Since Guatemala’s armed conflict ended in December 1996, the CCDA has combined land fund credits included in the peace accords with profits from coffee sales and support from solidarity groups to obtain land for its members. Wherever possible, the CCDA assists members to organize cooperatives on their new land.
The CCDA’s Café Justicia is produced on these cooperatives, and on small plots farmed by individual CCDA members. The first to produce Café Justicia was the El Paraíso Cooperative in the municipality of San Antonio Polapó, Sololá province (about 15 kilometres east of Lake Atitlán).
The Cooperative was started in 1998 by approximately 100 families from five neighbouring Cakchiquel Maya communities. The cooperative’s land comprises 300 hectares that stretch from the Madre Vieja river valley at 1600 metres to a mountain plateau at just over 2000 metres.
Vegetables for market and domestic consumption are grown in the river valley, where irrigation is easily accessible, while the slopes are planted with coffee grown under a canopy of bananas, avocados and larger shade trees. Access to the cooperative is via a precarious mountain trail 1 hour’s hike from the village of Chitilul – itself an hour’s hike from the nearest road.
History
El Paraíso coffee plantation was carved out of natural forest during the early 1940s by an immigrant from Spain. The Spaniard’s family lived and worked on the farm until the early 1980s, when they abandoned their home due to increasing levels of violence in the region. While they no longer lived at El Paraíso, the Spaniard’s son and grandchildren continued to work the plantation, hiring Cakchiquel Mayas from the neighbouring village of Chitilul to care for the plants and harvest the beans.
The people of Chitilul consider the former owners of El Paraíso to be among the few “good” plantation owners in the region in that they usually paid the legal minimum wage. And when the army came to massacre the villagers in 1982, the owners of El Paraíso provided them with refuge on the plantation.
In the late-1990s, when the family decided to sell the plantation, they offered it first to their workers. The villagers alone could not afford the land, so they turned to the Campesino Committee of the Highlands for support. The Campesino Committee of the Highlands The CCDA was founded in 1982 as an organization that works to defend the rights of workers on large coffee, sugar and cotton plantations, to recover lands taken from the Mayan communities over the past centuries, and to promote and recover Mayan culture and spirituality. Today about 800 communities in 13 Guatemalan provinces belong to the CCDA, but the organization is strongest in the Madre Vieja valley of Sololá.
When the people of Chitilul approached the CCDA for support, the organization worked out a deal that combined the resources of five member communities with a grant from the local Catholic parish and a loan from a new rotating land credit fund created by the 1996 peace accords between the Guatemalan government and left-wing rebels.
Today El Paraíso is a legally constituted cooperative with membership in the CCDA. The CCDA has since acquired 80 more land parcels for its members, 30 of which also produce high quality coffee for export to Canada.
The Coffee
Currently El Paraíso produces about 60,000 lbs. of coffee per year. Many of the beans are sold by the cooperative on the domestic market or to intermediaries. The cooperative’s best organic beans are purchased by the CCDA to be marketed internationally and within Guatemala as “Café Justicia” (Hoo-Stee-Cee-A) – a Fair-Trade Plus coffee brand. Café Justicia is imported to Canada by the BC Central America Solidarity Alliance (BC CASA) which serves as the distributor of the CCDA’s Cafe Justicia in Canada..
The CCDA pays cooperative members a living price for their coffee and uses the surplus to support development projects in villages that are not yet able to export their coffee as Café Justicia. El Paraíso produces Yellow Bourbon, Arabico, Catue, Catimoro, Pache and Caturra varieties of Arabica coffee. The coffee has been graded in Guatemala as Strictly Hard Bean (SHB) Altura.
Most of the coffee harvested is processed to the parchment level on the plantation using the wet processing method and cement drying patios. More recently, the CCDA has also processed some coffee using the honey and natural processing methods. To avoid polluting the river with organic waste, the cooperative has built a series of “sinks” in its drainage canal where the husked cherries are trapped and later used as organic fertilizer. The parchment coffee is then taken to a Dinamica Crops, an exporter based in Guatemala City to be transformed into green coffee, packaged and shipped to Canada.
In 2002 the El Paraíso Cooperative registered with Mayacert, an organic certifying agency whose credentials are recognised by Quality Assurance International and the USFDA. About a fifth of Café Justicia’s annual crop is certified as organic, the rest is grown and processed in exactly the same manner as the certified organic, but is considered transitional, meaning that no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides are applied, but not all traces of these chemicals have yet been eradicated from the soil.
Initially, Café Justicía was carried to Canada by BC CASA delegations returning from Guatemala. This severely limited the quantities of coffee that could be imported. However, sales in Canada rose to the point that it was cost-effective to ship by containers holding up to 43,000 lbs of coffee. The CCDA currently ships two of these containers to the Port of Vancouver and two to Toronto.
For more information please contact us: fairtrade@cafejusticia.ca 236-999-2241 CCDA’s website at https://www.ccdagt.org