In the interest of saving you time, I have tried to highlight the most pertinent information in some of the longer readings.
You can find general travel information (including currency, time zones, customs information, and safety tips) here: General Travel Info. I strongly encourage you to read through this, especially if you’ve never travelled to Latin America.
This link provides some general information for travelers: Lonely Planet Central and Eastern Guatemala
This link provides a brief biography of the NGO we partner with in Guatemala.
The most relevant information that I could give you is the below (an excerpt from an interview we did with Father Marco Tulio, an important contact of our group, who is familiar with the communities where we have been staying). Please note that this is an unedited version, that still requires much improvement!
Interview with Padre Marco Tulio Recinos Torres:
I was born in Huehuetenango 56 years ago, almost 57. I am the son of peasant farmers (campesinos). I lived in Huehuetenango until I was 20 years old. When I was 20, I moved to Guatemala City and began my studies. In 1990, I became a priest. At the end of the year 1990, I came to San Miguel Tucuru, in December 1990. After one month, I decided to stay. Part of the reason why I stayed is because despite being Guatemalan, I had little knowledge of the situation in the plantations.
At the time I came to Tucuru, there were 37 plantations. Only 7 were free communities where the people lived freely. One of the things that caught my attention and hurt me a lot was how they were treated in the plantations. It was terrible; they were treated like animals. Here, during the time of the harvest of coffee, during the time of the cleaning of the coffee, indigenous people were brought from Huehuetenango from El Quiche and other departments. So, here, galleys were constructed, very big ones where they were put like animals. In the plantations, there were no schools, no health posts. They lived like “mozos colonos,” [colonial man-servants] that’s what they were called. They had no salary; they earned very little. During the coffee harvest, during the cleaning of the coffee, the landlord gave them a tiny bit of land. The campesinos would plant their little bit of corn and beans, in exchange for working for the landlord. This affected me very much. I’d say to myself, How can people live like this? On Sundays, the campesinos would come to Tucuru and they’d get drunk on weekends. They lived in poverty…terrible. And that’s how Sisters here and another priest, Father Dario…we’d ask ourselves what to do. Are we to close our eyes and let them live like this?
We had to enter the struggle for land, especially – what was important – to initiate a program of consciousness-raising. The people needed to learn the labor laws and constitution of Guatemala, and also to learn about the Bible, in the plain sense of the word of God because the Bible is God’s dream. He wants his people to have a life and that’s why Jesus came and said, I came so you can have life and live in abundance. We believe in talking about the kingdom of God and educating the people so they can arrive at an understanding that the word of God has an element of liberation that helps us live, that lifts us up and helps us become aware.
So, we began to study. We met up, a group of us here in town, then we began meetings in Coban with some students from the University of San Carlos and some religious people. How are we going to help the people? But our meetings in Coban didn’t last long because we were quickly noticed. At that time, whoever gathered like that would be labeled a guerrilla or subversive. So they shut their doors. That was in June 1991 in Coban. We were no longer allowed to meet up in the house where we were meeting.
So, with a Sister named Vacilia Arguilon and with Father Dario Cal and another Sister named Eugenia Huila, we arrived at Tucuru. A Sister who’s Brazilian said, You can’t stop your work. Why don’t you meet up in Tucuru and search for help? So she, named Yolanda, who already had a bit more knowledge of Juan Tiney and all of them, which in that time was called CUC – Committee Unit Campesina. So, we invited them to Tucuru, to help us initiate this program about how to help. The first idea was to raise money from foreign countries, dollars, to buy the land. They raised $40,000 to buy Chelema, which is a community that is farther than Sepacay, farther up the mountain. So, initially, the owner of all that land had said that he would sell the caballeria [a tract of land about 33.3 acres] at $5,000. Then he said, No, he’d sell it for $10,000.
Then, the colleagues from CUC came. They brought lawyers, like Antonio Argueta, Esq. They said, No, we don’t have to buy this land; it belong to the campesinos. So, we initiated a project with Chelema, Cruzchut, San Antonio, San Sebastian, Raxquix, Xochela, Panache, to see what we would do. We initiated a process of political training, of consciousness-raising, so that the people would know the constitution and the labor laws.
In 1992, there was a split in CUC and CONIC (National Indigenous and Campesino Organization) was born, right here in San Miguel Tucuru, born July 16, 1992. So, we initiated a program of consciousness-raising and political organization. Attorney Argueta began a process against the landlords. There were people who had worked thirty, forty years in a plantation and never received any wages. Never got any employment benefits, never had medical assistance – nothing. They lived practically like slaves – they were slaves. The people were slaves. So, Argueta said they needed to sue the landlords because the people had a right to their labor benefits. And that’s how the lawsuits were initiated.
The landlords began to give out land. In the case of Chelema, Sepacay, Xochela, San Antonio, Cobadonga, Pachilica El Salto – when they were given the benefits that were owed to them, it was in the millions of quetzals. So, by way of the struggle, by way of the lawsuits in the labor tribunals, the landlords agreed to give out land. And that’s how many communities began to get their land. Then, the palm trees came, the orange trees, and they began to receive land, pine trees, “lomos de chama” (?) – it’s just that, during that time, we weren’t very intelligent because the landlords didn’t give out the best land – they gave the worst! I think the ones who benefited most was Sepacay because they got the whole plantation, all the land in the case of the palm trees, of the mines and the orange trees. The landlord gave them the land right at the top of the mountain, the end of the land, where nothing is produced, and down here he gave them a tiny piece only to build their houses, to have their little pets, and then much, much, much later, many years later, we realized that it wasn’t such an amazing victory after all. That was in 1995, 1996, 1997 that we began to get land.
In 1998, we realized the problem was more serious because the people would receive their land but then – what would they do with their land? We didn’t have technicians. We didn’t have money to invest in projects. We didn’t have markets. In 1999, I had to leave Tucuru. For me, the situation had gotten very complicated because I had three assassination attempts on me. I received death threats. Perhaps it was a bit of cowardice or God knows what, but in 1999, it was that that it was best – the bishop and I thought, as well as the congregation – that I leave Tucuru. One night, they came here to look for me, but I wasn’t around. I think that I’m alive now because I left when I did. So we decided it was best for me to go to Brazil for a while, that I should leave Guatemala. And in that year, 1999, the price of coffee fell. Coffee lost its value in the international market and so the people, the campesinos that left the plantation, the ones that had stopped working in the plantations and had received their land, suddenly found themselves without a job. In the plantations, for better or worse, they received a little bit of money, even if it was just charity pay. And so, a very difficult situation began because the people said it was better to work with the plantation owners – better not to have left the plantation because there they had jobs.
The plantation owners closed their doors and said, No one can come back here. So they distributed documents that said not to give jobs to the people because they were subversives, guerrillas, members of CONIC. So the people went hungry. At that time, we had a good mayor named Jorge Bariseles who was elected by a civic committee called “punic” which means “sombrero.” He was a hard worker, an honest man who fought hard. So we had a lot of support, both international and domestic. He got much help in the form of corn, beans, rice. And by means of corn, rice, and beans, we were able to help all these people who had left the plantations. Also, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch had hit and destroyed a lot here. So, a lot of help came. But the most serious problem was that the people left the plantation. The landlord gave them the worst land, what was useless – the boulders, the mountains. So the people found themselves with nowhere to plant their corn, with nowhere to plant their beans, with no job, no money. So the people said, Now what are we going to do? And I always told CONIC that when we initiated the programs to get people their land, when we began what can be called an agrarian reform – because what happened in Tucuru was an agrarian reform.
Now, I’m not exactly aware but I believe from the struggle we were able to obtain more than 40 caballerias [approximately 1,333.32 acres] of land. And that is their land. It’s just that we didn’t get technical assistance to teach us how to work the land from another perspective because people here only know how to plant corn and beans. They could only wash the coffee, plant the coffee, and carry the coffee. Proof of that is that when the people got the land, where there was coffee, the people cut everything down by machete and planted corn and beans. And I’ve read many articles, anthropological and economic articles, by people who study the social field, that say that people in Latin America, by producing corn and beans will never get out of poverty because the people produce corn and beans sometimes for subsistence and sell a little but they are given a price that is useless. There, the land is overworked. Too much fertilizer has been used and now the people can’t produce corn or beans. It’s more work to plant the corn and beans and what they harvest is just a small amount that doesn’t compensate for all the work, doesn’t compensate for all the struggle. And also because later, when the price of coffee fell, the demand for coffee fell to zero. Here the big coffee plantations were finished because of that. And the price of a pound of coffee got to be 10 cents – actually 5 cents. And so for the people it was a very difficult thing.
In 1999, I left San Miguel Tucuru and Jorge Bariseles was no longer mayor. I believe that CONIC brought projects, but they were projects that weren’t accompanied properly. They brought cattle projects, vegetable projects, community market projects, but how could a community market subsist if people didn’t have money to buy or invest. Another problem we saw was, especially us in the parish, we began to give hens. We gave 100 hens that laid 100 eggs daily and then people said, Where are we going to sell them? We don’t have a market in which to sell them. The people, for better or worse, would sell their coffee, but we didn’t have a market in which to sell.
I left during that time, so when I left the parish, when Jorge Bariseles left the post of mayor, I feel that the leaders of CONIC didn’t have the experience or training and they were suddenly lost. Perhaps this was our sin because we didn’t worry about forming leaders. And anyway the leaders that were here like Juan Tzi and all of them, they have a third grade level of education. They’re practically illiterate. Nobody went to school. Of all the leaders that we had during that time, many of them were illiterate. They didn’t know how to read or write because in the plantations there were never any schools. An education was never available. So we didn’t take that step of teaching people. A lot of money came in from Denmark and other countries, but the money was lost because the projects we initiated didn’t have technical accompaniment. As of today, CONIC still does not have an agronomist to come and accompany. We just don’t have one.
So, then I left for nine years to Brazil and last year I returned to San Miguel Tucuru and saw that the poverty remains the same. Not much has improved after all the struggle. Two people died, two colleagues. Here there was pressure and still there is persecution. there are colleagues who have orders of capture on them, accused of being thieves, of being subversives. Today, we have thirty. Our colleague Marcos who died in an accident – we buried him yesterday – he was from CONIC. He died with an order of capture on him. So, one of the things I here in Tucuru…after the mayor left – Jorge Bariseles – after our colleagues in CONIC found themselves lost, the current mayor came – who’s a thief there now in the municipality. They began to bring programs of “assistance-ism”. There’s a project called “My Family Progresses.” Every year – each month they come and give 300 quetzals to each person so they can sen their kids to school, but that’s not helping. The people aren’t investing the money in sending their kids to school. And anyway, it’s “assistance-ism” cash because 300 quetzals is more or less currently $30, less than $25 maybe. What do people do with that money? They buy sugar, beans. But there are no projects, labor projects, projects to teach them how to work, to cultivate the land and produce coffee.
Thank God at this time we have projects like Association Saint Teresa, the Association Cuchil, Association New Hope, Association Paijat. An association has been created to see if the coffee can be sold and now they are producing coffee. People have come to see if the coffee can be purchased directly with international buyers, but that’s now. I think that now we have a lack of leaders – politics absorbed them. Politicians are very intelligent because our leaders invited them so they could bring their political parties. They were bought, they sold out. Today in Tucuru we don’t have political leaders because practically the few that remained, the parties, were corrupted, entered the parties of thieves. And even today we have a municipality where there is no organization; it’s just collapsed.
Farmers Fight Back 