Unfortunately, the Portuguese proceeded to destroy much of that paradise. The sugar plantations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had established the pattern of huge fazendas (plantations) owned by the elite, where slaves worked in unimaginably awful conditions, dying after an average of seven years. The owners found it cheaper to import new slaves than to maintain the health of existing laborers. Growing cane eventually turned much of the northeast into an arid savanna.
As sugar prices weakened in the 1820s, capital and labor migrated to the southeast in response to the coffee expansion in the region’s Paraiba Valley. While Francisco de Melo Palheta had brought seeds to Para in the northern tropics, coffee grew much better in the more moderate weather of the mountains near Rio de Janeiro, where it had been introduced by a Belgian monk in 1774. The virgin soil, the famed terra roxa (red clay), had not been farmed due to a gold and diamond mining boom in the eighteenth century. Now that the precious minerals were depleted, the mules that once had carted gold could transport beans down already-developed tracks to the sea, while the surviving mining slaves could switch to coffee harvesting. As coffee cultivation grew, so did slave imports, rising from 26,254 in 1825 to 43,555 in 1828. By this time well over a million slaves labored in Brazil, composing nearly a third of the country’s population.
To placate the British, who by then had outlawed the slave trade, the Brazilians made the importation of slaves illegal in 1831 but failed to enforce the law. Slavery’s days were clearly numbered, however, and so the slavers increased the number of slaves imported annually to 60,000 by 1848.
When British warships began to capture slave boats, the Brazilian legislature truly banned importation of slaves in 1850. Still, some 2 million already in the country remained in bondage. A system of huge plantations, known as latifundia, promoted a way of life reminiscent of the slave plantations of the Old South in the United States, and coffee growers became some of the wealthiest men in Brazil.
A traveler in the Paraiba Valley described a typical slave schedule:The negroes are kept under a rigid surveillance, and the work is regulated as by machinery. At four o’clock in the morning all hands are called out to sing prayers, after which they file off to their work. . . . At seven [P.M.] files move wearily back to the house. . . . After that all are dispersed to household and mill-work until nine o’clock; then the men and women are locked up in separate quarters, and left to sleep seven hours, to prepare for the seventeen hours of almost uninterrupted labor on the succeeding day.
Although some plantation owners treated their slaves decently, others forced them into private sadistic orgies. Beatings and murders were not subject to public scrutiny. Slave children were frequently sold away from their parents. Constantly on guard against slave retaliation—a scorpion in the boot or ground glass in the cornmeal—owners always went armed. Slaves were regarded as subhuman, “forming a link in the chain of animated beings between ourselves and the various species of brute animals,” as one slaveholder explained to his son.
Brazil maintained slavery longer than any other country in the Western Hemisphere. In 1871 Pedro II, who had freed his own slaves more than thirty years earlier, declared the “law of the free womb,” specifying that all newborn offspring of slaves from then on would be free. He thus guaranteed a gradual extinction of slavery. Even so, growers and politicians fought against abolition. “Brazil is coffee,” one Brazilian member of parliament declared in 1880, “and coffee is the negro.”
War Against the Land
In his book With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the ecological historian Warren Dean documented the devastating effect coffee had on Brazil’s environment. During the winter months of May, June, and July, gangs of workers would begin at the base of a hill, chopping through the tree trunks just enough to leave them standing. “Then it was the foreman’s task to decide which was the master tree, the giant that would be cut all the way through, bringing down all the others with it,” Dean wrote. “If he succeeded, the entire hillside collapsed with a tremendous explosion, raising a cloud of debris, swarms of parrots, toucans, [and] songbirds.” After drying for a few weeks, the felled giants were set afire. As a result, a permanent yellow pall hung in the air at the end of the dry season, obscuring the sun. “The terrain,” Dean observed, “resembled some modern battlefield, blackened, smoldering, and desolate.”
At the end of this conflagration, a temporary fertilizer of ash on top of the virgin soil gave a jump-start for year-old coffee seedlings, grown in shaded nurseries from hand-pulped seeds. The coffee, grown in full sun rather than shade, sucked nutrition out of the depleting humus layer. Cultivation practices—rows planted up and down hills that encouraged erosion, with little fertilizer input—guaranteed wildly fluctuating harvests. Coffee trees always take a rest the year after a heavy bearing season, but Brazilian conditions exacerbated the phenomenon. When the land was “tired,” as the Brazilian farmer put it, it was simply abandoned and new swaths of forest were then cleared. Unlike the northern arboreal forests, these tropical rain forests, once destroyed, would take centuries to regenerate.
How to Grow and Harvest Brazilian Coffee
The Brazilian agricultural methods required the least possible effort and emphasized quantity over quality. The general way Brazilians grow coffee remains largely unchanged.6
Coffee thrives best in disintegrated volcanic rock mixed with decayed vegetation, which describes the red clay, the terra roxa, of Brazil. Once planted, it takes four or five years for a tree to bear a decent crop. In Brazil each tree produces delicate white flowers three and sometimes four times a year (in other areas of the world there can be only one or two flowerings). The white explosion, which takes place just after a heavy rain, is breathtaking, aromatic, and brief. Most coffee trees are self-pollinating, allowing the monoculture to thrive without other nearby plants to attract honeybees.
The moment of flowering, followed by the first growth of the tiny berry, is crucial for coffee growers. A heavy wind or hail can destroy an entire crop. Arabica coffee (the only type known until the end of the nineteenth century) grows best between 3,000 and 6,000 feet in areas with a mean annual temperature around 70°F, never straying below freezing, never going much above 80°F. The high-grown coffee bean, developing slowly, is generally more dense and flavorful than lower growths.
Because 95 percent of the country rests below 3,000 feet, Brazilian beans have always tended to lack acidity and body. Worse, Brazil suffers from periodic frosts and droughts, which have increased in intensity and frequency as the protective forest cover has been destroyed. Coffee cannot stand a hard frost, and it needs plenty of rain (seventy inches a year) as well. The Brazilian harvest begins soon after the end of the rains, usually in May, and continues for six months. Cultivated without shade, Brazilian coffee grows even more quickly, depleting the soil unless artificially fertilized.
Trees will produce well for fifteen years or so, though some have been known to bear productively for as long as twenty or even thirty years. When trees no longer bear well, they can be “stumped” near the ground, then pruned so that only the strongest shoots survive. On average—depending on the tree variety and growing conditions—one tree will yield five pounds of fruit, translating eventually to one pound of dried beans.
Coffee is ripe when the green berry turns a rich wine red (or in odd varieties, yellow). It looks a bit like a cranberry or cherry, though it is more oval shaped. Growers test a coffee cherry by squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. If the seed squirts out easily, it is ripe. What is left in the hand—the red skin, along with a bit of flesh—is called the pulp. What squishes out is a gummy mucilage sticking to the parchment. Inside are the two seeds, covered by the diaphanous silver skin.
The traditional method of removing the bean, known as the dry method, is still the favored method of processing most Brazilian coffee. Both the ripe and unripe cherries, along with buds and leaves, are stripped from the branches ont
o big tarps spread under the trees. Then they are spread to dry on huge patios. They must be turned several times a day, gathered up and covered against the dew at night, then spread to dry again. If the berries are not spread thinly enough, they may ferment inside the skin, developing unpleasant or “off” tastes. When the skins are shriveled, hard, and nearly black, the husks are removed by pounding on them. In the early days the coffee was often left in its parchment covering for export, though by the late nineteenth century, machines took off the husks and parchment, sized the beans, and even polished them.
The dry method often yielded poor results, particularly in the Rio area. Since ripe and unripe cherries were stripped together, the coffee’s taste was compromised from the outset. The beans might also lie on the ground for so long that they developed mold or absorbed other unpleasant earthy tastes that came to be known as a Rioy flavor (strong, iodine-like, malodorous, rank).7 Some Rio coffee, however, was handpicked, carefully segregated, and gently depulped. Called Golden Rio, it was much in demand.
From Slaves to Colonos
By the late nineteenth century the Rio coffee lands were dying. The Rio region was “quickly ruined by a plant whose destructive form of cultivation left forests razed, natural reserves exhausted, and general decadence in its wake,” wrote Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins of Latin America. As a result, the main coffee-planting region moved south and west to the plateaus of São Paulo, which would become the productive engine for Brazilian coffee and industry.
With prices continually rising throughout the 1860s and 1870s, coffee monoculture seemed a sure way to riches.8 In 1867 the first Santos railway to a coffee-growing region was completed. In the 1870s the new coffee men, the Paulistas of São Paulo, pushed for more technological change and innovation—primarily to advance the sale of coffee. In 1874 the new submarine cable facilitated communication with Europe. By the following year 29 percent of the boats entering Brazilian harbors were powered by steam rather than sail.
In 1874 there were only 800 miles of track; by 1889 there were 6,000 miles. The lines typically ran directly from coffee-growing regions to the ports of Santos or Rio. They did not serve to bind regions of the country together; rather, they deepened dependence on foreign trade.
After 1850, with the banning of slave importation, coffee growers experimented with alternative labor schemes. At first the planters paid for the transportation of European immigrants, giving them a house and assigning a specific number of coffee trees to tend, harvest, and process, along with a piece of land so they could grow their own food. The share-croppers had to pay off the debt they incurred for the transportation costs, along with other advances. Since it was illegal for the immigrants to move off the plantation until all debts were repaid—which typically took years—this system amounted to debt peonage, another form of slavery. Thus it was no surprise when Swiss and German workers revolted in 1856.
The Paulista farmers finally gained enough political clout in 1884 to persuade the Brazilian government to pay for immigrants’ transportation costs, so that the new laborers did not arrive with a preexisting debt burden. These colonos, mostly poor Italians, flooded São Paulo plantations. Between 1884 and 1914 more than a million immigrants arrived to work on the coffee farms. Some eventually managed to secure their own land.9 Others earned just enough to return to their homelands. Because of the poor working and living conditions, most plantations maintained a band of capangas, armed guards. One much-hated owner, Francisco Augusto Almeida Prado, was hacked to pieces by his colonos when he strolled through his fields unprotected.
The Brazilian Coffee Legacy
After concluding that the colono system produced coffee more cheaply than slavery, the Brazilian coffee farmers led the charge for abolition, which occurred when the aging Dom Pedro II was out of the country. His daughter, Princess-Regent Isabel, signed the “Golden Law” on May 13, 1888, liberating the remaining three-quarters of a million slaves. A year later the planters helped oust Pedro in favor of a republic that for years would be run by the coffee planters of São Paulo and the neighboring province of Minas Gerais.
The liberation of the slaves did nothing to improve the lot of black workers. The planters favored European immigrants because they considered them genetically superior to those of African descent, who increasingly found themselves even more marginalized.
In the coming years under the colono system, coffee production would explode, from 5.5 million bags in 1890 to 16.3 million in 1901. Coffee planting doubled in the decade following abolition, and by the turn of the twentieth century, over 500 million coffee trees grew in the state of São Paulo. Brazil flooded the world with coffee. This overreliance on one crop had a direct effect on the well-being of most Brazilians. A contemporary writer observed that “many articles of ordinary food required for the consumption of the [Brazilian] people, and which could easily be grown on the spot, continue to be largely imported, notably flour. . . . Brazil is suffering severely for having overdone Coffee cultivation and neglected the raising of food products needed by her people.”
Guatemala and Neighbors: Forced Labor, Bloody Coffee
At the same time that Brazil led the coffee boom, Central America also came to rely on the same trees, with similar results. Except for Costa Rica, where coffee paired with a more egalitarian ethos, the new crop spelled disaster for the indigenous people while it enriched the rising coffee oligarchy. The history of Guatemala exemplifies that of the entire region.
In contrast with land-rich Brazil, Guatemala is slightly smaller than Tennessee. Known as “the Land of the Eternal Spring,” it is one of the most exquisite places on earth, as one visitor wrote in 1841: The situation was ravishingly beautiful, at the base and under the shade of the Volcano de Agua, and the view was bounded on all sides by mountains of perpetual green; the morning air was soft and balmy, but pure and refreshing. . . . I never saw a more beautiful spot on which man could desire to pass his allotted time on earth.
Beautiful, but troubled. Below all of Central America, tectonic plates grind against one another, occasionally spewing lava or shaking the earth. But many of the man-made problems stemmed from the way the region’s coffee economy developed in the late nineteenth century.
After declaring independence from Spain in 1821, the Central American states united in an uneasy alliance until 1838, when a revolt led by Rafael Carrera in Guatemala permanently split the countries of Central America.
Carrera, part Indian, was the charismatic peasant leader of the indigenous Mayan Indians, who had been harshly treated by the “liberal” Mariano Gálvez government.10 In Central America the Conservatives generally supported the Catholic Church and the old-guard Spanish descendants, while protecting Indians in a paternalistic manner. Liberals, on the other hand, favored the rising middle class, challenged the Church’s power, and sought to “civilize” the Indians.
Under Gálvez, lands that had been held in common by indigenous villages increasingly were confiscated, forcing Indians to become share-croppers or debt peons. Many Indian children were taken from their parents and assigned to “protectors,” who often treated them as indentured servants. As a result of these policies, the Mayans retreated higher into the mountains and the altiplano—the high plateau—where the land was not so desirable.
Carrera, who aligned himself with the Conservatives, effectively ruled from 1839 until his death in 1865. Although a dictator who amassed a personal fortune, he was extremely popular with the indigenous peoples. He respected native cultures, protected Indians as well as he could, and tried to incorporate them into his government.
In the 1840s Guatemala’s export economy was based on cochineal—a dye produced by a small insect that fed on a cactus. The dried insects yielded a brilliant red that was much in demand in Europe. Concerned about the internal self-sufficiency of Guatemala, Carrera encouraged agricultural diversification. When Europeans invented synthetic analine dyes in 1856 and it became clear that cochineal’s days were numbered, Carrera app
roved of the growth of coffee but also encouraged cotton and sugar.11
By the time of Carrera’s death and for the few years following, during the rule of Vicente Cerna (1865-1871), the profits from coffee continued to grow. The sides of Guatemala’s volcanoes—particularly on the Pacific side—proved to be perfectly suited for growing the coffee. In many cases the steeply sloped hillsides where coffee grew best, previously considered worthless, were occupied by Indians. The ladino12 coffee growers needed a government that would allow them to take this land and guarantee them a cheap, reliable supply of labor.
In 1871 the Liberals overthrew Cerna, and two years later General Justo Rufino Barrios, a prosperous coffee grower from western Guatemala, assumed power. Under Barrios, a series of “liberal reforms” were instituted, making it easier to grow and export coffee. The amount of coffee exported from Guatemala grew steadily, from 149,000 quintales (1 quintal = 100 kilograms) in 1873 to 691,000 by 1895, and over a million in 1909. Unfortunately, these “reforms” came at the expense of the Indians and their land.
Throughout Central America and Mexico at this time, the Liberals took power, all with essentially the same agenda: to promote “progress” in emulation of the United States and Europe, always at the expense of the indigenous populations. In Nostromo, his 1904 novel about Latin America, Joseph Conrad exclaimed, “Liberals! The words one knows so well have a nightmarish meaning in this country. Liberty, democracy, patriotism, government—all of them have a flavour of folly and murder.”
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 5
