Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

  Guatemala—A Penal Colony?

  The Mayans had little sense of private property, preferring to share their agricultural space with one another, but they resented being displaced from their traditional lands. Through a series of laws and outright force, the Barrios government began to take prime coffee lands away from the Indians. Often they tried to placate the Mayans by giving them other marginal land.

  The Liberal government encouraged agricultural development by defining all lands not planted in coffee, sugar, cacao, or pasture as “idle” (tierras baldías), then claiming them as national property. In 1873 nearly 200,000 acres in the western piedmont regions of Guatemala were divided into lots up to 550 acres and sold cheaply. Any required payment automatically excluded peasants from ownership.

  Like the Brazilians, the Guatemalans tried to attract immigrant labor, but these attempts largely failed.13 They had to rely on the Indian, who had little incentive to work. As much as Liberals may have wished to apply the “North American solution”—that is, simply eliminating the “inferior” race—they could not afford to do so. They needed their indigenous population as virtual slave labor. Living in self-sufficient villages, however, most Mayans were loath to work other than briefly for a little money.

  The Liberal government solved the problem through forced labor (mandamiento ) and debt peonage. For an Indian the only alternative to being dragged off to work on a farm (or to the army or gang labor on a road) or to go into debt to a coffee farmer was flight.

  Many Indians did flee, some to Mexico and others taking to the mountains. To maintain order, the Liberals instituted a large standing army and militia. As Jeffrey Paige observed in Coffee and Power, “Guatemala had so many soldiers that it resembled a penal colony because it was a penal colony based on forced labor.” Thus, coffee money funded a repressive regime that fostered smoldering resentment among the Indians. Sometimes they rebelled, but such attempts only resulted in Indian massacres. Instead they learned to subvert the system by working as little as possible, by taking wage advances from several farmers simultaneously, and by running away.

  The Indians sometimes petitioned the jefe políticos (governors) for help. Their plaintive appeals are heartrending, even at the remove of a hundred years. One laborer alleged that “Don Manuel, the brother of my actual employer, beat me without motive . . . as well as my wife and our baby, with the result that they both died.” A man over eighty wrote that through “all the flower of my youth the patron exploited my labor,” but now, sick and crippled, he was to be released to “die slowly in the fields as do the animals when they become old and useless.”

  The forced Indian migration down from the altiplano to the coffee harvest also resulted in Mayans contracting diseases such as influenza and cholera, then bringing them back to their home communities, where deadly epidemics swept entire villages.

  From the grower’s perspective, securing a reliable labor supply was difficult. Indians ran off. Other planters stole their workers. Thus, the coffee economy of Guatemala, as well as that of nearby El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua, frustrated everyone in one way or another. Above all, however, it relied on the forced labor and misery of the indigenous population. With this unhappy foundation, a future of inequity and violence was all but assured.

  The German Invasion

  Into this mix came a new kind of immigrant, full of energy, self-assurance, and a willingness to work hard. In 1877 the Liberals passed a law to help foreigners obtain lands, granting a ten-year tax exemption and a six-year holiday from import duties on tools and machines. The Barrios government signed contracts with foreign firms for major construction and colonization projects. During the last two decades of the 1800s, enterprising Germans, many fleeing Bismarck’s militarism, flocked to Guatemala—and to the rest of Central America. By the late 1890s they owned over forty Guatemalan coffee fincas and worked on many others. Soon German coffee growers in the Alta Verapaz region of Guatemala got together to solicit private capital from Germany to build a railroad line to the sea. This was the beginning of a trend in which the Germans brought capital and modernization to the Guatemalan coffee industry.

  By 1890, two decades after the Liberals took over, the largest Guatemalan fincas—over one hundred of them—represented only 3.5 percent of the country’s coffee farms but accounted for over half of the total output. While foreigners ran many large plantations, others were still owned by the Spanish descendants of the original conquistadors.

  These large-scale operations typically had their own processing machinery and grew their own food. Small, marginal coffee farms of only a few acres, usually owned by poor, illiterate peasants, had to rely on the larger farms for processing. They and their children were sometimes subjected to forced labor on the bigger farms. In some cases the dominant farms deliberately sabotaged their smaller neighbors, as finca agents burned their milpas (small subsistence plots, usually of corn) and destroyed their coffee bushes.

  Securing credit was always a major problem for the coffee farmer. Typically, European or North American banks would loan to coffee import houses at 6 percent. The import houses in turn would loan to export houses at 8 percent, who then loaned to large growers or beneficios (coffee processing plants) at 12 percent. The small farmer would have to pay the beneficio 14 to 25 percent, depending on the perceived risk. Most entrepreneurs starting a plantation found themselves deep in debt before their first crop matured four years later. The Germans had an advantage, since they frequently arrived with capital and maintained ongoing relations with German brokerage firms that gave them lower interest rates. They also had recourse to diplomatic intervention and maintained close ties to foreign-controlled export and import houses. Nonetheless, the coffee industry of Latin America has never resolved the credit problem satisfactorily.

  Many of the Germans who came to make their coffee fortunes in Guatemala were not wealthy men when they first reached the country. Bernhard Hannstein, born in Prussia in 1869, left Germany “to get away from the military habits of Germany, to flee the tyranny of [my] eccentric father and to be a free man.” In 1892 Hannstein found work at La Libertad, one of the huge coffee plantations owned by ex-president Lisandro Barillas, where he received $100 a month plus free room and board—many times more than the Indians.

  It apparently did not trouble the German that Indians were virtual slaves. He described the debt peonage system without any judgmental emotion. “The only way to make an Indian work is to advance him money, then he can be forced to work. Very often they run off but they are caught and punished very severely.”

  Bernhard Hannstein eventually worked his way up the hierarchy and came to own Mundo Nuevo and other plantations.

  To the north in Alta Verapaz, Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, another German, slowly assembled the largest privately owned coffee plantations in the area. At first he lived among the Indians, ate their food, and learned their language and culture. Eventually Dieseldorff became an expert on Mayan archaeology, folklore, and herbal medicine. As long as the Indian laborers obeyed him, Dieseldorff treated them with paternal kindness. Yet he too paid the Indians a pittance and kept them bound to him in a feudal system of debt peonage. He summed up his and other Germans’ philosophy when he observed, “The Indians of the Alta Verapaz are best handled as if they were children.”

  How to Grow and Harvest Coffee in Guatemala

  Although it took some trial and error to establish the custom, coffee in Central America has traditionally been grown under shade trees of various types to protect the coffee from sun, promote automatic mulching, and prevent the coffee trees from overproducing and exhausting themselves and the soil. These shade trees usually are pruned yearly to allow the proper amount of sunlight to pass through; the wood then can be used for fuel.

  Unlike the Brazilian bean, the coffees of Central America were harvested by the “wet” method invented in the West Indies and popularized in Ceylon and Costa Rica. According to most coffee experts, this system yields a superior be
an with fewer defects, producing a drink with bright acidity and full, clean flavor. It is also far more labor-intensive, requires more sophisticated machinery and infrastructure, and needs an abundant supply of fresh running water at each beneficio, or processing facility. The mountainsides of Guatemala provide plenty of water, and the German farmers brought much technical know-how.

  As the coffee industry developed during the late nineteenth century, importers began to refer to two types of coffee: Brazils and milds. The Brazilian coffee gained a reputation for lower quality—often, but not always, deserved. Most other, more carefully processed arabica coffees were known as milds because they were not as harsh in the cup as the Brazils.

  Though the Brazilian laborers can simply strip the branches, the Guatemalan harvesters must pick only the ripe berries, which are depulped by machine, then left in water-filled fermentation tanks for up to forty-eight hours. As the mucilage decomposes, it loosens from its sticky binding on the parchment and in the process lends a subtle seasoned flavor to the inner bean. From the fermentation tank the beans bump along a long channel, where the loosened mucilage washes off with the wastewater. Still covered in parchment, the beans then are spread out to dry in the sun or are dried artificially in huge rotating cylinders heated by dried parchment from previous batches, along with coal, gas, or wood pruned from shade trees. Women and children hand sort the dried coffee, removing broken, blackened, moldy, or overfermented beans.

  Since the actual coffee bean constitutes only 20 percent of the weight of the cherry, this whole process produces an enormous amount of waste product. The mounds of wet pulp are often recycled as smelly fertilizer, if the beneficio is located on the farm. Allowed to float downstream, the mucilage causes massive pollution problems.

  Women and Children as Laborers

  Women (and children in the old days) always did the tedious sorting in Guatemala and elsewhere, primarily because they traditionally were paid even less than their husbands. Though the men performed most of the physically demanding jobs, such as clearing, planting, pruning, and digging irrigation ditches, women and children did much of the harvesting as well.

  On a good farm, harvest time is a relaxed, joyous occasion. The pay may not be great but it is higher than any other time of the year, and no one forces children to work any set schedule. In the late nineteenth century, however, women and children were often forced to work long hours in the fields along with everyone else. One observer in 1899 described the “ragged, tattered pickers, large and small, father and mother and a brood of partially clothed children” on their way to pick coffee.

  The father and mother salute you with the deference born of generations of training. Later, from the depths of every thicket comes the chant of singing voices, and the chorus is feminine, the woman of poverty, somehow, knowing how to be happier than the man. The little children gather all the low berries which may be reached by their tiny hands. [At dusk,] the sleepy, tired tots stumble along, with all the brightness of life gone out, for that day, from their worn-out little souls. It is no uncommon sight to see a mother carrying a sleeping child, besides all her other load.

  Occasionally, however, Guatemalan women forgot how “happy” they were in their poverty, and they somehow overcame the “deference born of generations of training.” Men sometimes took wage advances, to be worked off by their wives or children, virtually selling their labor. Juana Domingo wrote from jail to the jefe político of Huehuetenango in 1909, for instance, because she refused to work after she was “sold by my own father, which is the custom among our race.” Women were routinely subjected to sexual exploitation by overseers. Sometimes complaining backfired, as when the finca administrator for one woman added the cost of capturing her rapist to her debt.14

  Coffee in Guatemala thus brought a reliance on a fickle foreign market, the rise of a coercive police state, gross social and economic inequality, and the virtual enslavement of the indigenous peoples. The pattern was set. Large fincas, owned by ladinos, Germans, and other foreigners who earned huge profits in good years, were worked by migrant labor forces forced down from the adjacent highlands. In years to come this coffee legacy would lead to repeated uprisings, discontent, and bloodshed. “The strategies of government in Guatemala,” wrote one Latin American historian, “can be briefly summarized as: censorship of the press, exile and prison for the opposition, extensive police control, a reduced and servile state bureaucracy, matters of finance and the treasury in the hands of interrelated members of the large coffee-growing families, and benevolent treatment of foreign companies.”

  Stealing the Land in Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua

  The pattern set in Guatemala was echoed in neighboring countries, except that the size of the typical coffee finca was smaller. To the north, in Mexico, Porfirio Díaz attracted American capital to his “liberal” regime (1877- 1880, 1884-1911), where laborers on the sugar, rubber, henequen (a plant used to make rope), tobacco, and coffee plantations were little more than slaves. A labor agent, known as an enganchador (snarer), would supply unwary laborers through lies, bribes, or outright kidnapping. The mortality rate for the workers on the henequen farms of the Yucatan or the tobacco plantations of the infamous Valle Nacional was horrendous. Conditions were somewhat better on the coffee fincas in southern Mexico in the mountains of Chiapas, since migrant labor had to find it sufficiently attractive to return every year.

  In El Salvador, the small but densely populated Pacific Coast country to the south of Guatemala, the disenfranchisement of the Indians was even more violent. Though in Guatemala the Mayans lived primarily above the coffee regions, in El Salvador the majority lived in areas suitable for coffee growing. Land expropriation began in 1879, and legislation in 1881 and 1882 eliminated the indigenous system of common lands and communities. The Indians revolted throughout the 1880s, setting fire to coffee groves and processing plants. The government responded by creating a mounted police force to patrol coffee sectors and squelch rebellions. A famous group of fourteen families—with surnames such as Menéndez, Regalado, de Sola, and Hill—came to own most of the coffee plantations of El Salvador, and through a well-trained militia they maintained an uneasy peace, punctuated by coups that replaced one authoritarian military regime with another.

  In Nicaragua, to the south of El Salvador and Honduras, coffee cultivation began early, but it did not dominate the economy as in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the Indian resistance in Nicaragua was not so easily broken. Coffee cultivation began in the southern uplands in earnest during the 1860s, where the transition from other commercial agriculture took place relatively smoothly. But the prime coffee-growing lands turned out to be in the north central highlands, where Indians owned most of the land, and the familiar process of disenfranchisement took place. In 1881 several thousand Indians attacked government headquarters in Matagalpa, in the heart of prime coffee-growing regions, to demand an end to forced labor. The national army finally put down the revolt, killing over a thousand Indians. Nonetheless, peasant resistance remained strong, even after Liberal General José Santos Zelaya, the son of a coffee planter, took over in 1893. He ruled Nicaragua until 1909, creating an effective military and successfully promoting coffee, despite continued agitation, including the assassination of the largest coffee grower in the country.

  Coffee in Costa Rica: A Democratic Influence?

  Coffee-rich Latin American countries have been routinely racked by revolution, oppression, and bloodshed. The singular hopeful exception to this rule, on the whole, has been Costa Rica. In his thought-provoking 1994 book States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America, Robert Williams argued that the way coffee land and labor evolved in the late nineteenth century helped determine the shape of Central American governments, setting patterns that continue to this day:Along with the expansion of coffee came changes in trading networks, international financial connections, patterns of immigration and investment, and international political relatio
ns, but coffee also reached back into the structures of everyday life of ports, capital cities, inland commercial centers, and the countryside, altering the activities of merchants, moneylenders, landowners, shopkeepers, professionals, bureaucrats, the urban poor, and the peasantry. . . . A careful look at this single commodity affords a lens through which to view the construction of Central American states.

  In Costa Rica reliance on coffee resulted in democracy, egalitarian relations, smaller farms, and slow, steady growth. Why did cultivation of the same tree lead to such different results? The primary reason appears to be the lack of a ready labor force. Most of Costa Rica’s Indians, never very numerous, had been killed off by early Spanish settlers or by disease. Consequently, by the time the Costa Ricans began serious cultivation of coffee in the 1830s, they could not establish the huge latifundia that later developed in Brazil and Guatemala. Small family farms were the norm.15 As a result, Costa Rica’s coffee industry developed gradually, without the need for repressive government intervention.

  In addition, Costa Rican coffee production commenced in the rich highlands of the Central Valley, near San José, and spread outward from there. For years to come, an ever-expanding frontier would allow new coffee entrepreneurs to establish farms in virgin lands. Because of this opportunity, fewer fights developed over land. During harvest season families helped one another. The farmers themselves performed the hard physical labor and felt close to the land. Thus, a relatively egalitarian national ethos developed.

  The conflict within Costa Rica developed between small growers and owners of the beneficios, which processed the coffee. Because the farms were generally so small, they could not afford their own wet processing mills. The beneficio owners had a great deal of clout and could set artificially low prices, reaping most of the profits. While this inequity did cause tension, the Costa Rican state managed it peacefully, on the whole. This small Central American country has had its share of revolution and bloodshed over the years, but nothing to compare to its neighbors. The reason can probably be traced directly to how the coffee industry developed there.