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Coffee ... Guns ... and Social Justice

By Dave Cook This was to be an article about food travel, or maybe a food pilgrimage, but it has evolved into something very different. It is a story about people. People wanting to grow and market products co-operatively and the threats they face in doing so. It?s about challenging the status quo. Traveling to ?origin,? as it is called within the specialty coffee trade, had been a dream of mine for many years, and it?s one of the quickest ways to really learn what goes into the growing and processing of coffee before it comes to North America. Sure, I had read every coffee book I could get my hands on and did the ?resort? drive-by visits several times, but I never immersed myself in the culture as fully as possible. As a Fair Trade certified roaster, I was always aware of the conditions that were prevalent within the industry that led to the creation of socially responsible products, and I understood that in many coffee-producing regions, it is a very humble and challenging existence. Poverty and lack of medical access, schooling, and adequate shelter are all challenges still being faced by many farmers and workers. Early this year, we decided to visit the coffee-growing areas of Guatemala. Flying into Guatemala City with its volcanoes carving the clouds was exhilarating. The sheer size of them seemed to go on forever. We were very lucky to be able to make the trip with a friend or ours, Elvis Morales of Guatemala?s Campesino Committee of the Highlands ( CCDA) Coffee drying in the sun, near Cerro de Oro, Guatemala, with Lake Atitlan in the background Luis Rivas. Luis was born in El Salvador and understands the culture and speaks the language. This enabled us to start interacting with the local people immediately upon landing and head straight for the hills into the agricultural area toward Lake Atitlan. Our destination: an organic co-operative called the CCDA, or The Campesino Committee of the Highlands, whose members grow and process a coffee called Cafe Justicia (Coffee Justice). Driving up the side of cliffs overlooking Lake Atitlan, with bright red coffee cherries everywhere, it seemed the whole countryside was alive with the harvest of coffee. The CCDA had emerged during tumultuous times of the civil war in Guatemala in the 1980s. Its direct purpose was to fight for access to land and labor rights for Mayan campesinos. This was not without risk, and their organization?s directors faced arrest, disappearance, assassination threats, and exile. Who is a campesino? A campesino is a Spanish term for a farmer or farm worker, but really means more than this, as most campesinos are landless and are farming mainly for survival, rather than for profit. There were many events that contributed to the civil war but the main one was access

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