala’s upcoming elections, wars, history, and the divides and struggles in both countries. One interesting debate has involved which country has more internal racism. Guatemala has Central America’s highest concentration of indigenous Mayan peoples, and during colonialism the social structure was divided into hierarchies of indigenous, mixed-blood (“Mestizo,” or more commonly “Ladino”), and foreign colonist categories. Especially in rural areas, economic inequities and vastly different access to social services continue to divide society. My teacher insists that Guatemala is more progressive in fighting racism than the United States, but much of her opinions are based on viewings of Michael Moore documentaries, so though I readily agreed with much of her analysis of US shortcomings, I tried to point out that there were other, perhaps slightly more balanced social analyses of our government and its problems.

We spent a lot of time talking about the problem of “machismo” in Latin American countries and how the entrenched culture has undermined much of the struggles for female equality. She bristled at being labeled a feminist though, and even harbored some disdain—I loved her reply and I know some friends at school would appreciate this: Being a feminist is just the opposite of being machismo and it would be just as bad. Her goal was to deconstruct stereotypes, but she certainly didn’t want women getting any special treatment. However, as she herself admitted, she is far more assertive than even many women her age, who continue to insist that women should not try to push beyond traditional gender roles.

I stayed with a very “typical” middle-class family; the father worked in a small construction tools and materials store the mother was a homemaker who spent most of her days cooking, washing clothes by hand, and keeping the house spotless. Grandmother, an adorable old woman with a colorful ball dangling from each of her braids, helped with all the work at home, while the two boys were university students, studying engineering and medical school, but living at home (as almost all university students do). The rooms of the house were constructed on two levels around a courtyard—the rooms were attached but not connected and were all entered separately from the outside. Upstairs the family was working to add on a room at a time, with an old man slowly working on the construction project.

The best descriptor for family life would be down-to-earth. Life seemed pretty straightforward; the kids always seemed to be studying. I arrived at the beginning of three weeks of exams for both of them. The younger son attending the public medical school told me how more than ninety percent of his class would not finish the decade of classes and training, and this first year served as the largest weed-out. Dad worked hard and came home for lunch and dinner, but on Mother’s Day when he produced two tickets for a fancy dinner and concert, the mother just beamed and immediately began to detail everything she had to do to get ready for the big night. The next morning she told me breathlessly how she had danced until 1:30 in the morning!

On my first weekend the language school offered a trip up Volcán Chicabal, one of the many volcanoes ringing the region. Set in the volcano’s cone was a crystal lagoon—a sacred site for Mayan worshipers. We were able to stand at the top of the crater and look down at the lagoon and then across the valley at a smoking volcano that erupts with bits of smoke and ash several times a day, and then descending the precipitous steps right to the lakeshore, we found ourselves in the midst of a Mayan religious ceremony. The children were especially excited to see gringos; we had had our cameras out to photograph the lagoon and they were captivated. A few brave youngsters asked us to take their pictures while the rest cowered in fear nearby—the best picture from the encounter is a snapshot of all the children gathered around me showing them a picture.

Today featured my attempt at salsa dancing—generally a disaster. For all my improvements in conversation, my feet and brain still don’t coordinate particularly well. When I danced with my absolutely gorgeous instructor, she guided me nicely and I even sort of looked like I knew what I was doing, twirling her away. However, when I tried to dance with my gringa partner, we pretty much fell apart. I vowed that next time I am enrolling in classes, I will pick up some serious dance sessions to go with my language learning.

All-in-all, the week has been thoroughly enjoyable. The other language students are a great, diverse mix: our usual nightly contingent is drawn from a former Air Force linguist from Alabama, a Michigan sophomore, a couple formerly from Wisconsin now moving here from Puerto Rico, a cute Australian girl, and a jolly Dutch guy, and we’ve had a great time exploring the bars and cafes all over. I’ve gotten to run and kill my lungs with the elevation and read lots about Guatemalan history and politics. I’ve also started my research with visits to a weaving cooperative and a couple of area NGOs. I’ll write a bit about what I’ve read and learned, and soon I can add my own observations from the field.