From Fighting to Farming in the Mountains of Guatemala
BY JONATHAN LOTT
In the shadow of Guatemala’s jungled mountains, once heavy with the specter of conflict, the smell of coffee hangs in the air. A generation after the historic peace agreement which ended the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), dozens of former guerrilla fighters now work the land to cultivate organic coffee.
The farming cooperative, Comunidad Santa Anita la Union, was founded in February 1998 in southwest Guatemala, as part of an agreement to distribute land among victims and participants of the devastating Civil War. The community was profiled by the 2008 documentary “Voice of a Mountain” and a subject of the 2019 book “Combatientes de la Historia.” We met with five former fighters for a long, wide-ranging discussion on politics, economics, and the Civil War—topics which remain relevant, and sensitive, to modern society.
The roots of the Civil War go far back. Guatemala had long been exploited by American corporations, particularly the United Fruit Company (today Chiquita Brands International). A popular revolution in 1944 forced Guatemala’s first democratic elections, in which Juan José Arévalo triumphed in a landslide victory. His successor, Jacobo Árbenz, implemented land reforms which prompted the United Fruit Company to push the United States into supporting a 1954 coup that ended a decade of democracy and installed a severe military dictatorship.
Years of repression followed, until resistance groups eventually began organizing and self-activating in 1960. War has a tendency to escalate, and by the 1980s, state terrorism and civilian massacres had brought the Civil War to new extremes. “What they could not do to the guerrillas, they did to the population,” says Mincho (his nom de guerre).
The ex-guerrilla fighters at Santa Anita—they prefer the term “revolutionaries”—say they self-organized after years of injustice. “We could not endure the exploitation anymore,” says one of them. There was no other option to “free themselves from colonialism” with “the necessity of fighting.” They were not alone. Although many individuals, especially in the cities, accustomed themselves to government abuse and corporate exploitation, others mounted a clandestine resistance from rural sectors, mostly in the west.
For the Santa Anita community, a long period of preparation was necessary. “There were eight years of training—ideologically, politically, militarily,” before they became active, one of the former fighters tells us. Unlike the government soldiers, revolutionaries participated on a purely volunteer basis. They tell us that military trucks would approach the villages and cities, and leave full of young men conscripted against their will.
When asked what particular roles they fulfilled in their resistance group, one man tells us he was responsible for bringing supplies from cities and villages into the guerrilla group. He says that university students helped the resistance fronts with logistics. One of the women says that she was responsible for internal security. However, in the desperation of civil war, each of them was prepared to perform whatever role was necessary. “We needed a change for the common good,” said one of the former revolutionaries. “This was, in retrospective, a fight for a just cause.”
Many guerrilla fighters were unaware of formal theories of insurgency at the start of their involvement, and the revolutionaries at Santa Anita were no exception. However, one of the women says that she later found access to Marx and Che Guevara, who wrote about class warfare and strategies for waging a successful insurgency. Another former fighter quotes the famous Guatemalan guerrilla-poet, Otto René Castillo: “Vamos patria a caminar yo te acompaño” (Let’s go walk, [my] fatherland, I will accompany you).
36 years of fighting could not achieve total victory, or total defeat, for either side. The military junta was unable to locate and eliminate all the guerrilla fighters—and even produced more in reaction to their tactics targeting sympathizers and those hitherto uninvolved in the war. Meanwhile, the guerrilla fighters lacked the firepower and ability to topple the dictatorship that ruled with fear and overwhelming violence. “The biggest loser was the population,” one of the ex-fighters explains.
It became necessary to eventually negotiate a peace, but crafting a mutually acceptable agreement which would endure was a challenge. Reconciliation between both sides presented difficulties, as did reintegrating fighters into mainstream society. The war remains a sensitive, painful topic among many Guatemalans today.
The “Historical Clarification Commission” was established to account for war crimes, atrocities, and violations of human rights. Its other responsibilities included identifying the causes of the Civil War, “clarify[ing] the history of events,” establishing a shared understanding of the conflict, and pursuing efforts to “make it easier to achieve national reconciliation, so that in the future Guatemalans may live in an authentic democracy.”
The Commission functioned from 1997-1999 and produced a concise summary report, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence.” It indicates that over 200,000 individuals were killed and/or disappeared in the conflict. The report concluded that the conflict emerged out of a number of factors, including an inequal economic system which produced “a violent and dehumanising social system” and “exclusion and injustice” protected by the State, which also “abandoned its role as mediator between divergent social and economic interests.”
The Commission also identified as contributing factors a lack of governmental checks & balances, increasing restrictions on political spaces, racism, and an ineffective justice system which tolerated or even encouraged violence. The Cold War also presented a global context in which (anti-)communist sentiment encouraged foreign intervention, from the United States, Cuba, and other state and non-state actors.
With decades of complex interrelated factors, it may have been impossible to craft a perfect peace. The negotiators would have for a settlement which was good enough—one that addressed the major concerns to such an extent that all participants would not attempt to sabotage its implementation. One of the ex-guerrillas at Santa Anita explains that the negotiators benefited from the peace, but the masses did not really benefit from it. “The peace had to be followed with dialogue, but it was not done.”
He says the recommendations from the Commission were not followed. According to the 1999 report, some of these recommendations included reparations to victims and their families, comprehensive anti-discrimination measures, a full acknowledgement of the Guatemalan Genocide, and fostering a culture of respect for human rights—including legislation protecting human rights defenders. In the years following the peace agreement, Guatemala ratified a number of international human rights treaties—but many of them have still not been translated to national legislation and enforcement at the local level. “The fight did not finish” after the peace was signed, says Mincho. It simply continued in another form for another generation. He points to corrupt forces trying to manipulate the presidency, as well as structural issues with the way school curricula are organized and implemented. The corrupt elites wanted to achieve “a technical coup d’état” over the Seed Movement political party (Movimiento Semilla), he adds. He draws a comparison between Guatemala’s ongoing fight for justice against the story of Geronimo, an Apache leader who mounted a long, unsuccessful struggle against Mexico and the United States in the 1800s. “This resistance has already been lost,” he says. However, Guatemala’s struggle still endures.
“Nature and history are disconnected from education” today, Mincho says, and the educational system as it is “has been imposed by the Spanish” and does not meet the needs of Guatemala’s population. Narrative warfare is still employed everywhere. Additionally, Mincho says that children should read more in schools, because reading is a tool which allows self-improvement and further education. “Identity in education has been lost…It wasn’t easy to integrate into a society which comes from 500 years of Spanish [domination], but also years of American domination.” He jokes about how modern parents placate their crying children with smartphones instead
of giving them meaningful attention.
Since its foundation, the community at Santa Anita has grown from 35 families to 80, and it became necessary for them to establish their own school on the property. A primary school was therefore built to service about twenty children in the community. The children also receive a hands-on education through their involvement on the farm. Today, about 60 children from the community and neighboring communities receive an education at the school.
One of the revolutionaries shares a story about how the postwar government tried to integrate ex-guerrillas into society by offering them low-paid work in chicken farms. The attempt failed, and many of them left the country to seek new opportunities in Mexico or the United States. The flight of Guatemalan farmers to the United States—which continues today—, motivated by higher wages and a better quality of life, has also diminished the availability of farm laborers within Guatemala and contributed to rising crop prices. Those who stay in their ancestral lands to farm coffee are “resisting,” one ex-guerrilla says.
Following the 1996 peace agreement, small-scale land reform was implemented in Guatemala, and a deal was made with the founding families of the Santa Anita community. With the support of the European Union, they chose to buy land in the mountains south of Quetzaltenango, where they had once operated as a guerrilla unit. Despite scattered stories of successful small-scale farms, there is a gigantic imbalance in land ownership in Guatemala with a few large plantation owners, known as latifundistas, owning and farming most of the land—leaving subsistence farmers, usually indigenous peoples, to labor on small plots.
The 1990s saw a rise in coffee demand as global consumption exceeded population growth. Today, much of the Santa Anita Coffee Producers Association (APCASA) exports its arabica coffee to Canada. Sipping hot coffee as the gentle summer rain falls, we talk to the café manager about Guatemala’s future developmental challenges. The coffee is delicious and incredibly strong.
Difficulties remain for the Santa Anita community. Many years ago, they split into two groups over irreconcilable differences, although they continue to live among each other as neighbors. Additionally, as part of the agreement made to purchase the land, the founding families must pay the government a substantial sum of money every year.
Other communities that have not been able to make annual payments have seen their lands confiscated by the government, the farmers tell us. “Future development is uncertain because” of the massive debt, debt that the farmers say should not exist because the European Union and other countries left BANDESA (now BANRURAL) to manage the money for the purchase of farms to be donated to organized groups. The state did not provide any financial support for the land acquisition. “The way of life here still favors the [corporate and financial] system.” One of the ex-combatants says that “the system is at the service of U.S. imperialism” even today.
In many ways, the end of the Civil War merely translated the methods of achieving justice into different forms. Today the fight exists primarily in economic, social, and political battlefields. When asked who was winning this fight, the group fell silent for a moment to think. Eventually, one of them spoke about the new political consciousness emerging in Guatemalan society.
“We can see that people have chosen Arevalo, so we are no longer a small [guerrilla] group—but a people.”
Jonathan Lott I am a writer, teacher, and scholar-practitioner from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Recently, I attended graduate school for my LL.M. in international human rights and humanitarian law at the European University Viadrina in Germany. I am now volunteering at ENTREMUNDOS and another local NGO to promote human rights in the region.
