Land and Opportunity

To most rural Guatemalans, land means everything.

Despite a growing economy and the Mercedes and Jaguars cruising the streets of the capital, millions of Guatemalans still live in homes made of mud and walk hours to tend farms for little pay. The country is, in fact, overwhelmingly poor: by some accounts, about 80 percent of the population lives in poverty, with two-thirds of those living in extreme poverty. One reason for this is that fertile land in Guatemala — the most important means of production in an agricultural economy — is concentrated in the hands of a few. It's been reported that roughly 2 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the country's productive farmland.

On a trip to Guatemala last November, I spent my first couple of days exploring how this inequity of land came to be and what keeps it from changing. In interviews with lawyers, government officials and land-reform advocates in Guatemala City, I learned about the Spanish conquistadores who literally entitled themselves to traditional Mayan lands; about the non-functional land registry that favored the educated classes and led to overlapping property boundaries; about how the country's 36-year civil war exacerbated unequal land distribution; about the land reform commitments that were passed as part of the 1996 Peace Accords; and about how today those legally mandated reform efforts are advancing only in fits and starts.

Photo: Nathan Golon for Mercy Corps

Conflicts over land erupted in the wake of Central America's coffee crisis, which began in 2000. Prices for the bean plummeted, forcing many Guatemalan coffee plantations to shut down. Unemployment spiked and many workers were expelled from their homes on the plantations — which included the lands they planted to feed their families.

Facing the loss of everything they knew, some communities simply refused to leave. They occupied farms, demanding access to land and retroactive wages and pensions. Violent altercations with police and land owners often ensued.

The highest number of these confrontations occurred in Alta Verapaz, one of Guatemala's 22 departments — administrative districts equivalent to U.S. states. Alta Verapaz is located in north-central Guatemala and is home to some of the country's largest coffee and cardamom farms. More than 76 percent of its 1 million people — most of whom are indigenous Q'echi' — live in poverty.

Since 2003, Mercy Corps has been working with local partners in Alta Verapaz to peacefully resolve conflicts over land. Our approach has been lauded as a model for "integrated land-conflict mediation" — one that combines conflict mediation between landowners and indigenous workers, support to help newly landed communities organize a profitable farming system, and advocacy for land reform at various government levels.

After more than two years, approximately 270 cases have been peacefully negotiated, with 142 of those fully resolved.

One of the first was a community called Nuevo Amanacer. It's featured in the two-part "Land and Opportunity" video in this section. The agreement we brokered required 27 families to compensate the owner for a portion of his land — which in turn required them to figure out how to make the land feed more than their own families.

Beginning in 2005, Mercy Corps, with the support of The Phoenix Fund, began helping eight communities — including Nuevo Amanacer — with planning, land management, crop diversification and marketing. Communities that once grew only beans or corn for their own subsistence, and maybe dabbled in a little bit of a cash crop like coffee or cardamom, received support to grow pineapple, honey, bananas and other produce for sale. Early results are encouraging. In a 2007 survey of participants, farmers growing pineapples and raising bees saw their household incomes rise by 40 percent.

In 2007, Mercy Corps advanced this strategy another step by forming the Inclusive Market Alliance for Rural Entrepreneurs, a project designed to help rural farmers benefit from the rapid growth of supermarkets in Latin America. The Alliance will inject $2.2 million worth of assistance into 20 communities to help them grow high-value crops such as pineapples, tomatoes and onions. Mercy Corps' partners include Fundación ÁGIL, Wal-Mart CentroAmerica and USAID.

The communities Mercy Corps works in are poor. Most families live in mud houses lacking electricity or running water. But the farmers there today sound less like down-and-out economic castoffs and more like new entrepreneurs eager to take control of their own financial futures. Mercy Corps is also supporting women in their efforts to contribute to the family's bottom line. We spoke with some learning to become beekeepers who were happy to break free of their traditional family roles and to help send their kids to school and pay for medical care.

The third component of the project, political advocacy, is no less critical. Mercy Corps promotes efforts to raise awareness of agrarian issues at the local and national levels, with the goal of supporting a fair and workable land-registration system.

A foundation in health

Our work in Guatemala began with a different challenge in Alta Verapaz: the lack of quality healthcare.

In the late 1990s, Mercy Corps was invited to Tucurú, a very traditional Guatemalan town of 21,000 mostly indigenous residents a couple of hours' drive from Cobán, by a Portland family foundation who asked us to reinvigorate the health center they'd founded. Not only had it fallen into disrepair, but it had failed to attract Tucurú's overwhelmingly indigenous population. In 2001, Mercy Corps hired two Q'echi' women to serve as 'cultural brokers' — go-betweens for the mostly Spanish-speaking staff and the mostly Q'echi'-speaking visitors. The job went beyond translating language to lobbying patients to have faith in outside clinicians and exhorting doctors to trust the Q'echi' people's long reliance on herbal tonics.

The hospital's turnaround sparked further investments in healthcare. Today, throughout Alta Verapaz, maternal and child health programs are strengthening the capacity of the indigenous Q'echi' and Poq'omchi' people to monitor their own health status and provide health services in collaboration with local organizations, health practitioners and government health officials.

Our Community Health and Microcredit program currently helps more than 15,000 people in Tucurú, most of whom are women and children. Women in small villages are using loans to raise pigs, tend chickens and run small tiendas selling snacks, staple foods and toiletries. Another health-related project, funded by Tazo Tea, builds health clinics, latrines and pharmacies, and helps communities improve their farming practices and create new economic opportunities through forest-protection plans, beekeeping, and other initiatives.

Two other health programs help to form and train representative Municipal Health Commissions to improve local healthcare systems, and to deliver health services directly to remote villages, in conjunction with the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance.

As part of these health initiatives, Mercy Corps organized Jovenes 4 Peace, an impressive group of young people in Tucurú. Over the last two years, they've organized a host of high-energy activities and events to educate their peers and their community about HIV/AIDS. A video capturing the energy and imagination of these youth appears in this section.

Their accomplishments are all the more impressive because of their circumstances: they are severely disadvantaged by the mere fact of growing up indigenous in rural Guatemala. The cost of education beyond sixth grade is out of reach for the vast majority of these kids, job opportunities are slim, and day's worth of earnings from manual labor is equivalent to only the price of a bus ticket to the city.

What ties these programs together is opportunity — the opportunity for rural Guatemalans, most of whom are part of marginalized ethnic communities, to access the education, healthcare and economic tools they need to escape poverty.

And for most, it begins with land.

Read more ▸