 |
| Volcan Santa Maria and Santiaguito |
Back at the Mountain School.... it was nice to have a little time in the city, but I am really happy to be back to the simple country life. This week I have the same teacher and family as I did in 2004. It is a very interesting perspective. There are of course more kids in the house, I honestly can´t figure out how many people live there, at least 12. My host mom Ana speaks Mam (a Mayan dialect) as well as Spanish. She is very sweet, we laugh a lot and talk about simple things. There are many children in the house, however I usually interact with Angelica and Ronny. Angelica is 11, she loves it when I bring books to the house for her to read.
 |
| Angelica and her Grandma Ana |
The schools are a new thing in the community. There are many people who can not read or write, also middle and high school are not free here, many families can not afford to send their kids to school after primary school. The Mt. School runs a scholarship program to help pay for kids to go to school. It is great to be getting to know the families in the community. It is a good exchange. Us being there gives them work that they enjoy and can do at home with their kids.
The stories are endless of injustice and exploitation of the workers in Guatemala. During my first week at the Mt.School Edwin Lopez came to speak to us about his struggle at the finca Nueva Florencia. In March 1997 the workers at the coffee finca attempted to organize. They were not being paid the legal minimum wage. They were also not receiving their Christmas and summer bonuses which are required under Guatemalan´s minimum wage laws. As soon as the workers started to organize they were fired from the finca, denied access to health care, denied access to water, they were not allowed to cut firewood (they cook food over fires), their electricity was cut, and their children were expelled from the local school. The workers were blacklisted and were not able to get work on any of the other fincas.
In Guatemala as long as the workers continue to live on the Coffee finca they are able to take legal action against the finca owner, as soon as they move they loose those rights. The workers had obtained legal help from the Catholic church, and won more than one court case against the finca owner. The first court case they won was in 1999. The court ordered the 38 families to be rehired, but the finca owners did not pay any attention to the order. There is no agency that enforces the courts orders in Guatemala.
The court system is very slow in Guatemala. For many years the courts would claim to have lost their documents, every time they won a court case the company would appeal. In 2004 they exhausted the legal process in Guatemala. Even though they had won all of their court cases they still had not received any justice. In 2006 they presented their case to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights. At this point many of the families had left the finca because they could no longer take the threats and the hard life.
All through this time the finca owners were harassing the people. Edwin went to D.C. to testify for the Inter-American court, and when he returned home his house was fenced off. Workers were being imprisoned on false charges of theft.
In 2009 they won the court case in the Inter-American court. The Guatemalan government acknowledged that they did not provide the resources to help the people in their struggle. Therefore the government is providing money for the people to purchase a small amount of land. Edwin expressed that although he was glad that they are finally getting some justice, he is upset that the company owners still are not paying a dime, it is the government that is providing the money.
2 years after winning their case they are still looking for land that they are able to buy. They received Q800,000 which is not enough to buy land that they can farm on.
The story of the communities Fatima and Nuevo San Jose (the two communities next to the mountain school) have very similar stories. The people of Fatima worked for weeks without receiving pay. When they demanded pay they were fired and again denied access to the finca. The owner made threats to the workers when they were attempting to take legal action, he told them that they could go ahead and try, but he was rich and would be able to pay off the officials. The workers eventually ended up taking a small settlement, and were able to buy the land that they live on now because the Catholic church owned the land and gave them a loan.
These stories are just one of many. Today the minimum wage has been raised to Q63 (Quetzals, there are about $8 to 1Q) for a days work for one person. It is rare that a worker on a coffee plantation will get paid this. According to Edwin, coffee pickers get paid anywhere from Q25-Q50 for 100lbs of coffee. A family of 5 (yes including the little kids) can pick up to 200lb of coffee a day in a good year. That means the most a family of 5 gets for a long, hard day of picking coffee is Q100. That is about $8. Even thought the standard of living is a lot lower in Guatemala, it is very, very difficult to get by on Q100 a day. That also does not include paying transportation to get to the finca, and keep in mind the coffee picking season is only a few months, after that there is little to no work to be found.
In order to be able to organize a union person needs to have worked for a company 3 times. When a worker gets a job at the company they have to sign a contract. Companies will have the father put his name down the first time, and his son´s name down the second time. They well do all that they can to avoid having people work for them more than 3 times. It is almost impossible for people to unionize.
There are a few cooperative fincas in the area. I am going to go and visit two of them this weekend. The Santa Anita coffee finca is run buy ex-guerillas from the 36 year internal armed conflict. santaanitafinca.com
We are also going to La Florida coffee cooperative..... more on these soon.
There are so many issues surrounding coffee it is overwhelming. Sometime around 2000 was the ¨coffee crash¨ where the price of coffee took a nose dive. People here say the cause was because the world bank gave Vietnam a whole bunch of money to grow coffee and it flooded the market. It seems as though there are many reasons that the "coffee crash" happened. Global economics are complicated. However coffee is the number two imported commodity in the United States after oil.
Yesterday I went to the finca near the school. They have tons of land, but don´t produce much coffee. When the coffee crash happened they cut down all of the shade trees and planted avocados. The unfortunate consequence was this made the coffee plants produce less coffee since coffee hates to grow in the direct sun, and they don´t have any experience growing avocados so they only produce small avocados that they can not export. There are only 7 people that currently work on the finca right now. The finca is 3 million cuadras (one cuadra is 20 meters squared).
 |
| avocado |
I toured the farm with my teacher Abby who lived on the finca when she was a girl. The farm feels abandoned. It was fun to climb around the old buildings with her and hear stories about how she used to sneak into the garden of the owner when she was a girl and eat the raspberries that grew there. We were climbing around and peering into the windows of the old casa grande, you could tell that she got into mischief on the farm when she was young. She told stories of how the finca used to be a great place to live and work. They had a school and animals and the workers were treated good. During the the war they moved from the finca because it was becoming too dangerous as both the guerillas and the army were setting up camp at the finca. They couldn't tell what side was better because they both were saying the same thing. Sometime after war the finca changed owners and now it is run by a woman who also owns another finca near Antigua which she has turned into an ecotourism farm. She has let this finca go to the wayside since she makes so much more money at the other farm.
It is really difficult to see fallow land in a country where one of the major problems is land distribution. If people only had access to land to grow food for themselves or to raise some animals there would be way less malnutrition and poverty.
Hopefully before I head to Ecuador I will have time to upload all the pics of the fincas and other adventures.
Love to you all and Go Los Empacadores!!
