The Presence of Guns and the Finca Santa Anita

¨I was going to the bank,¨says a guy named Dave on a hike at the finca de Santa Anita where I went this weekend. ¨And there was this sweet little old lady in front of me. And at the door, they put you through a metal detector, and this old woman takes a silver pistol from her bag and hands it over to the guard. He put it in a box, and she went in. Just like that.¨

I thought this vignette summed up a little about Guatemala, where not very long ago, whole villages were armed to the teeth to combat government-perpetrated genocide. The banks are guarded by police with long shot guns. Bars are sometimes gaurded, trucks with any kind of worth on board are gaurded, and most of the time, men in uniform are just hanging around, not guarding anything. But they have guns too. And the finger of these men is always right next to the trigger.

And then there are the men with guns on top of Mount Baúl, (the hill of trunk, strangely named in english) the mountain/park in Xela. Those men are scarier, and three of them robbed my friend Madeline and I on Friday afternoon. Nothing like a gun waved in your direction to make you realize how little you care about cash, phones, cameras. And nothing like a gun waved at you to realize how quickly you´ll relinquish control.

Luckily, these dudes just wanted something of worth, and they gave me back my earrings that my cousin Carolyne had brought me from Turkey. (Sorry Cayo, guess they look cheap). They tried to get off the ring I´d made at the Maine College of Art a couple springs ago, but it was stuck on and anyway, not worth it either.

Later, I eyed the family heirloom engagement ring that a girl from NYC was wearing at the finca this weekend. ¨I´d take that off if I were you,¨I said. ¨I know, I really should,¨she said sheepishly.

I guess you don´t get it until you get it.

At the The Finca Santa Anita, a cooperatively owned coffee and banana plantation, the treasurer, Sergio, had half a finger missing from his part in the campesino movement. His trigger finger. He didn´t talk about it. Willy, the guy that brought us there, a guatemalan who told his parents he was guiding hikers in Pétan back in the early nineties and instead was helping the guerillas out behind volcan lacandon, said Sergio wouldn´t talk about the war because he was sick of talking about the war.

¨He´d rather talk about the coffee finca, and what they´re doing to have a better future.¨ Talk he did. Boy does that Sergio talk. Doesn´t even mind that you only half understand spanish.

The finca is owned by 32 families, though they don´t farm it together. They each have a part of the property, and the families bring in their coffee harvests seperately. Santa Anita does have its own school, library, store and eco-tourism hostel, which is all part of a plan to diversify (here you go dad) the plantation. They have a permit to export only unroasted coffee, and it is sent to a fair trade, organic coffee company in Madison, WI. The bananas go even less farther afield, being sold domestically only. During the off season, when the harvesting is all done (now), the community harvests wood to sell. Our group split up to eat with different families for the night´s dinner. Most of them live on five quetzales a day. The current exchange rate is 7.7 Q to 1 US dollar.

Murals are a big thing at the finca, and we helped paint one. The members are all unabashedly Che Guivera fans, and his face or movement is painted everywhere.
¨You´ll notice,¨says Willy, who has a son back in Madison, WI, where he lived for 12 years, ¨that all the pupils painted in that mural are left handed.¨
This is of course, not by accident. ¨Izquierda, siempre izquierda!¨Willy likes to say, laughing.

The small pueblas in the state of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala´s western highlands, were badly hit in the thirty plus year civil war. Many of them were guerrilla sympathetic, and were especially flattened in the 1982-1983 era of Rios Mont, a dictator that wreaked most havoc among indiginous people and who even the Reagan administration saw as too right wing for his continuation as president.

Willy is promoting a documentary that I saw last week, all about the finca Santa Anita, the community members´part in the civil war, and history about the civil war itself. It´s called Voice of a Mountain, and it´s quite good.