Detailed List of Events

Details for Thursday, February 4, Events

Speakers Reception (invitation, 5:00 - 6:00pm)

The reception invitees will include all speakers, sponsors, BUILD members, IGL staff, and Tufts staff. During the reception we will have a slideshow that will display pictures of the BUILD project in Santa Anita. At 5:30 BUILD Directors will offer a few words of thanks and expectations for the Forum.

From Mountain to Mug: How Coffee Gets to Your Cup (6:30 - 7:30pm; Terrace Room, Paige Hall)
Participants: Ángel Moreno Fuentes, Just Coffee, Dean's Beans, Kathryn Taylor

This will be an interactive session (with samples) with members of Santa Anita as well as representatives from various coffee companies affiliated with the community and/or BUILD. Each group will be responsible for explaining and demonstrating a different part of the coffee production process.
- BUILD will introduce the panelists and explain the reason and importance of this event (Kathryn Taylor, 5 min)
- Don Mincho will, via photos and video and a whiteboard, discuss the planting and cultivation process (15 min)
- Just Coffee will discuss the purchase and importation process, and will touch on the nature of fair trade buyer-grower relationships. (10 mins)
- Dean’s Beans will discuss the roasting, blending, and distribution processes (15 min)
- Questions/Discussion (15 min)
- Both Just Coffee and Dean’s Beans are asked to bring samples and promotional materials.
- BUILD will be selling their custom Just Coffee blend at this event

Formal Introduction (8:00 - 8:10pm; Terrace Room, Paige Hall)
Participants: Sherman Teichman, Mike Niconchuk, Kathryn Taylor, Sasha de Beausset

This will be the first formal introduction to the No Alcanza Forum. BUILD Co-Directors, along with Sherman Teichman, will give opening remarks about the process of getting to this point and the hopes for the weekend’s events. Formal welcome of all speakers and the members of Santa Anita.

The Guatemalan Civil War: Perspectives on the Clandestine Conflict (8:10 -9:30pm; Terrace Room, Paige Hall)
Participants: Lázaro Ventura Velásquez, Gloria Elena Gómez, Eluvia Aguilar Luen, TBD

The people of Guatemala endured tremendous violence during the longest civil war to ever take place in Latin American history.  Despite the formal end of Guatemala’s internal conflict in 1996, thirty-six tumultuous years of war have doubtless left the country in a state of social discord and political turmoil.  BUILD Guatemala has worked to assemble a panel of speakers to address and shed light on the topic of the more clandestine side of the country’s conflict.  Lázaro Ventura, a member of BUILD’s partner community Santa Anita la Unión, spent much of his youth as a field medic with the URNG guerrilla movement during the Guatemalan civil war. Gloria Gomez, like hundreds of other women, participated alongside the men in the armed struggle against the government. Eluvia Aguilar, representing a very different female perspective, lived the displacement and migration problems caused by the conflict. These three, along with other panelists, will address this complex and sensitive issue. Audience members are welcomed to question the panelists about both their experiences and opinions, although we ask that all questions bear in mind the sensitivity and traumatic nature of the war.

BUILD will be screening a brief original film about Lázaro Ventura’s experience as a medic with the guerrilla at the beginning of this panel.

Details for Friday, February 5, Events

Lunch and Discussions (12:30 - 1:50pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: Just Coffee, Dean’s Beans, Ted Fisher, Root Capital, Santa Anita

The objective of these breakout lunches is to help Tufts students delve a bit deeper into a particular area of interest to them. Each of the following groups will host a discussion along with a catered lunch in various locations. BUILD students will moderate the discussions and facilitate questions. Students should sign up for these lunches by Tuesday, February 2nd.

Root Capital: An Innovative Approach to Microfinance
Ted Fischer: ‘Algo más’ and Guatemalan commodity chains
Just Coffee/Dean’s Beans: Percolate Your Interest in Responsible Entrepreneurship
Santa Anita: The Faces of Development and Reconstruction*

*lunch conducted in Spanish

The Power of Collaboration: Build Guatemala and Santa Anita la Unión (2:00 - 2:30pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: BUILD Members

This presentation, by BUILD, will first reintroduce the conference, and then will briefly recap the history of Project Santa Anita from its inception to its ongoing monitoring and progress in 2010.

How Fair is Fair Trade? (2:30 - 3:30pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: Just Coffee, Dean's Beans, Kathryn Taylor

This panel will be introduced and moderated by BUILD member Kathryn Taylor, who has conducted extensive research into the fair trade industry. Kathryn will open the panel with a series of questions and a brief presentation of her basic research. The focus of both the questions and research presentation is within the realm of: What is Fair Trade? What is the philosophy behind fair trade? How does a farm become certified? What is the difference between fair trade and free trade? How have agreements like CAFTA and NAFTA affected the fair trade industry? How does fair trade affect the consumer? What problems do fair trade cooperatives face? Is there fragmentation within the fair trade movement? What problems do the umbrella organizations face? What is the political importance of fair trade? How sustainable is fair trade? What is the future of fair trade organizations?

Representatives from fair trade coffee roasters Just Coffee (Madison, WI) and Dean’s Beans (Orange, MA) will serve as panelists.

Specific impacts of the above questions on Santa Anita la Unión will be addressed.  After the panelists speak, the floor will be opened for questions from the audience.

U.S. Consumers and Local Agricultural Development (3:30 - 5:00pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: Root Capital, Ted Fischer, Dean's Beans, Ángel Moreno Fuentes

One of the most tangible links between the developed and developing worlds lies in agricultural production and trade. This connection is based on mutual dependence; consumers receive relatively inexpensive, constant access to the (often literal) fruits of the rural poor’s labor, while producers enter the unpredictable global market in hopes of earning more income to support themselves and their families. While these connections represent sustenance and livelihood for consumers and producers, respectively, each group hardly recognizes the impact the other has on daily life. As exporting in Guatemala has grown from coffee and bananas to include such non-traditional crops as broccoli and snow peas, suitable to be grown on small plots of land, more and more smallholder farmers from the highlands have developed linkages to global economy.  As Mayan farmers increasingly participate in exporting, exposure to fluctuating prices and underdeveloped marketing institutions may leave them vulnerable to instability. Many issues, both social and economic, remain to be addressed if the agricultural industry in Guatemala is to continue to integrate smallholders at the most basic level.

This panel discussion will focus on these crucial yet seldom discussed connections and will explore the ways in which the benefits of trade can be more equitably distributed. Ted Fischer, an anthropologist and author of Broccoli and Desire, will discuss his experience and research regarding the links between Mayan broccoli farmers in Guatemala and health-conscious, affluent Americans. Dean Cycon, author of Javatrekker and owner of Dean’s Beans Coffee Company in Orange, MA, will discuss his work on opposite ends of the supply chain—from starting his own fair trade coffee company to his extensive work in coffee producing communities worldwide. He will draw on these experiences to discuss the potential of ethical and responsible business practices to empower farmers and improve quality of life in producing communities. Root Capital is a microfinance organization based in Cambridge, MA that provides financing to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to fuel economic growth among the rural poor, often using future sales contracts from corporations such as Starbucks and Green Mountain as collateral for these loans. A representative from Root Capital will discuss the relationship between producers, multinational corporations, and American consumers and will explore the issue of how producers can receive more gains from international trade. Lastly, Angel Moreno Fuentes will speak from the perspective of living in a small agricultural community plugged into the complex world of exports from a land of tradition.

BUILD will be screening a brief original film about Ángel Fuentes’ experience as an indigenous coffee farmer at the beginning of this panel.

Santa Anita: Emblem of the Past, Hope for the Future (5:30 - 7:00pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: Ángel Moreno Fuentes, Lázaro Ventura Velásquez, Gloria Elena Gomez, Eluvia Aguilar Luen, Mauricio Velásquez Felipe

While professional and academic perspectives are crucial in understanding problems and conflicts both local and international, there is no substitute for personal experience. To live through a conflict and its aftermath means to have insight that can never be put into words, that most will never have to bear. As we seek for answers through the various panel discussions and sessions of the No Alcanza forum, we cannot forget that we have the obligation to yearn for the clearest understanding of what it means to live, breath, and struggle on a daily basis in a land still searching for peace and development.

This unique panel is to feature five members of Santa Anita la Unión, a community of resettled guerrilla combatants and former refugees from Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. Tufts student organization BUILD has been engaged in a long-term partnership with the community for two years and is proud and honored to bring their voices to Tufts. Our discussion will be moderated by Michael Niconchuk and Sasha de Beausset, two of the directors of BUILD, and both Guatemalan themselves. Each of the five community members will have the opportunity to express their views on what Santa Anita means and what it signifies in the broader context of Guatemala’s enduring search for peace. The people of this community are representative of the diverse and complicated sectors of the Guatemalan population, and if we ever hope to end the cries of “no alcanza,” we must begin by listening with open hearts and minds to the words of those who navigate, on a daily basis, issues so often only read about in textbooks. 

BUILD will be screening a brief original film about Gloria Gomez’s experience as an active member of this resettled community, a nascent entrepreneur, and former guerrilla combatant.

Details for Saturday, February 6, Events

Caught in Trafficking: Gang Violence, the Drug Trade, and Youth (12:00 - 1:30pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: Matt Herbert, Ambassador Villagrán, Mauricio Velásquez Felipe

This panel seeks to explore the growing and dangerous nexus of drug trafficking and gang violence in Guatemala, with special focus on the effects these trends have on the country’s desperate youth who are so often faced with few alternatives other than throwing allegiance to a gang or narcotrafficking group as a source of income. Ambassador of Guatemala to the United States Hon. Francisco Villagrán de Leon will share on the causes and side effects of Guatemala’s growing trafficking and crime problem, and recent political developments’ effect on the security situation. Matt Herbert, trafficking specialist and master’s candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, will detail the actors and dynamics of the volatile world of Central American drug trafficking. He will be accompanied by Santa Anita member Mauricio Alejandro Velásquez, who will provide the often lost perspective of a young man living first hand in a land of tempting allegiances and dangerous paths.

BUILD will be screening a brief original film about Mauricio Velázquez’s life as a young man in rural Guatemala, where poverty is the norm, and any source of income, even illegal sources, seems to offer a brighter future than the present.

Coming and Going: Migration, Displacement, and Reintegration (3:00 - 4:15pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: Eluvia Aguilar Luen, Kyle deBeausset, Lázaro Ventura Velásquez, Mario Rodas

This panel will analyze several key aspects of migration in Guatemala, particularly in the post-war context.  It will cover post-war incentives for going abroad and how both external and internal population movements are affecting Guatemala and the United States alike. 97% of Guatemalans living abroad reside in the United States, with 6-12,000 arriving via the Mexican border every year.  One third of the Guatemalan population, 57% of which live in rural areas, receives remittances.  In 2005, remittances topped US$3 billion, and accounted for 6.8% of Guatemala’s GDP. Internally, there has been a marked population move into the cities. Specifically, 72% of Guatemala’s total urban population resides in Guatemala City, which has been growing at a rate of 6% a year.  Kyle deBeausset will relate his experiences crossing the border, and will elucidate the nature of the journey to the United States. Guatemalan farmer Lázaro Ventura will speak to the economic impact of migration and will elaborate on the motives for working both at farms and in the city, and the lucrative prospect to go al Norte.

Reintegration of emigrants who have returned either due to the end of the war or to deportation has become a major issue in Guatemala. It is of special concern whether the youth will or will not fall into gangs and other dangerous options which they confront. The panel will therefore also include Eluvia Aguilar, who fled Guatemala to Chiapas, Mexico, during the civil war and returned after the Peace Accords were signed in 1996. She will relate her experiences and will then address how reintegration into Guatemalan society has affected  the political, social and economic rights of returnees.

BUILD will be screening a brief original film about Eluvia Aguilar’s experience leaving her homeland as a refugee to Mexico, the life she found there, and the difficult process of return, resettlement, and reconciliation in post-war Guatemala.

Final Remarks (5:30 - 5:45pm; Cabot Intercultural Center)
Participants: BUILD Members, Sherman Teichman

BUILD students and IGL director Sherman Teichman will briefly close the Forum with a few words of thanks and appreciation. A brief video will be shown. 

Dinner with Ambassador Villagrán (invitation, 5:45 - 7:00pm)
Participants: BUILD Members, IGL staff, BUILD Alumni, BUILD Parents, Tufts staff

Saturday’s ‘Dinner with the Ambassador’ is an invitation only event. The event will include all members of BUILD, as well as all Santa Anita members present, IGL staff, Tufts administration, other relevant student groups such as PPRI, Timmy, and ALAS.  

At the dinner, representatives from BUILD, Santa Anita, and the IGL will reflect on the true meaning and impact of the No Alcanza forum. Ambassador Villagrán will briefly give his response and reactions. Following the remarks will be an informal dinner during which students can interact with the members of Santa Anita and the Ambassador.