By Todd Caspersen, Director of Purchasing, Equal Exchange

We set for the town of Malacatan where we would examine a warehouse that was to be rented and used as a centro de acopio –a coffee collection center.  This warehouse would serve as the base of operations during the harvest for the members of Apecafromm, the farmers would haul their coffee out of the hills on mules then trucks and eventually make there way here after what could be as long as 8 hour journey 3-5 of which would be with mules. The warehouse was adequate though lacking a room for the staff to sleep in during the harvest. Lots of cash is required to collect all the coffee from the farmers and there was a lot of talk about the security risks of having all the money and of bringing it up to the communities where it was used to pay farmers as they delivered to the cooperatives. Guatemala has a lot of public security problems with street gangs running rampant, gangs that we have in Providence where I live the M-18, Mara Salvatrucha to name the most notorious.  These gangs are linked to prison gangs in Guatemala, Salvador and the U.S, they are involved in drug trafficking, people trafficking, banditry, murder, extortion.  The Guatemala border is highly permeable with the Prensa Libre reporting while I was there that 200,000 people a year cross into Mexico on their way to El Norte, that is more than 500 a day.  Across the border in Tapachula Mexico there is the third largest concentration of child and adolescent prostitutes in the world.  The border is a scary place with lots of clandestine activities taking place and the place where many honest hard working people suffer untold hardships, and someone is making a lot of money.

Due to heavy rains and resulting landslides in the mountains it was determined that the best way for us to reach the village of Santa Rita would be to cross the Mexican border at Talisman and take a bus north and then recross into Mexico at a place called Cordoba near Union Juarez.  We left our truck at a hotel at took a taxi to the border crossing of Talisman which is a bridge over the Rio Suchiate, it's a small border crossing with a big business in motor vehicles from the north, I figured I could sell my old pick up here for several thousand more than I could get in Providence, I pondered the possibilities.  As we crossed the bridge we could see figures in the river below making there way through the fast current with huge plastic containers of gas from Mexico, they were bringing it over as contraband into Guatemala, there were five people working the river as we passed over in plain sight of the border guards on both sides, again someone is making a lot of money.  On our way back through the next day we would see people taking big bundles of something else from Guatemala to Mexico not sure what but again right in plain sight.

After several uncomfortable minibus rides we jumped out in Cordoba by the panaderia and headed back East toward Guatemala, five minutes after we left town the path plunged into a deep valley, at the bottom was a gorgeous river plunging through the valley whose steepest walls were cloaked by huge ferns, it was a spectacular place.

From the valley floor we ascended what the locals call el caracol  which is a private road built by the plantation el Oswald? That winds up at least a thousand feet and has twelve hairpin turns we were told by the school boy who we met on the road.  He studied in Mexico but lived in Guatemala, people who reside on the border cross easily and frequently.  Finally, after much sweating we reached the top of the road and the Guatemalan border which is marked by cleared land and large stones, it looks like the clearing beneath electrical lines in the U.S long cleared strips through the forest up and down the mountains, by the vegetation type we determined that it was kept clear by herbicides and not machetes.

Another hour of walking brought us to the village of Santa Rita where 35 members of Apecaformm live and grow coffee at elevations of 1200-17000 msnm.   The group was working on building a centralized washing station, currently each farmer processes his own coffee individually; centralized washing stations are frequently a topic with cooperatives we work with.  Ideally they reduce the farmers work load and provide better quality coffee, or they become white elephants that don't work at all due to distance from the farms and bad management cause quality problems.  The people from Santa Rita were about ¾ done with the construction of the station, having been given the machines by ANACAFE and some of cement was donated  but they still need more, a topic that was much discussed during our visit.  The cooperative provided all the labor all including bringing in all the cement and materials necessary on mules.  One of the farmers had spent 52 days working on the station with out pay as the cooperatives role in the project was to provide the labor, a set up frequently used in development context.

After sleeping in Don Paulino's one room house with his family we went to visit some of the coffee farms belonging to the members.  In the early morning looking out at the mountain sides one can see where small concentrations of people live by looking for the smoke from cooking fires that starts to drift through the trees, it is easily mistaken for mist or clouds. The farms were planted with Bourbon, Caturra and Arabe, we visited the farms of Jaun Perez and Rodolfo Roblero which were well care for farms of about 1.5 hectares; the crop looked good.   In the mature plantings of 7-10 years Juan and Rodolfo harvested between 30-50 quintales per hectare which is a good yield.  We said our good byes and took a different path back to El Caracol.  On our way back we stopped by new hanging bridge that had been built by the community in the wake of Hurricane Stan two years previous, looking up the river valley they pointed out where huge sections of the mountainside had disappeared into the rivers raging torrent.  Don Paulino had lost one of his coffee plots in the landslides, people joked that he owned part of the river now.   After the long descent of El caracol we decided to take a swim in the river which felt great after two days of sweat and dirt.  The river carved through solid rock making smooth pools that cascaded one into the other, we went between pools as if on water slides.   The journey back to Xela was uneventful the only remarkable thing was the reverse contraband we saw and photographed on our trip back across the bridge.