Guatemala’s Inconvenient Truth

Part 1

James Harper:

So Jonathan, you know where I live, Berlin, Germany, there's this unique phenomenon, which I haven't found in many other places in the world, where you can go to any large supermarket, pick up a loaf of bread, and you can put it through the slicing machine, and it slices your bread fresh for you.

Jonathan Morris:

My sense of that is that they used to have those machines in bakeries in Britain, but no longer bother.

James Harper:

Well, Germany still does. And guess what else you can do? Again, you probably have this in the UK, but not anymore.

Yeah, especially this one here is made for a big grocery. So you and I, we went to Markoenig in Hamburg. They are our partner sponsor for the series.

Jonathan Morris:

They are.

James Harper:

They make grinders for professionals, home baristas. Almost every German supermarket has this corner. Ansgar, one of their product managers, explained that they also have a coffee grinder for supermarkets.

Ansgar:

And then you can grind by yourself the coffee in different grind sizes directly into the bag. Literally, just pick up a bag of coffee off the supermarket shelf. I will turn it on now.

Open the bag in the store and then dump it in the grinder.

James Harper:

Done. That was fast. That was very, very fast.

Ansgar:

So very, very fast, because this motor is running with almost 1700 RPMs. But Jonathan, you know what is the most interesting thing for me about this grinder? What is it? It's name.

Guatemala. We called our products, it came from the origin. That's why we call it Guatemala.

James Harper:

Right. So they named some of the coffee grinders after places where coffee is grown. And in this case, they chose Guatemala, which on the face of it is kind of strange.

They could have chosen to call this grinder Brazil, but they chose to call it Guatemala, even though Guatemala, it's not a major coffee producing country like Brazil. That is no accident.

Jonathan Morris:

You know, Malkoenig are based in Germany, in Hamburg, in Germany, and Guatemala, you know, have a very special connection.

James Harper:

Yes, yes, they do. A very special connection. Because, for example, when we were in Hamburg, you picked up some Guatemalan beans.

Correct. And we brought it up as a V60. And when we looked at the label, we noticed that the name of the producer from Guatemala, it wasn't a Latino name.

It's the German name. Yes, it's a very Germanic name. We're not going to name the producer, but it had the same kind of Germanic sounding ring to it as a name like Heinz Schmidt.

And that is kind of the story we're going to be exploring.

Jonathan Morris:

That is exactly the story that we want to explore. So, I mean, James, we're going to explore the history of coffee in Guatemala in this episode. You know, it's not just a story of colonial imperial extraction.

In fact, what this is, above all, is a story of what happens after the country becomes independent, after the Spanish rulers of the country have left. And to give you fair warning, dear listener, this is quite a dark story. It is.

But it's an important story, you know, because when you look at a coffee bag, you see something on the bag that says fifth generation coffee producer, a family farm. Well, if it comes from Guatemala or it comes really from many bits of Central America, it might not be quite as simple as that. It might actually be a signal for a more uncomfortable truth.

James Harper:

And we really want to thank Marconiq for supporting us to tell this kind of story.

Jonathan Morris:

We can tell this story, which I think is very important for the coffee community to hear, and we can create this free educational resource because of receiving our sponsorship. So thanks to Marconiq for making that possible.

James Harper:

I'm James Harper, creator of Filter Stories, a coffee documentary podcast.

Jonathan Morris:

And I'm Jonathan Morris, professional historian and author of the book Coffee Global History. And this is a history of coffee, a story of how a psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

James Harper:

This is our third series on the history of coffee. And in this episode, we're tackling the uncomfortable history of Guatemala and coffee.

Jonathan Morris:

Who owns the rich volcanic soils and who is forced to work them? Whose land is it anyway? James, you know, Guatemala, obviously, before the Europeans came along, it's inhabited by indigenous people, the Mayans.

And obviously, even today, there are some places that are still very much Mayan.

James Harper:

Yes, for example, the town of Jacaltenango. It's in the northern part of Guatemala, near the border of Mexico, in the region of Huehuetenango, which you'll often find written on many coffee bags. And I actually had a great conversation with somebody who grew up in the town of Jacaltenango.

Juan José López:

So I am Juan Jose Lopez. I am a PhD candidate in anthropology, and I study like coffee, multispecies relationships.

James Harper:

And Juan Jose's town of Jacaltenango sounds like an extraordinary place.

Juan José López:

You are encircled by mountains, and then you have like a triangle in which you can see like lowlands. And that's looking to Mexico and Chiapas lowlands.

James Harper:

And Juan Jose's family have been living here in Jacaltenango for longer than anyone can remember.

Juan José López:

So they have been in Jacaltenango, I think forever, right? There is no like a story of how they got to this place. Even today, they see themselves as Jacaltecos first.

Like, you know, people have come here to say that we are indigenous, that we are Maya, but we have been always been Jacaltecos.

Jonathan Morris:

Jacaltenango, it's almost entirely populated by indigenous people with long routes in that area.

James Harper:

And once upon a time, that was a story for all of Guatemala.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, indeed. Obviously, prior to the arrival of the Spanish, you know, the whole of Guatemala is populated by indigenous peoples living in very different societies. But in order to understand more about that history, we brought in somebody we both know, and I've worked with quite a bit, Professor Ted Fisher.

Ted Fischer:

My name is Ted Fisher. I'm a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University, which is in Nashville, Tennessee. I've been working in Guatemala since the early 1990s.

And my latest book is Making Better Coffee, How Mayan Farmers and Third World Tastemakers Create Value.

James Harper:

All right, so Ted, my first question for you is, if we were to rewind the clock 600 years before the Spanish, before Europeans come along, can you paint a picture of who's living in Guatemala? And in particular, how they manage the land?

Ted Fischer:

So many different languages spoken. Some of these are kingdoms. There are some big cities, but mostly they're small communities.

They had this system of agriculture. We call it milpa agriculture, where they would cut down land, they would plant crops, and it was a particular group of crops. Corn was the staple, maize was the staple, and beans and squash and tomatoes and chilies and things like that.

And it was seen as alive. The land is actually a living being, and we offer sacrifices to it, and it gives to us, and we have this cycle of reciprocity. And one thing that's really different, and that sometimes it's hard for us to wrap our western minds around, because we think of property in a very particular kind of way.

And it was different back then. The sense of private property wasn't there. Most land was communally owned.

It would be allocated and reallocated from year to year. To gain prestige in these communities, it was generally the people who gave away the most, who were the most generous to the community. So they weren't necessarily the wealthiest, or they did really well, but they gave all of what they earned away, and that would create this prestige.

Jonathan Morris:

What Ted's saying is we have collectively organized communities who work the land commonly together. They might change the partition of the land from year to year as to who looks at which bit, but essentially it's not really seen as a private resource, it's seen as a communal resource.

Jonathan Morris:

So this is that indigenous structure. Then, 1524, we have the arrival of colonizers from Europe, the Spanish.

Ted Fischer:

They're gold-hungry, they're silver-hungry. The cities that there are, they take them over, and they would hold the leaders hostage and demand so much jade or gold, and the gold that they would demand, and there was some gold around, but it wasn't like these huge quantities that we think about in Peru and other places. Yeah, so it was just really extraction, extraction, extraction.

James Harper:

But hold on. Jonathan, there are very few Spanish. They are totally outnumbered.

How did they get away with this?

Jonathan Morris:

They had gunpowder. The other thing that they had is disease. They brought with them a whole range of, as it were, common European diseases that obviously were not known in Guatemala, and that actually wiped out more of the native population probably than actually the bloodshed itself.

So, I mean, James, obviously today we have vaccines, we're not exposed to life-threatening diseases anymore, but back then, many more people are going to die from disease rather than die from old age. And of course, James, here's an interesting fact to you. There are obviously equally diseases in Guatemala to which the Spanish had never been exposed that were very deadly to them.

And as you know, you and I, we went together to Guatemala to present at a conference. You think about the Spanish capital that we visited.

James Harper:

Antigua.

Jonathan Morris:

And what was the amazing thing about Antigua? It's a giant square. It's an absolute giant square.

The whole of Antigua is constructed on that sort of square way with all these square roads, as it were, to make sure the wind goes through, to try and disperse what they thought would be the disease-bearing miasmas and so forth.

James Harper:

Interesting. Let's just return to the story. So the Spanish have turned up.

Jonathan Morris:

Spanish, yeah, they turn up, they hold people hostage. They're extracting what they can, but the fact is they've miscalculated. It isn't really that much gold.

So this isn't really something they can extract. But what they do find is a bug, the cochineal. And this bug produces a red dye.

And that becomes the basis for red dye in Europe. So instead of demanding gold, they demand that people give them cochineal.

James Harper:

So they're demanding this insect, which produces this red dye. But the Spanish, it doesn't sound like they are owning the land. It's still indigenous land that they're demanding things from.

Jonathan Morris:

The Spanish concentrate into armed military bases in the cities. Right. Around them is the countryside.

That's the huge, big expanse of Guatemala. That's where there are those indigenous people. But what they're telling them to do is give them tribute, such as bringing in those insects for them to then export.

So the indigenous people, as it were, are still settled on the land. And there's no sort of Spanish land ownership. But everything changes in the 19th century.

First of all, the then colony of Guatemala declares independence from Spain. And then towards the mid-century, the cochineal industry basically collapses as Europeans develop synthetic dyes back in Europe. So let's explore the Guatemalan independence story.

What happens? The end of the Spanish empire is caused by the Spanish settler population.

James Harper:

Right.

Jonathan Morris:

It's the settler population who are no longer prepared to be part of that empire for various reasons. But in essence, it's about self-government.

James Harper:

And this is the same story in America, right? Where American settlers, they declare independence from the British monarchy in the late 1700s. They're like, we are our own country.

Why are we taking orders from some faraway European country? Yes, actually, that is indeed the same thing that what happens basically in Guatemala too. Right.

So Guatemala is independent in 1821. So then who's really running the place?

Ted Fischer:

So we often talk about 20 families in Guatemala. And these are families that are very cognizant of their bloodlines and their ties to Spain and the whiteness of their skin. And then you have a, by some counts, a majority indigenous population.

And then this mixed, I hate to use the language, right? But this population that was called Ladinos who were Spanish, Maya, Guatemalan. And so you had these three layers.

And the elite elites were really kind of running things behind the scenes. They weren't president or anything. And then the Ladinos who aligned with the Western side of things.

James Harper:

Right. So these Spanish descendants elites, they're running the place. What do they want for their Guatemala?

Ted Fischer:

Among the elites, there was this notion that Guatemala should be a real nation. And by real nation, they were thinking France, Germany, England, something like that. A modern country.

And what's holding us back are all these indigenous peoples. And, you know, we're too enlightened to slaughter them. But as good economic liberals, we can privatize their land.

And in a very generous way, say, we nudge them or we pull them into the system. And make them modern.

Jonathan Morris:

And now comes the second piece, James. There's a collapse in the cochineal industry. The Guatemalans at the same time, that settler population, they want to modernize their economy, create a new export industry to replace cochineal.

And they decide to do it with coffee. Why coffee? Well, as we know, there's one fundamental thing about coffee.

You can't replace coffee from something in Europe. Something that we've already observed in our surrogates episode. In other words, coffee has to be grown only in tropical areas.

So coffee is, in that sense, a pretty good investment. But there is a problem. If you're going to do this, you've got to need people with money and capital that they're going to be prepared to invest to create that industry.

James Harper:

And coming up next, how Guatemala transformed itself into a coffee-growing powerhouse.

James Harper:

So, in the later 1800s, the Guatemalan elites, they want to modernize the country, they want to grow coffee, but they have a problem. There just aren't enough elites, and they themselves don't have enough money to really transform the entire country. So Ted, what do they do?

Ted Fischer:

They decided that we can import people to help us with this. And who better than the Germans? They're white, they're super white, so it's going to lighten up the population.

They're engineers, they build factories, so looking on into the future, when we become a real nation that has factories, we need these kind of people. And they can bring that expertise now with coffee processing machinery. And so they very explicitly had a program of, let's get Germans to come here.

There were conventions between Guatemala and Hamburg, basically giving Germans carte blanche, even at one point, immunity from prosecution in Guatemala. Basically saying, you can do whatever the hell you want in our country.

James Harper:

Yep. And why would Germans choose to move?

Jonathan Morris:

The obvious answer is money. They want to make money, cultivate fame.

Ted Fischer:

My favorite example is this Hamburg man, Erwin Paul Dieseldorf. And he was a second son of a trading family. And his father sent him at like 17 to go to an uncle in London and work in his trading house.

And then he wanted to make his own name for the family, but also for himself. So he made his way to Guatemala, was able to play on some family and friendship ties and borrow a little money and buy some land. So he goes to this area of Guatemala called Coban.

It's a little removed from Guatemala City and the cosmopolitan urban life there. But coffee was really starting to boom. And so there was some money.

He was one of the main players there. You can still buy Dieseldorf coffee today. Wow.

James Harper:

Okay. So Dieseldorf, he buys this land, but I would imagine that this land is indigenous land, right? Cultivated by indigenous communities.

So how does that work?

Jonathan Morris:

In very simple terms, James, the government uses its own legal system to declare it owns the land, takes it away from the indigenous people, and then sells it on to those settlers.

Ted Fischer:

Communal land was considered unused or fallowed land, right? These rotating cycles of milpa agriculture require a few years of fallowness between. Right.

And it can happen kind of shockingly fast. I mean, you know, the surveyors show up in a community where the majority of people are illiterate, much less conversant in the law and, you know, have people put fingerprints on pieces of paper and stuff. It still happens today.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, that's scary. So James, I think we want to highlight one thing here within the story, okay? The majority of the land that the government gives away is unsurprising.

The easy accessible, the very fertile, the low lying land, the land that's easily accessible from their own cities, that's the land they target. So the indigenous population living on that land definitely lose their land. However, land that was more inaccessible, more mountainous, further away from the centers of population, those were the places where you might see indigenous peoples continue to occupy the communal lands.

James Harper:

And that actually goes back to Juan Jose, who we heard from earlier. His town, Jacoltenango, you know, it is so far away. It is so mountainous, so hard to cultivate, that Juan Jose mentions that this is what saved them and allowed that land to stay in his community.

Juan José López:

Because it was considered a far away place, then most of the major city town halls were managed by the same people, which was indigenous people. So this change is really important because it allowed them to actually safeguard their land, right? To create titles, be owners of their land, and that safeguard their land in a context of dispossession.

James Harper:

Okay, so across Guatemala, we have so much dispossession, right? Indigenous land being sold to settlers, many German settlers coming along to cultivate coffee. Okay, but what about the labor?

Who's going to do the hard work of cultivating the coffee trees?

Jonathan Morris:

Well, surprise, surprise, James, that's going to be the indigenous people.

James Harper:

But how did they get indigenous people to work this land? You know, was it high wages?

Jonathan Morris:

Effectively, the Guatemalan government introduces laws that force the indigenous peoples to work on the land, usually for certain portions of the year at the direction of the authorities.

James Harper:

So the government effectively forced the indigenous people to do it. Exactly.

Ted Fischer:

The state could assign them to do things like road repair, and they did. Or they could assign them to work on coffee plantations or something like that. So aligned were the economic elites in the political state that the state saw it in its best interest to essentially give free subsidized labor to these German plantation owners.

Jonathan, hold on.

James Harper:

They were really getting paid nothing?

Jonathan Morris:

The point is, in practice, what this is, it's trapping people in a cycle of debt and poverty. So they're paying them very little.

James Harper:

Yeah. And that chimes with what Juan Jose told me. From his perspective, the way people suffered in this system was similar to slavery.

Juan José López:

So most of the people that were kicking off their land, I will say they just ended up being laborers of plantations, right? On their really severe conditions, which I will say it even resembles like what was happening in slave societies, right? And it was a very terrible situation for them.

James Harper:

Okay, so here we have sets of laws which strip indigenous people of their land and then force them to work, which is slavery in all but name. What if you were indigenous, though, and you decided, no, I'm not going to do this.

Ted Fischer:

You can get thrown in jail. There has to be a serious penalty about it. These were not popular laws.

Did anybody resist? Subtle resistance, what we in the social sciences sometimes call weapons of the weak, where workers would pretend not to understand something or act like they were less capable than they actually are. But there was also active protest.

On the Dieseldorf plantation, there were several strikes. Dieseldorf, he had a nemesis, this Maya guy named Jose Angel Aiko. And Dieseldorf, man, hated him.

He's hypnotizing all of my Mayan workers to think that they're being exploited. He helped organize these strikes and was ultimately jailed and died not long after he was released from jail.

James Harper:

Right, yeah, so the system crushed him. Quick aside, that German plantation owner, Dieseldorf, he is a fascinating character. He, on the one hand, is part of a system that caused so much suffering to the indigenous people of Guatemala.

And yet, at the same time, he's a pioneer in the study of Mayan culture.

Ted Fischer:

I mean, he's often portrayed in history in the social sciences as really a demon. I do not want to excuse any of his behavior. He did awful things.

But he was also fascinated by Mayan culture. He did studies and published books.

James Harper:

As ever, people are complex. And I'm going to be writing an article in the coffee magazine Standart about Dieseldorf and showing to the extent that I can how he made sense of the fact that he was, on the one hand, impoverishing the indigenous community, yet at the same time admiring their culture. That article will come out towards the end of 2026.

And there's a link to Standart, the magazine, in the show notes. Anyway, returning to the story, you know how we heard earlier how up in Juan Jose's town of Jacaltenango, although the indigenous community still owned that land, I was surprised to learn that they were actually required to work as laborers in the system as well. They were forced to come down from the mountains and work on the plantations.

Juan José López:

And Jacaltenango and Huehuetenango is also seen like a reservoir of labor. So they are seeing it just specifically as a space to extract labor for the coffee harvest and also for developing infrastructure for linking these plantations to the ports.

James Harper:

And I learned from Juan Jose how what happened here, this dispossession of land and then forcing the indigenous to then work on the plantations, the long-term effects of this are still felt today. But there is a contrast. There's a contrast between those people who lost their lands down in the lowlands.

There is a difference between them and the people in Juan Jose's community up in Jacaltenango who kept their land. They were still forced to work as laborers, but because they kept their land, today they're in a much, much better position financially.

Juan José López:

Just the difference between owning land and taking your land from you is still present today.

James Harper:

The indigenous who lost their land in the lowlands of Guatemala, they got pushed into a cycle of debt and poverty, which even today, if they wanted to migrate to the USA illegally to work and earn better money, they can't even afford to do that.

Juan José López:

Even the possibility of migrating doesn't even exist because you are so poor that you cannot even invest for migrating somewhere else, right?

James Harper:

The $5,000 it takes to get to the American border.

Juan José López:

You are not even close because you don't have anything in order to put like as a collateral for if you were to take out money.

James Harper:

Coming up next, we look at how the Germans fare in Guatemala and the war this all leads to.

Jonathan Morris:

Okay, so James, what we've heard as we get into now the 1900s, we've moved from a of having a Guatemala as a colony owned by the Spanish to the point where the settlers themselves have declared independence. But then following the collapse of Cochineal, they've basically removed the indigenous population from many of their commonly owned and invited in settlers, new settlers, primarily German settlers, to plant those up with coffee to recreate an export industry. And using indigenous labor.

Using the labor of those very people whose lands they have removed from them.

James Harper:

And condemning them, most of them, intergenerational poverty. But Jonathan, I want to quickly just touch here on the German side of the story, right? Because here we have many of the plantation owners in Guatemala who are German.

And so how much of the industry do Germans control at this point?

Jonathan Morris:

At the end of the 19th century, German families were responsible for 80% of the coffee that was exported from Guatemala. Wow, 80%.

James Harper:

And what about the other side? How much of the coffee that Germany is drinking comes from Guatemala?

Jonathan Morris:

After Brazil, Guatemala is the next biggest import. But Ted suggests that there could also be a kind of a flavor reason that people in Germany like Guatemalan coffee.

Ted Fischer:

The Germans were noted early on as having a taste for high quality coffee. And most of the coffee at the time was produced in Brazil. And to the German palate, the Brazilian coffee was inferior.

And the Guatemalan washed arabicas were superior.

Jonathan Morris:

Another thing to mention, of course, here is connecting back to our first episode when we saw how Hamburg developed the coffee exchange, partly because of those deep German connections across the coffee trade. Those German families are involved in every aspect. You might have members of the family who are out there growing coffee, shipping coffee.

And then you've got trading families who are importing it and companies roasting it. And so if a German plantation owner in Guatemala saw that bad weather was affecting their harvest, then they're going to report that back to their family in Germany, quite often part of the same trading family, as it were. And that gets over to the Hamburg exchange.

They know before anybody else that gives them an advantage in the coffee market. So you get this whole sort of chain of connections.

James Harper:

Right. And so given all of this, you know, when Malkoen thinks about what kind of grinder are we going to name after a coffee producing country? Of course, it's going to be Guatemala.

Yeah, exactly. But what I'm curious to know here, back in Guatemala, here we have this enormously profitable coffee export business dominated by German families in this extremely unequal system, right? Where we have the indigenous people living in poverty and this land-owning settler class who is making very good money.

And so what does that do to a society when you have the settler class making just fabulous profits and the workers trapped in poverty?

Ted Fischer:

A Marxist historian would say it would lead to the civil war that started in Guatemala in the 1960s.

James Harper:

Okay.

Ted Fischer:

It is a highly unequal place, one of the most unequal places in the world. And you feel it when you're there. You feel it and you see it.

And so today, these people living in Guatemala City in gated mansions with serious security staffs. They fly by helicopter to the plantation house periodically, sometimes spend some time there and play farmer and then fly back out. They can tell you about the best new bakery in Paris more than they could tell you about the communities where they own land.

James Harper:

Incredibly unequal place. And as you say, some historians say this inequality creates the conditions for the Guatemalan civil war, which actually only came to an end 30 years ago. Tell me about the civil war.

How do we get there?

Ted Fischer:

What got solidified in the 20th century, sugar and bananas became the other big export crops and particularly bananas.

Promotional film narrator:

Green gold, the largest banana plantations in the world.

Ted Fischer:

And so you had this system that was based around exporting plantation crops that relied on super cheap labor.

Promotional film narrator:

Native workers attacked the enemy tropical undergrowth, machetes to the right of them, machetes to the left of them. These tireless workers cut their way through a tropical wilderness to conquer the soil for the new banana plantation.

Documentary narrator:

Guatemala, the Banana Republic, a major exporter of bananas, coffee, sugar. More than half of its citizens are Indian. More than 80 percent of them suffer from malnutrition.

For most of this century, they've been ruled by military dictatorships. However, Guatemala knew a brief period of democracy. 1950, Jacobo Arbenz is elected president.

Arbenz implements a campaign promise, land reform, returning unused land to the peasants.

Jacobo Árbenz's son:

Guatemala was a very backward country, based on a colonial, almost feudal system. One of the first things that my father, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, did as president was to bring in reforms to modernize farming. America's United Fruit Company, which had enormous economic power in Guatemala at the time, didn't like the changes.

They became very upset when they saw that their monopoly was being affected. This was the time of the Cold War, so they took advantage of this to label my father a communist, which was totally untrue. And that's how they promoted and justified the idea of an invasion.

US archive voice:

By 1954, Guatemala was well on its way to becoming the first full-fledged member of the communist bloc on this side of the Atlantic. It was then the United States provided the moral and material means for the temporary removal of communism from the Western Hemisphere.

Documentary narrator:

1954. U.S. officials meet with Guatemalan military leaders. A coup d'etat is devised.

Unknown interviewee:

A communist conspiracy was invented. Soviet intervention was decried, proclaimed. The CIA armed Castillo Armas, and with the full backing of the CIA, with planes, with arms, Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala from Honduras, and the democratic experiment came to an end in Guatemala.

Jacobo Árbenz's son:

My father resigned as president in 1954.

Jacobo Árbenz:

I have taken a momentous decision for our country in the hope that it will halt the invasion and bring peace back to Guatemala.

Jonathan Morris:

The U.S. put in a pro-American military dictator who was happy to crush all the opposition.

Documentary narrator:

Arbenz is forced into exile. Members and supporters of the reform government are purged and jailed. Peasants executed as alleged communist sympathizers.

Jonathan Morris:

Military dictators then last in power for the best part of 30 years or so. There are resistance to that. There are small armed groups who identify as Marxists, and they operate in predominantly indigenous areas.

Ted Fischer:

You had these rebellions that started in Guatemala, and the second rebellion started in the mid-1970s, and was more active in Mayan areas, had a lot more Mayan participants.

Jonathan Morris:

But as Tate explains to us, that's not necessarily because Mayans believed in Marxism.

Ted Fischer:

They were orthodox Marxists in a way that was hard to fully bring in Mayan culture and beliefs. So there was always a bit of a tenuous relationship.

James Harper:

So where in Guatemala is this rebellion taking place?

Jonathan Morris:

Essentially, if you're going to fight any kind of rebellion, you can't do it down in the lowlands because it's easy to get found. It's easy to get caught. You do it up in the mountains where basically you have the possibility of taking shelter or it's hard to find you.

And of course, up in the mountains, that's where many of the Mayans were living.

James Harper:

Right. But in any case, in the mountains, there are these armed groups calling themselves Marxists.

Ted Fischer:

The U.S. sees this and they're like, oh, oh, my God. I mean, they're taking over. They should take over because if we look at the conditions objectively, the people have a reason to join this revolution.

And then they're at Mexico.

James Harper:

Right. The dominoes.

Ted Fischer:

Yeah. And so then they're at us. And so the United States reacted with really supporting the Guatemalan government to conduct what has been determined by a U.N. body as genocide, killing the Mayan population intentionally. And so in the 70s, they conducted scorched earth campaigns against Mayan villages, many of them in coffee producing areas. And the stories are just so horrific. They almost make me cry recounting them of babies heads bashed against the wall, women raped in front of their families, communities herded into the church and it burned down with them in it alive.

James Harper:

Juan Jose told me some stories that he'd heard. At one point, the government wanted to track whether guerrilla fighters were coming in across the border from Mexico. But it was difficult because there were all these mountain villages near the border with indigenous people.

And so they just swept through and murdered them.

Juan José López:

They just went there and they just tried to kill and disappear everyone.

Unknown journalist:

And this man comes up to this short Indian man who was a schoolteacher there with his students. And we said, we're journalists. And he finally kind of believed us.

And he told us a story that he had personally witnessed. The army came in and they rounded up all the men, about four dozen men, and they arbitrarily assigned them to La Gloria or El Infierno, heaven or hell, completely arbitrarily. Half of them went to heaven, the other half went to hell.

The army then shot the half who went to El Infierno, and they ordered the ones who were saved to La Gloria to bury the others. And this man was one of those who had been saved. And he had to bury his fellow townsmen.

Ted Fischer:

And coffee plantations were understandably a flashpoint in this. A number of them were burned down or taken over by rebels. The military saw it as their goal to keep the status quo.

Jonathan Morris:

There were coffee plantation owners who were symbolically executed. You kind of saw the identification by the rebels of those big coffee owners as symbolic of the system that was oppressing the population.

Archive narrator:

36 years of civil war in which at least 200,000 people were killed.

Archive statistic voice:

83% of the victims are indigenous.

Jonathan Morris:

James, I mean, this has been a really dark episode. We've seen how Guatemala was originally inhabited by indigenous people with very sort of communal practices around the land. And then things changed dramatically as first the Spanish come in.

And then particularly after Guatemala declares independence because the ruling class of the European descent modernized the country, by focusing on coffee as their key export crop, confiscating that communal land, selling it to particularly German origin plantation owners, and making the indigenous communities then work as landless laborers on that land, leaving them in very dire poverty. And the kind of the only exceptions are communities that are so high up in the mountains, these sort of indigenous communities far from the center of a settlement, that they retain their land simply because of their geographical isolation. And then all of this culminates in that 30-year Guatemalan civil war.

And this is the 20th century, James, not long ago, where hundreds of thousands, vast majority of them indigenous, are massacred as part of an American-backed military campaign that doesn't finish until the 1990s. Incredible. Shocking.

James Harper:

But coming up in part two, in the next episode, with the rise of specialty coffee, this very dark story flips around. Because coffee goes from this tool of oppression to hope, and then to something a bit more complicated.

Jonathan Morris:

Yes, James, it's a complicated question, because we have to ask ourselves, what do we actually care about when it comes to our own specialty coffee?

Part 2

James Harper:

So welcome back to A History of Coffee. This is the second part of a two-part episode about the history of Guatemala and coffee. If you haven't heard the first episode, I strongly suggest that you do.

But in any case, Jonathan, please give us a quick refresher. What did we cover in the last episode?

Jonathan Morris:

Guatemala is inhabited by its indigenous people, who commonly owned and cultivated the land. But things change once the Spanish arrive, and especially, actually, when Guatemala, the country, gains its independence. Because that ruling European elite aimed to modernize the country, focusing on coffee as the key export crop.

So what they do is pass a law in 1871, confiscates the indigenous communal land, sell off that land to German plantation owners, and then the indigenous are coerced into working it, and many of them are left very, very poor. And we see a huge rise in inequality between the two, which ultimately sparks that long-lasting civil war between a large amount of the indigenous population against an American-backed military ruling elite.

James Harper:

A very dark time, when almost 200,000 indigenous people were killed, often indiscriminately. Yes, absolutely. So this is where we are, by the 90s.

But of course, in the 90s, something really begins to transform the coffee world. Specialty coffee. Taking bigger and bigger strides as a very small industry.

Yeah, taking wing. So here, in part two, we look at the story of how specialty coffee changes the story for the indigenous people of Guatemala. Coffee, as a tool of oppression, finally offers hope.

But then, something a bit more complicated. Let's return to Ted Fisher to take us into this next part of the story. As you mentioned, Jonathan, many of the large, historically German plantation owners, they had farms down in the lowlands.

The coffee was good, but it was still a commodity coffee.

Ted Fischer:

It was a quality product when it was introduced in the 19th century, and even into the 20th century, Guatemala has retained a reputation for quality coffee. But quality commodity coffee, right? Quality coffee going into supermarket bags and things like that.

Jonathan Morris:

So then, in the late 1990s, specialty coffee, as we say, is starting to take off. And there's a strong view in specialty coffee that the higher up a coffee is grown, the more likely it is to have specialty flavours. And the problem, of course, for the German producers, the big coffee-owning families in Guatemala, is their farms are now suddenly in the wrong place.

Ted Fischer:

These German farmers have been working at relatively low elevations, 750 to 1350 metres.

Jonathan Morris:

In order to grow your specialty quality at higher elevations, it's got to be up in those lands that, as we said, were still in the hands of the indigenous up in the mountains, the higher elevation.

Ted Fischer:

And then with this quality turn, looking at better coffees, which meant higher elevation coffees, production started moving up into these Mayan communities in the highlands. And so you had a lot of people starting to grow coffee that didn't before. And it makes all kinds of sense.

Many of them had worked seasonally on plantations, so they kind of knew the routine. They're agriculturalists, so they're very familiar with working the land. It ties into the agricultural cycles of rural communities in a way that makes sense to them.

And there was a market for it.

James Harper:

And so, as Ted tells us, as these Mayan communities start to grow, coffee, specialty coffees, of course, specialty coffees attract a higher price than commodity coffees. And this made a big change for these communities.

Ted Fischer:

And indeed, in the 2000s, we see a real boom in Mayan coffee producing communities. The prices that they're able to get are going up. They start buying cell phones.

The more successful, you know, try and buy a truck or add indoor plumbing or something to their house. So it's success on a relative scale, right? They're not buying helicopters.

James Harper:

And speaking with Juan Jose, somebody from the community of Jacultinango, up near the This is where most of Guatemala's smallholder coffee farmers are, up in the mountains.

Juan José López:

It is the department where you have the most small coffee farmers, right?

James Harper:

But he caveated that, saying this is the case because his community were able to keep their lands, unlike all the indigenous down in the lowlands who had their lands confiscated and sold to the German settlers.

Juan José López:

And that it's only because they were able to safeguard their land.

James Harper:

And in some ways, they were the lucky ones who they weren't kicked off their land.

Juan José López:

Exactly. Yeah. So that's some of the strange ways in which history unfolds sometimes.

James Harper:

But Jonathan, this is kind of curious for me, because obviously in the history of Guatemala, coffee has been this tool of extraction that's caused so much suffering and intergenerational poverty for the indigenous who lost their land and were forced to work for almost nothing on these plantations. And so I was curious from the perspective of Juan Jose, you know, why would his community choose to grow coffee, this thing that was so destructive to them?

Juan José López:

I will say it became like this welcome companion, right? A very not positive relationship, I will say.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah.

Juan José López:

But also if we think about like how indigenous communities think about the world, I will say that there is a differentiation in between like what we as humans are doing with this plant and the plant itself, which is not necessarily linked to colonialism, right?

James Harper:

Right. It's neutral.

Juan José López:

Exactly. It's just like a vegetal life. The plant itself is not actually making the system, right?

Jonathan Morris:

Okay. So this is great. Yes.

Here we have specialty coffee. It's bringing prosperity in the early days of the specialty revolution. These high grown Guatemalan coffees, they're selling for a premium.

The premium is delivering, you know, back to farmers a modest livelihood, but a sustainable livelihood that obviously they had struggled to access before.

Ted Fischer:

Generally, it was a big boom for Mayan communities. Man, this product that we used to sell for nothing, almost at a loss, we're now able to make some money on. No small farmers get rich off the coffee.

But sometimes they save up their money and buy a truck or open a little tienda or do other things. It was huge in these rural Mayan communities that have been marginalized for generations, hundreds of years in so many ways.

James Harper:

But then the coffee market shifts again. There's even more money to be made now. But can Mayan communities take advantage of this?

That's coming up next. So Jonathan, the rise of specialty coffee in the early 2000s is a very nice change to what has been historically a pretty dark story. But the thing is, as we know, specialty coffee is always evolving.

And the specialty coffee of 25 years ago looks very different from the specialty coffee of today. The indigenous communities in Guatemala were able to make good money from what specialty coffee looked like 25 years ago. But as specialty coffee changes, were they still able to take advantage?

Jonathan Morris:

And so let's just quickly touch on what did specialty coffee look like 25 years ago? In the early 2000s, it's basically, look, have you got a coffee that tastes somewhat better or somewhat different from your basic commodity coffee? And the other thing, of course, is, you know, origin is somewhat different at that point.

To say it's a single origin probably means it comes from a single country or at least a single area. It doesn't have to be a single farm.

James Harper:

Right. And Ted actually told us a story of him going to a specialty coffee cafe back in the day, 25 years ago. And this is what he saw.

Ted Fischer:

I remember I was living in New Orleans in the early days of specialty coffee. And when the coffee shop started putting up Kona or Guatemala or Blue Mountain. And Guatemala was one of those that made it into the early differentiation that way.

Jonathan Morris:

So as Ted explained to us, you know, the Mayan communities do really well in the early days of the specialty revolution. Right.

James Harper:

But as we know, specialty coffee shifts, it evolves. And it's really not that long after, in the 2010s and onwards, that a new era of specialty coffee begins. Whereas in that earlier period of specialty coffee, it was just really about a coffee from a single country or maybe a region and a coffee that tasted distinctly better than commodity.

Fast forward 10 years and now we have an increased focus on specific farms, on really interesting fermentation techniques, on very exotic varieties. And specialty coffees start to taste more and more distinct, interesting, different. And of course, prices also go up.

And this is all fantastic for the farmers who produce these coffees.

Ted Fischer:

The third wave revolution of really looking for particular named farms, unusual varietals, the Maya were left out of that.

James Harper:

The Maya struggled to capitalize on this new shift in the market. But here's the funny thing. Their neighbors, their literal neighbors, were actually able to take advantage of it and prosper.

Ted Fischer:

In these highland areas, you had Mayan communities growing coffee. You also had a number of Ladino, non-Maya, middle-sized farms growing coffee in these same regions. They weren't the coffee oligarchy that we call the Germans and the others.

But they were a little better off than the locals.

Jonathan Morris:

Just to clarify, these farmers who we're calling Ladinos, this is a kind of a mixed ancestry background. Some of their ancestry is European, some of it's indigenous. And they become, if you like, part of what Ted called them as the global middle class.

James Harper:

Right. So these are people who are not American or European level middle class, but middle class by Guatemalan standards.

Ted Fischer:

So they were doing well enough that they may have sent their kids to the university in the capital. They may have taken a trip to the U.S. or somewhere out of the country before.

James Harper:

And on those rare trips where they would leave Guatemala and went to America, their eyes were opened.

Ted Fischer:

They saw what consumers were going for. You know, if you went to a coffee shop in Portland in 2000 and you saw what they were selling and you came back, you were able to present this.

James Harper:

They saw that prices were really good.

Ted Fischer:

Prices continued to go up. Demand for higher and higher quality or more and more exotic coffees went up.

Jonathan Morris:

And they gave the market what it wanted, specialty flavors, exotic varietals, interesting fermentation techniques.

Ted Fischer:

These middle sized Ladino farmers just really taken off in the years since.

Jonathan Morris:

And they're able to charge a premium for that.

Ted Fischer:

The market went to this next level where you're starting to pay $20 wholesale for coffee, where the market price is $1 or maybe $2 or even more than that.

James Harper:

Right. So here we have these Ladino farmers who are doing relatively better than the neighboring Mayan indigenous farmers. But why?

Why weren't indigenous producers catering to this super specialty shift? And speaking further with Ted and Juan Jose, what began to emerge is actually there is a huge clash of values behind the values of specialty coffee compared to the values that indigenous communities hold. For example, to start with.

Juan José López:

People are more attuned to how much coffee you produce, not how much money did you earn. Juan Jose told me a story.

James Harper:

At one point, he had a few sacks of very experimental specialty coffees with really interesting flavors. And he was able to sell them at a much higher price than, you know, the regular coffee they were producing. But the reaction from his friends speaks volumes.

Juan José López:

So I was talking to these friends of me that are also coffee farmers. And I was like, hey, do you know, like I sell like, let's say, three sacks at this price. Right.

And I was expecting them to be like excited. Right. And then they were like, oh, yeah, but that's only like three.

Right.

James Harper:

His friends weren't impressed. Three sacks. It's not very much.

His friends didn't care about the price. They only cared about the quantity because that ties to the values of the community.

Juan José López:

It speaks about your relationship with the land. Right. The more you produce, the more blessed you are in somehow.

Right. The field is in somehow takes your personhood. Right.

As the person, it is like an extension of you. So the more your field produces, it's sort of like the more wealthy you are. Like, let's say, even in gender, like the more men you are.

Jonathan Morris:

What matters within the community is not profit. It's about abundance. How much can you get from the land?

How much can it provide you with? And that's really the status symbol within the culture.

James Harper:

Right. But that doesn't lend itself to specialty coffee. Specialty coffee is the opposite of volume.

A lot of farmers who are focused on producing specialty coffees, they choose varieties of trees that don't produce very much volume. But what they do produce have great flavors, which they can sell for a higher price. So this cultural value on abundance is one reason why not so much specialty coffee is produced.

But it goes further, too. There are other ways in which mine values clash with the values of specialty coffee.

Juan José López:

There is a value in collectivity.

James Harper:

So, Jonathan, in Juan Jose's community, a lot of things are done communally, which goes right back to what we covered in part one, where Ted Fisher, he told us about how the indigenous communities of Guatemala managed their land before Europeans came along.

Jonathan Morris:

Ted's argument was, you know, the mine communities, the land is seen as a collective good by the community. They have a system of allocation which varies from year to year depending upon your need.

James Harper:

And speaking with Juan Jose, he mentioned how today you can still see these collective systems at play in his town of Jacoltenango.

Juan José López:

In Jacoltenango, we have like these concepts of wayap, which is taking turns to work in each other's plots of land. So we will do a wayap today with me. So I will go and let's say all help me to clean my field.

Then next week we go to the others.

James Harper:

So Juan Jose's community has these strong collective values, but that actually works against producing super specialty coffees, because super specialty coffees are all about uniqueness, specialness, being different from everybody else.

Juan José López:

And I feel like this idea of like the specialty, you know, the terroir, the specificities of this sensorial coffee, it's really very singularized to a specific field.

James Harper:

And so given this strong preference for collectivity, not doing it alone, singularizing your coffee production, Ted tells us that.

Ted Fischer:

Mayan farmers have a strong preference to work through cooperatives when they can.

Jonathan Morris:

In the cooperative, you tend to see all the members as equals.

James Harper:

And when Juan Jose explained the process of a farmer selling their coffee to the cooperative.

Juan José López:

You go to the warehouse and there is like this person that is like, OK, hi, how are you? How much coffee are you coming? Ah, just like five quintales.

And that's all.

James Harper:

There's no mention of cupping scores. Members get paid based solely on quantity. And let's just say hypothetically, you are a farmer up in Jacultinango, Juan Jose's community, and you want to do things your own way.

You want to grow specialty coffee. You want to have direct conversations with buyers, earn more money than the cooperative is able to get for you. In theory, you could do it.

But Juan Jose mentions you're going to have a problem.

Juan José López:

So that creates tension because you are in a world in which collectivity is value, not singularization.

Jonathan Morris:

To be clear, you are choosing to move out of your culture. Right. That's the point.

You're choosing to contradict your cultural norm. Absolutely. All of these then are kind of interweaving reasons, interconnected reasons, why these communities are left out of that shift into the super specialty world that we experience today.

Right.

James Harper:

And so that then takes us to the question. If you want to buy a coffee from Guatemala, which coffee should you buy? What should you look for?

So, Jonathan, you want to buy a coffee from Guatemala. Guatemalan coffee is that delicious?

Jonathan Morris:

They certainly are.

James Harper:

The question is, which farmer do you want to buy from?

Jonathan Morris:

And how do you know which that farmer is? How do you figure it out? Because, I mean, there are three different groups of farmers, right?

So you've got the historic leftover of the coffee oligarchy, German plantation owners. Then you have this group of Ladinos, the people with a mixed heritage, European and indigenous. And then you have the more clearly indigenous, the Maya produced coffees from those uplands.

Of course, that's a spectrum, James. We've outlined three, what we would call ideal types, as in, you know, stereotypes. But basically, there are all kinds of different farms and backgrounds overlapping with each other.

James Harper:

But here's the thing, though, Jonathan. With a little bit of decoding, you might be able to figure out which kind of farmer we're talking about here. For example, oftentimes, when you look at a Guatemalan coffee, you might see a written fifth generation coffee producer, which to me as a coffee consumer, that's fantastic.

Family business, long running, heritage. But Ted Fisher warns, you've got to be careful, actually.

Ted Fischer:

And so, yeah, a lot of those keywords that sound very attractive, fifth generation farmer or whatever it may be, could actually be red flags. A lot of times what you're seeing are legacy plantations.

Jonathan Morris:

Many consumers might think fifth generation farmer. You'll be supporting the sort of the struggling small indigenous farmer. But actually, if you think about this a bit, five generations doesn't take you far that back historically.

And what you're actually supporting is probably the heirs, as it were, of the legacy settler plantation owners, who are certainly going to be better off than the Mayan farmers.

James Harper:

Yes, it's funny. But Ted also mentions that there are very few of these plantations around anyway, these days.

Ted Fischer:

The large plantations are largely gone. This is crazy. This is the other thing that happened with the quality turn.

They're selling their land. They're moving to timber. They're doing many hydroelectric.

The market for commodity coffee is so up and down, and it's been down so much in recent decades. The old coffee oligarchy is getting out of coffee.

James Harper:

Wow.

Ted Fischer:

No need to worry too much about them. They're doing fine. Their kids are working for investment banks in New York and London.

James Harper:

Another thing that I thought was really interesting is a bit of a trap actually. Many consumers, they want organic coffees, fair trade coffees. And you would think fair trade works a lot with cooperatives.

That's how they implement the certification system is through cooperatives. And as we just heard, Mayan indigenous communities love to work in cooperative systems. But Ted says if you go for fair trade organic, you might actually be excluding Mayan farmers.

Ted Fischer:

We often also see lots of labels on bags these days. And those labels contribute to what we might think would be a Mayan approach to coffee, ecologically conscientious, respectful of labor, and so forth. And yet all of those labeling regimes are very difficult to get and cost money for farmers.

And so most smallholding Mayan farmers don't participate in those.

James Harper:

So by choosing to pursue some kind of certification, you are excluding the possibility of buying Mayan coffee.

Ted Fischer:

I wouldn't quite go that far. But yes, it's a barrier that may not be promoting the goals that the consumer is thinking. So there's that.

James Harper:

And now one other wrinkle, curveball to throw at you. If you're thinking of buying Guatemalan coffee, maybe from Mayan producers. If you are somebody who prioritizes exceptional coffee flavors, super specialty stuff, well, by prioritizing that, you might be excluding Mayan farmers.

And you might probably be led towards a path of enjoying coffee from Guatemala from Ladino farmers, who very much cater to that market.

Jonathan Morris:

I agree, James. And I think that's one of the great paradoxes of specialty coffee, right? But there's something else, too, that I want to point out here.

There are examples where certainly I've seen in Guatemala, where you'll go to a Ladino farm, and they will be providing services for their workers and pickers, who tend to be from indigenous communities, that are paid for by that coffee. So I've seen schools that are educating Mayan indigenous children, in particular in agricultural techniques, in basic marketing techniques, and in language. It's a very morally difficult set of judgments here that we're making.

Yes. It's never been harder to be a conscious consumer.

James Harper:

The further you try to be conscientious, the more difficult it becomes. But Jonathan, when we know there's a story, it does help change how we perceive a coffee. Absolutely so.

The story literally changes our perceptions of the flavor. It's kind of the magic of the brain. If you as a consumer really want to buy Mayan coffee for what Mayan coffee has to offer, I asked Juan Jose, what is the story?

What makes coffee from his region of Jacoltenango special?

Juan José López:

I would say it's the history that coffee has in this specific place. You are tasting collective effort. You are tasting some of the arrangements that happened a couple of hundred years ago, right?

When people get access to their land. It is also tasting the in-between, right? Tasting the in-between of engaging in capitalism, but also trying to maintain other sorts of values.

And I think also the, let's say, environmental and these relationships are there. For example, if you are blessed by the land, right, you will produce. That's what is in the cup of Jacoltenango's coffee.

James Harper:

Thank you very much for listening.

Jonathan Morris:

If you'd like to learn more about Ted Fisher's work, then obviously the best place to start is with his book, Making Better Coffee.

James Harper:

Juan Jose finishes his PhD next year and it examines coffee farming in Jacoltenango as he describes it as a kind of alchemy where ritual, ecology and generational memory all shape how a farmer decides to tend the land. You can follow him on LinkedIn to learn more. We've got links in the show notes.

Jonathan Morris:

So, this is the last episode of Series 3. Wow.

James Harper:

Final episode, Jonathan.

Jonathan Morris:

The final episode.

James Harper:

Over already? I feel like it hardly even began.

Jonathan Morris:

I sense that we might find we're doing a bonus episode because there's been so much here. So much. But yeah, if you want more episodes, let us know.

James Harper:

Tell us. You can get us on our Instagrams. I'm at filterstoriespodcast.

Jonathan Morris:

And I'm at coffeehistoryjm. On Instagram, I'll use illustrations to go further into the history of settlers and coffee in Guatemala.

James Harper:

And on my Instagram, I will have images of what coffee cultivation looks like today in Jacoltenango.

Jonathan Morris:

And if you haven't already, you should absolutely pick up Jonathan's book. Thank you, James. It's called Coffee, A Global History.

Link in the show notes. Should you wish to reward James, you can buy him a coffee at coffee.com.

James Harper:

It's a platform like Patreon, but run by nicer people, where you can contribute to my work so I can continue to make these sorts of documentaries for you.

Jonathan Morris:

And just to be clear, coffee is spelled K-O-F-I. Link in the show notes. We want people to tell their friends about this episode.

Press subscribe. Rate and review. And what should they do when they go onto Instagram, James?

James Harper:

Yeah, one way that really helps to get people knowing about this podcast is create a screen grab of your podcast player listening to this episode. Share it as a story. Tag Jonathan and I, because that way we can thank you and repost it.

Absolutely.

Jonathan Morris:

So, A History of Coffee is produced by James Harper and myself, Professor Jonathan Morris.

James Harper:

I edit the episodes. I also write and play the music.

Jonathan Morris:

And if I may say, I compliment you on your music for Series 3.

James Harper:

Thank you.

Jonathan Morris:

I am available for weddings. There's no need to go to Desperate Advert out there.

James Harper:

Great. Well, until next time, let's not try and make it three years between Series, like we did between Series 2 and 3, Jonathan. Was it really incredible?

If you want a series sooner than that, let us know. Until next time.

Jonathan Morris:

It's goodbye from me. Ciao, ciao. And one final thought.

Whatever you decide to buy from Guatemala, enjoy your coffee.