For those looking for a caffeine-free brew

Yes folks, a caffeine-free coffee plant is one of 2009’s top 10 new species, announced last week by the International Institute for Species Exploration at the University of Arizona. It’s the only caffeine-free coffee species to be found in the whole of West Africa. It may be a few years, however, until it reaches Guatemala. Meanwhile drink your joe of Godoys Gourmet in the morning and don’t stress!

The Video: An Indictment from the Grave

I was recently emailed this article about the videotape which has been shown all over the world and caused such a sensation both here in Guatemala and abroad. It all began with the murder of Khalil Musa and his duaghter last month. Khalil was both a friend, a fellow-coffee producer and a client of mine. I knew him as a man with a great deal of integrity. Like most people who knew Khalil I was horrified by the turn of events.

 

AN INDICTMENT FROM THE GRAVE
May 21st 2009 

A murder foretold has convulsed Guatemala’s government. Its
investigation will provide a test of whether or not Central America
includes a failed state

RODRIGO ROSENBERG was not the best-known, richest, or most powerful
victim of the endemic violence that dogs Guatemala. His murder on May
10th–he was shot by an unknown gunman while bicycling on a busy
avenue–was not even unusually brazen by the country’s grim standards.
But Mr Rosenberg, a Harvard-educated lawyer, did something to
distinguish himself from the other 6,000 people killed in Guatemala in
the past 12 months. Four days before his death, he recorded an
18-minute video in which he began by saying: “If you are watching this
message it is because I have been murdered by President Alvaro Colom”
with the help of Gustavo Alejos, his chief of staff, and Gregorio
Valdez, a businessman, and the approval of Mr Colom’s wife, Sandra
Torres. With that he plunged Guatemala into its most serious political
convulsion since the end of a 36-year civil war in 1996. He also
highlighted the continuing lawlessness of a country that comes as close
as any in the Americas (Haiti apart) to a failed state.

According to Mr Rosenberg’s posthumously publicised testimony, Mr
Colom’s government offered a seat on the board of Banrural, a partly
state-owned development bank, to one of the dead lawyer’s clients,
Khalil Musa, a farmer and textile manufacturer. The proposal was then
withdrawn, Mr Rosenberg claimed, out of fear that Mr Musa would reveal
rampant corruption at the bank. It was to keep this episode quiet that
Mr Musa and his daughter were murdered last month, according to Mr
Rosenberg, who feared that for the same reason he would be next.

No independent evidence has emerged to corroborate these accusations.
But for many, mainly middle-class Guatemalans, the case casts doubt on
the credentials of Mr Colom, a businessman of the centre-left elected
as president in 2007, as a crusader for good government and justice.

Guatemala desperately needs both those things. The state is weak, even
by Latin American standards. Tax revenues total just 11% of GDP,
depriving governments of the wherewithal to provide such basic public
services as security, health care and schooling. The war between
left-wing guerrillas and (until 1986) a string of military dictators
claimed some 200,000 lives and flooded the country with guns. When
peace came, drug-trafficking syndicates were springing up across
Central America to transport Colombian cocaine to the United States.
Many former combatants drifted into crime. The murder rate (of nearly
50 per 100,000 people) is higher than its average during the war.
Police and courts are understaffed, underpaid and susceptible to bribes
and threats. According to the United Nations, just 2% of crimes in the
country are solved.

Crime and corruption have contaminated politics. Political office
confers immunity from prosecution. Drug money helps to finance
campaigns. “You have to join up with the mafias to be a successful
politician in Guatemala,” says Nineth Montenegro, a human-rights
campaigner and congresswoman. Those who resist often pay with their
lives: 56 politicians or party activists were killed during the 2007
presidential campaign.

Mr Colom has taken some measures to tackle the crime wave. To the
dismay of some of his left-wing allies, he has given a bigger role in
fighting crime to the army, which killed thousands of civilians during
the war. He has set up a new intelligence service. Arrests and weapons’
seizures have gone up this year.

But Mr Rosenberg’s allegations have raised worries as to whether Mr
Colom’s government is any cleaner than its predecessors. Critics object
that Ms Torres, who has no cabinet role or political office, is
managing the government’s welfare programmes. She has refused to turn
over a list of the identity cards of beneficiaries to auditors and
legislators.

Mr Colom, his wife and the others named by Mr Rosenberg have all
angrily denied his claims. After at first questioning the video’s
authenticity, Mr Colom then suggested that it was part of a right-wing
plot to destabilise his government. (The journalist who recorded the
video, Mario David Garcia, is a conservative commentator who in the
1980s expressed sympathy for an attempted coup.)

The first couple have tried to turn the case into a political battle
along class lines. They ordered mayors to mobilise supporters for a
large pro-government demonstration outside the presidential palace in
Guatemala City on May 17th. Although this was organised with public
money, it was outnumbered by a rival protest demanding justice in the
Rosenberg case. “They’re well-groomed, with new shirts and shiny shoes,
when there are more than a million malnourished children nobody worries
about,” Ms Torres said of the protesters. She seems to model herself on
Eva Peron, Argentina’s populist heroine; some think she wants to
succeed her husband as president, following the example of Argentina’s
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

The investigation of Mr Rosenberg’s murder will determine the Coloms’
political future. The president raised suspicions when he held a
meeting with the supposedly independent attorney-general the day after
the video was released. But he then asked the UN and the United States’
FBI to join the investigation. In 2007, with the previous government’s
support, the UN set up a special commission charged with combating
legal impunity in Guatemala. It now has its most important case.
Whether or not Mr Rosenberg’s killers are brought to justice will show
whether or not Guatemala is indeed a failed state.

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The Coffee Bloomed!

One day a year is all you get.  If you miss that day you will have to wait for the following year.  This year the coffee blossoms lit up the farm on April 24th.  On this particular day the fields look as though a sprinkling of snow has fallen during the previous night.  When they wake in their splendor, the scent is overpowering.  The coffee blossoms emit a sweet honeysuckle-like fragrance which permeates the air.  By noon all the winged insects in the area have discovered them as well.  Bees and butterflies flicker and alight throughout the plantation pollinating the coffee for next year’s crop.

The Coffee Harvest

It’s the end of February and yesterday we brought a load of coffee to Guatemala City from the farm.  We brought a truckload full of 260 sacks of 120lbs. each of parchment.  Each sack is worth several hundred dollars so the driver and his assistants were armed as were those who drove behind the truck for security.  The most dangerous part of the coffee business is the transportation.  Fortunately the truck with the bulk of the crop was not held up.

 The crop this year looks excellent.  Coffee is like wine grapes.  The depth of flavor from each crop varies slightly from the year before.  We haven’t yet cupped this years crop but that will be in the coming weeks.

News from the Front Line

The coffee harvest started yesterday (Jan. 2) right on schedule and right in the middle of a terrible wind storm.  The electricity in most of the country went off in the afternoon.  In Guatemala City the darkness lasted for three hours and in many areas of the country there still is no light.  The coffee farm is no exception. 

 Coffee must be processed within 24 hours of picking or it begins to ferment.  Since Moyuta is one of the places where the electricity has not been restored, we are watching the clock with bated breath.  We have not been able to start processing and figure that we can only wait until noon today until extreme measures must be taken not to ruin yesterdays picked coffee.  

What can be done?  Our only alternative would be to resack up all the cherries that are now awaiting processing in large vats and haul them by pickup to a processor who either has electricity in another town, or to a processor that has its own generator.  Not good news, but doable.