About the Community
Visit the Santa Anita la Unión website
Santa Anita la Unión, about 4 hours from Guatemala City in the fertile boca costa region near the country’s second largest city of Quetzaltenango (Xela), is a community of about 160 people, 32 families, who make a living cultivating organic coffee and bananas. Most of the men in the community, and many of the women, are former combatants of the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA), one of the four major guerrilla groups of the country’s 36-year civil war. When the four major guerrilla groups came together with the Guatemalan government in 1996 to sign the Peace Accords, the guerrilla vowed to disarm in exchange for the promise of peace, rights, and land.
To fulfill its promises of land, the government established Fondo de Tierras (the Land Fund), a body dedicated to facilitating the access to and purchase of land for resettled refugees, ex-guerrilla fighters, and rural campesinos. In 1998, the 32 families of Santa Anita la Unión negotiated the purchase of their farm through Fondo de Tierras and received a more than $300,000 loan for its purchase. According to the rules of the bank and Land Fund, Santa Anita was given a one year grace period on the debt, during which time they also were supposed to receive technical training from government-hired agronomists. The training--which proved infrequent and insufficient--was partially funded by the European Union, who also helped the families remove the overgrown, dead plants from the farm’s long abandoned land. After three years, the EU/government training stopped, and the debt became a practical, ominous reality for the families of Santa Anita, who have now gone six years barely paying off the 12% annual interest, not having repaid one cent of the $300,000 debt. Hopes of debt repayment were complicated by Hurricane Stan in 2005, which crippled the cooperative’s production and sales. Three years after the hurricane, production has still not reached pre-Stan levels.
A Violent History
Coffee has long been a crucial part of the Guatemalan economy. First introduced to Guatemala in the 19th century, coffee became highly politicized in the era known as the "Great Liberal Reform" in the 1870s under President Justo Rufino Barrios. As the 20th century dawned, speculators began expropriating tremendous swaths of land for the sake of coffee cultivation. Thousands of indigenous Guatemalans found their lives growing increasingly tied to the production of coffee, and by the mid-20th century, their calls for reform shattered the grip that the coffee elite had on the national economy. Reforms in the 1940s and 50s were short lived, unfortunately, and after an infamous U.S.-backed coup de e'tat in 1954, Guatemala plunged into a bloody armed conflict that lasted for more than 30 years, left more than 200,000 Guatemalans dead, and resulted in more than 1,000,000 internally displaced persons.
Challenges the Community Faces
The training given to the men and women of Santa Anita was a gesture mandated by the Peace Accords, but unfortunately, the three years of training did not sufficiently equip the workers of Santa Anita with the skills necessary to run a profitable farm. Many of the community members spent twenty or more years in the mountains with ORPA, and none of them entered Santa Anita with coffee farming skills. In a meeting with Guatemalan Congressman Oliverio García, the BUILD team was told that “Guatemala’s development future is to help the people do what they know how to do.” So what happens to unskilled laborers who have known little more than the guerrilla lifestyle for the past decades? Unwilling to take on new debts and interest payments, the families of Santa Anita are facing an economic crisis, many men in the community now spending half of their weeks in Guatemala City in minimum wage jobs in order to meet family needs. When BUILD conducted its initial assessment of Santa Anita, some community problems—which mainly stem from lack of economic resources—included:
- access to potable water (currently only 1.5 hrs per day),
- educational opportunities for adults and children,
- lack of technology for education, marketing, communication, and finances,
- lack of business administration knowledge,
- lack of direct export capabilities, and
- lack of adequate legal and financial representation.
It is impossible to address all of these problems at once, given the scale and skills of BUILD. After the initial research conducted in 2008, BUILD students remained in contact with Santa Anita's junta directiva in order to prioritize community needs and clarify points of concern and confusion. These series of conversations sparked the original idea for "Project Santa Anita," which has been in progress since September 2008 and has received tremendous support.
BUILD in Santa Anita la Unión
The Community Development Plan (CDP) has been a joint effort of the BUILD Program and the people of Santa Anita la Unión. All projects are the result of continuous, though not easy, communication between BUILD students and the community, and BUILD, in developing the CDP, attempted to respond in the most effective and feasible way possible to the plethora of problems the community is facing.
Tufts is not an agriculture school, yet its students felt a calling to work with this small coffee-growing community. It was therefore necessary that the BUILD team search for partnerships to fill in the gaps in knowledge that were vital in working in the field of agricultural development. It was unquestioned that low production was the most pressing problem. To that end a large portion of the CDP was focused on production increases and productivity workshops. The concept was directed and presented by BUILD, but the execution would require outside expertise.