BUILD is proud to present the following speakers and sponsors of the "No Alcanza" Forum

Speakers

Kyle de Beausset

Kyle is founder of Citizen Orange, a blog that operates on the principle that the pro-migrant movement in the United States has the greatest potential for eradicating a host of global injustices and generating respect for peoples born on a different piece of the earth. He was born in Guatemala of U.S. citizen parents and was educated in Guatemala City at an international school.

After Kyle was accepted into Harvard, he took time off of school to retrace the route of a Guatemalan migrant into the U.S. and almost lost his life to smugglers. The journey changed his life and he was reborn as a migrant advocate, a journalist, and an organizer.

Gloria Elena Gomez of the Santa Anita delegation

Originally from San Miguel Ixtahuacan, San Marcos, Guatemala, Gloria Gómez Cinto has led an unconventional life.  When she was just fourteen years old, Ms. Gomez left her family to join the resistance movement with the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA), by whom she was trained in guerrilla warfare tactics. She subsequently spent several years fighting alongside hundreds of male counterparts in the Quetzaltenango region. It was during her time in the guerrilla that she met her husband. Mother of four young daughters, Ms. Gomez and her husband reside with many other former ORPA combatants in Santa Anita la Unión.

In December of 2008, Ms. Gómez was appointed as coordinator of the Santa Anita Ecotourism Project, where she is responsible for receiving and hosting national and foreign groups who visit the farm. The Ecotourism project currently employs more than ten women, including cooks, cleaning staff, and administrators. BUILD is currently actively engaged in a project with Ms. Gomez to bolster and improve this nascent Program.

Dean Cycon of Dean's Beans

Dean Cycon is an activist and entrepreneur who founded the all-organic, all-Fair Trade, all-kosher coffee roasting company Dean’s Beans. Cycon‘s more than twenty-year career working with indigenous communities in coffee-producing lands has led him to recently publish the book, Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee, in which he recounts his experiences “javatrekking.” This term was coined by Cycon, who in his own words defines it as the “word to describe the recent phenomenon of people going to the coffeelands for more than just buying beans, but rather to engage in the lives and issues of the people who grow coffee around the world.” His experiences have allowed him to prove that businesses can still be profitable while acting as positive forces for social change in the lives of the people they touch. “Dean’s Beans” focuses on People-Centered Development (PCD), an approach to international development that addresses the priorities of the people, focusing on the real necessities of life such as clean water, health care, and income generation.

Matt Earley of Just Coffee

Matt Earley is co-founder of Just Coffee Cooperative. Matt is from Lexington, KY and holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky and a MA in Latin American, Carribbean, and Iberian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. he lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife and two daughters.

Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University

Edward Fischer is a cultural anthropologist specializing in matters of economics and moralities.  His fieldwork has included working extensively with Guatemala’s indigenous Maya, and he is currently the director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American Studies.  He has written or edited seven books, including Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice, and Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala.  Professor Fischer will elaborate on the connections between Mayan farmers and American consumers on the panel “U.S. Consumers and Agricultural Development.”

Angel Moreno Fuentes of the Santa Anita delegation

Angel Moreno Fuentes, more commonly known as “Mincho,” was born in La Reforma, San Marcos, Guatemala. Growing up during the very beginnings of Guatemala’s civil conflict, Mr.  Moreno joined the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA) in his late teenage years. In 1982, ORPA united with three other national guerrilla movements to form the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), a movement which continued in armed struggle until the 1996 Peace Accords and subsequently became a political party.

Since the resettlement of ORPA combatants at the then-abandoned Santa Anita farm in 1998, Mr. Moreno has served in various offices of the cooperative’s administrative board and currently is the community’s treasurer and Field Coordinator with Catholic Relief Services’ Vidas Productivas Coffee  Project at Santa Anita. His knowledge of the organic coffee cultivation process has taken him recently to Lima, Peru, where he addressed a group of similar small-scale cultivators on organic production and marketing. Mr. Moreno is the father of three young children and an active part in planning and executing BUILD’s projects in the community.

Matt Herbert

Matt Herbert is a Masters candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His research focuses on issues of economic development, technology, and security. Prior to attending The Fletcher School, Matt worked as a threat analyst, dealing with transnational armed groups, drug trafficking, and human trafficking issues. Matt also worked as a special assistant for Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, handling political and legislative affairs. Matt graduated from the College of Santa Fe in 2006 with a double Bachelors of Arts in Political Science and Documentary Studies, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography. He has done field research on economic development, human security, and public diplomacy in Mongolia, Mozambique, Brazil, and Kenya. Matt Herbert will participate in the “Caught in Trafficking: Gang Violence, the Drug Trade, and Youth” panel discussion.

Mike Miller of Just Coffee

Mario Rodas

Originally from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, Mario Rodas migrated to Chelsea, MA with his family in 1999, at the age of 12. He grew up in Massachusetts where he was a stellar student, a patient caretaker and a committed leader. Committed to succeeding and fulfilling a responsibility towards his family, through much hard work and perseverance he learned to speak English quickly and did very well in school. He graduated at the top of his class as secretary of his high school’s National Honor Society. In spite of his commitment to his community, his family, and to the country he calls home, the US, at 19 Mario was detained and faced deportation. He gained the support of the Merrymack Valley People for Peace, Latinos United for Justice, the online blogger and immigrant rights community, the late Senator Kennedy and Senator Kerry and many more all acted in support of Mario to delay his deportation. This gave him time to apply for and win political asylum to remain in the US.

In the words of Senator John Kerry, “Mario is caught in the crossfire of a broken immigration system. He also is the reason we need not just comprehensive immigration reform, but to open the doors of opportunity for hard-working young people who play by the rules and want to live the American dream.”

Rodas, now 22, is now at Harvard University and is an active member of the Student Immigrant Movement an avid supporter of the Dream Act.

Root Capital    

Root Capital is a nonprofit social investment fund that is pioneering finance for grassroots businesses in rural areas of developing countries.  Root Capital provides capital, financial education, and market connections to small and growing businesses that build sustainable livelihoods and transform rural communities in poor, environmentally vulnerable places.  Representatives from the organization will speak on the panel “U.S. Consumers and Agricultural Development.”

Sherman Teichman of the Institute for Global Leadership

Lazaro Ventura Velásquez of the Santa Anita delegation

Born in Sibinal, San Marcos, Guatemala, Lázaro Ventura Velásquez adopted the name “Marconi” upon incorporation into the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA) at age seventeen. While not formally trained in medicine, ORPA leadership directed the young Mr. Ventura into the world of emergency field care, and since then his passion for medicine has grown. Having worked in the Santa Anita community pharmacy, Mr. Ventura remains committed to both medicine and his former guerrilla cause as he is now an active member of the municipal URNG political party in Quetzaltenango.

Mr. Ventura is the father of two children and lives with his wife in Santa Anita la Unión. Like many men in rural Guatemala, Mr. Ventura supplements the family income from coffee with a job in Guatemala City, where he works part time as a security guard at Fundación Sobrevivientes. Since 2008, Mr. Ventura has been an active partner in BUILD students’ research projects, where he has worked with our students on issues such as indigenous health care, natural medicinal remedies, and the political reincorporation of former guerrilla combatants.

Mauricio Velásquez Felipe of the Santa Anita delegation

Mauricio Velásquez Felipe has, like many young people in post-war Guatemala, experienced the effects of violence, migration, and displacement. Born in Ixtahuacan, Huehuetenango, Guatemala, he spent much of his early life in Chiapas, Mexico with his mother who fled Guatemala in the early 1990s. With his mother and younger siblings, Mauricio returned to Guatemala during elementary school where he settled at Santa Anita la Unión, a community familiar to his family and relatives, many of whom still live on the cooperative.

At Santa Anita, Mauricio is an active student and heavily involved in organizing events with the primary school. He works on his relatives’ coffee plots and also serves as one of the youth directors of the Rodrigo Asturias Computer Center, a project designed and sponsored by BUILD and completed in the summer of 2009.  Mauricio’s hospitality and smile are always among BUILD’s fondest memories of Santa Anita, and in the future Mauricio hopes to foster his welcoming spirit by studying hotel management, after which he plans to attend local university.

Ambassador Francisco Villagrán de León

Ambassador Villagrán de León has been the Guatemalan Ambassador to the United States since March 2008. As a career diplomat with more than 25 years in the Guatemalan foreign service, his previous positions include Guatemalan Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), the United Nations (where he also served as vice minister of foreign affairs), Canada, Norway, and Germany. He also has held fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., and the Center for the Defense of the Constitution in Guatemala City. Villagrán is an advocate for state involvement in democratic development, and encourages cooperation between governments – especially through, though not limited to, the Inter-American System and the OAS – in the areas of democratization, trade agreements, and regional security. Ambassador Villagrán holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Georgetown University, and an undergraduate degree in law and social sciences from Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City. Ambassador Villagrán will deliver a keynote address on Saturday.

Eluvia Aguilar Luen of the Santa Anita delegation

Eluvia Aguilar Luen was born in Concepción Chiquirichapa, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. As a girl, Ms. Aguilar fled in exile to Chiapas, Mexico after her two brothers joined the guerrilla movement.  Transition to life in Mexico was neither easy nor comfortable. Ms. Aguilar did not speak Spanish at the time, but rather only Maya Mam, and every day brought new challenges of assimilation.  Additionally, soon after her family’s arrival in Mexico, Ms. Aguilar was informed that her brothers had been killed in action, news which led to her decision to stay out of armed combat , even while many of her peers from Chiapas were re-entering Guatemala to join the conflict.

After years of waiting and clinging to bits of news smuggled across the border, in 1998 Ms. Aguilar began the painful and slow process of return and reintegration to Guatemala, a process undertaken by more than 400,000 refugees who had fled to Chiapas in the 1960s through 1990s. Her husband one of the disarmed ORPA combatants housed in Quetzaltenango, Ms. Aguilar resettled in the community of Santa Anita la Unión, where she currently lives with her five children. Like her peer Ms. Gloria Gomez, Ms. Aguilar works in Santa Anita’s ecotourism program and, according to many BUILD alums, makes the best banana bread in Colomba. 

Sponsors

BUILD

The Institute for Global Leadership

Just Coffee

Tufts University Philosophy Department