La Santa Anita Finca: Connections through Coffee

“Now, this land is ours. Every day the work is hard, but now we have something worth struggling for,” Rigo, our nine-fingered Guatemalan guide for the day told us as we stood in front of the coffee toasting house and under a hanging bundle of bananas. This was two weekends ago and my three friends and I went for a two-day visit to the La Santa Anita Finca, a fair trade and organic coffee and banana plantation founded and maintained by a community of 31 families of ex-guerrillas. We walked through a jungle of coffee plants with their sweet, caffeinated beans, banana trees with their huge leaves and their phallic bundles, and trees wrapped in vibrant vines, hoping to learn about the farmers, the history of Guatemala and their role in it, and about how we all fit together into the big picture of the world.

Of the many things this trip has made abundantly clear to me is that we do not live in a vacuum, isolated from one another. Our choices and actions reverberate in the complex matrix of relations in which we exist. In my high school days, I saw how one man’s choice to abuse alcohol and drugs and then to get behind the wheel of a car led to the death of a 17 year-old young man with a very bright future. I saw how an entire community of students and faculty were devastated when two members – one student and the other our dean of students – decided to take their own lives. In my family, I still watch helplessly as my grandmother’s inability to deal with her depression and addictions has visibly aged my aunt and has kept my mother only a phone call away from tears. Whether we like it or not, our actions affect others; there’s no denying it.

What is less clear for me, however, is when the people we are affecting cannot be seen; our choices of the products we buy and the companies that we support. For example, currently I’m wearing a plain-white Levi’s t-shirt that was made in India. I have done absolutely no research on the treatment of Levi’s factory workers in India, but we all know that the worker(s) who made my shirt is not getting that great of a wage, probably barely enough to survive day-to-day. Nevertheless, I unconsciously supported this system with my purchase. Lately, I have been wondering much more about these choices that I make. The meat industry is ugly. The large producers overuse land, feed their animals their own shit, and – worst of all – treat their workers – especially the illegal immigrants they recruit – like they were faceless pawns, expendable and plentiful. Should I be a vegetarian? I’ve asked myself, wondering how much personal responsibility I have in perpetuating a system that clearly can be much better than we currently let it be, both for the workers and for the world as a whole.

I’m not going to get into an argument about economics and the morality of capitalism; such discussions have no real answers and tend to reduce people into large hypothetical numbers. Instead, I’d rather continue with my story with an oversimplified history of Guatemala’s 20^th century.

In the several centuries since the Spanish’s first conquest of Latin America, Guatemala has seen only ten years of legitimate independence – 1944 until 1954. Fifty years prior to 1944, the president of Guatemala indefinitely closed all schools to be able to pay for an extravagant party like the heads of state in Europe were able to have. The un-development continued in the early 20^th century as another president sold the rights to own the power industry in Guatemala to a US company. The US based United Fruit Company was also able to buy humongous tracts of land throughout the country, roughly 80% of which were unused. In the early ‘30s, yet another president chose to screw the people by imposing a law that required all people who could not afford to pay a new tax to work for 20 days without pay on a large plantation. The walk to the plantation averaged five days, and the workers were forced to bring enough food to last them the 30 days they would be gone. Of course, that was essentially impossible. They needed to buy food to survive, but that would cost them another twenty days of labor. Essentially, slavery was re-legalized.

In 1944, however, the people struck back. The masses had united and, somehow without bloodshed, power was turned over to Jose Arevalo. He remained in office for six years until 1950 when, for the first time in the country’s history, power was peacefully transferred in a legitimate election to Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz was a true reformer and sought to reinvigorate his country and raise it to its potential. Unfortunately, one of his reforms pissed off the US enough to incite the CIA to organize a coup and kick him out of office four years later. While in office, he purchased all of the unused farmlands in the country to be redistributed to the peasants. Remember the United Fruit Company? Well they valued their land at around $600,000 when they had to pay taxes on it, so Arbenz gave them $600,000 and divided up the land to be given to the poor, landless peasants comprising much of the country. The UFC demanded $13 million for it, and, when Arbenz said no, they went to the US government screaming that there was a Communist in office. Hearing the word “communist” sparked them to immediately take action and, in 1954, the Carlos Castillo Armas was carried into office on the back of the CIA. He undid everything that the previous ten years had accomplished and it was back to business as usual in Guatemala. In 1960, the people finally said, “Enough of this shit,” and took to the mountains with guns and machetes in hand. The civil war would last 36 years.

In 1996, the Peace Accords were signed, though essentially nothing changed. The families with the poder (the power) maintained it, and those without it – especially the indigenous rural peoples – would continue struggling.

The people at Santa Anita, however, were not about to let the previous 36 years of struggle go to waste. They took out a loan for $300,000 in order to buy the beautiful tract of land that is now their coffee and banana plantation. They organized their own, self-sustaining community where they have their own school and they grow and produce all of their own food. The company Just Coffee buys all of the coffee that they can produce and pays them a “fair” price (fair meaning it meets fair trade specifications. It is much better than most coffee producers would earn, but that is not saying much). Now they still find themselves struggling every day, but now without weapons in hand. It is a price they are willing to pay.

We heard much of this story directly from the mouths of the people who are still living it. With our 17 year-old guide Guillermo, we walked through the winding paths of coffee bushes, up and down the narrow mud paths surrounded by green, vivid and verdant. That Sunday morning I tried imagining being able to make this trek every day to pick coffee beans by hand. Within minutes, the heat and humidity had me drenched in my own sweat. I tried to think about my choices. Are they supporting companies like the United Fruit Company who have ruined the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands in the name of a better bottom line? We heard the distant sound of rushing water and continued hiking. Is it my – or our – responsibility to support companies like Just Coffee that strive to do business in a way that benefits both sides of the table? After all, it’s easy to call the actions of a select few ‘evil’ but isn’t laziness the greatest and most insidious evil of man? We reached the waterfall – the goal of our hike this morning. In front of me 18 ft of water crashed into the rocks in front of me, slowly yet steadily changing the shape of the unmovable earth. I decided to strip down to my bathing suit and let the water wash over me. As it pummeled my back, knocking my breath out of me, I hoped that I could be part of its steady stream doing the impossible, moving the unmovable.