After several days spent with IMAP (the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute) learning about permaculture, traditional and ancestral agricultural practices and how food sovereignty is being developed at the community level in Guatemala, our visit to the CCDA (Campesino Committee of the Highlands) was a chance to situate our learning within the wider political context in the country. At IMAP, we had learned about the practical methods by which campesinos (smallholder farmers) are working to feed themselves, their families and their communities while restoring biodiversity and preserving vital yet under threat traditional practical knowledge.This work takes place in a context where Guatemalan campesinos (smallholder farmers) must attempt to maintain their agricultural practices under pressure from extractive, monoculture agriculture; attempts to introduce destructive, patented GMO seedstock; and the impacts of the country being opened to regional free trade through the CAFTA-DR agreement.
The CCDA’s beneficio, a collective coffee processing facility, is set on an outcrop overlooking the volcano-ringed expanse of Lake Atitlan, next to the Cerro de Oro lava dome, a comparatively small yet imposing volcanic remnant that juts out into the lake at the foot the much larger Volcán Tolimán.
Cerro de Oro, viewed from the CCDA beneficio
We began our visit with a presentation from Neydi Juracán, the CCDA’s National Coordinator. She outlined the key components of the organization’s work, particularly with regard to gender amidst the wider unequal power relations that the CCDA sees as structuring society in Guatemala, from the level of the state down to that of the family unit. For the CCDA, the system of land distribution imposed upon the Guatemalan population – especially its Indigenous peoples – is one that excludes people based on class, gender and race. Importantly, this system is conceived by Neydi and her comrades as being part of a historical continuity that dates back to the processes of colonization and one that unites peoples across Abya Yala.
Neydi Juracán presenting to the BTS delegation. Photo credit: Heidi Haines
Neydi noted the barriers that face women in particular with regard to access to land, including low participation in already limited land tenancy programs run by the state. She also noted that the state’s focus on promoting band-aid solutions to longstanding land inequality and dispossession within the country, such as ‘entrepreneurship’, results in false expectations of poverty alleviation when in fact 95% of such entrepreneurial initiatives fail within 2 years of being established.
These dynamics were situated in relation to the current political situation in the country, where criminalization and lawfare continue to be waged by the elites (the ‘pacto de corruptos’) against anyone attempting to drive progressive change and reform within the country. Neydi herself has faced these pressures in part resulting from her time in a student governance role in Guatemala’s only public university, USAC, where the student body has been protesting the imposition of the current rector – a position with wider political power in the country – through an illegitimate electoral process.
Following Neydi’s presentation, we were given a tour of the coffee beneficio and shown how the CCDA is using its Café Justicia program to build its autonomy as an organization and to allow it to operate without relying on donors or outside help to advocate for campesinos in Guatemala. Seeing the tools by which the CCDA supports its work was a perfect segue into the presentation from CCDA Agrarian Reform Coordinator Leocadio Juracán, who emphasized many of the same themes as Neydi did while building in particular on how the CCDA is working to build the capacity of campesinos in Guatemala to shape their own communities and futures.
The tour of the CCDA beneficio. Photo credit: Heidi Haines
CCDA members preparing their own coffee. Photo credit: Heidi Haines
What was shared with us by Leocadio was made all the more urgent in the context of his own criminalization, after he was arrested in August in a clear case of spurious, retaliatory action by the elites in response to his activism in defense of land and territory within Guatemala. For Leocadio, his case was merely one among many instances of repression and violence against land defenders in the country. A particularly striking piece of information shared by both him and Neydi was that in 2024, 12 land defenders that the CCDA has worked with had been assassinated – a fact made all the more galling for us as international visitors when we reflected on how next to none of this makes it into the international press.
Leocadio shared that despite the success of the CCDA and other campesino organizations in getting the new Arévalo government to agree to an Agrarian Accord in 2024, progress on its implementation has been limited and profoundly disappointing. Yet this was also the basis for showing what campesino organizations could do, and a demonstration that continued struggle and mobilization is the path toward real, tangible improvements in the lives of Guatemalan campesinos. The efforts of the CCDA are led from below, with active community participation and decision-making, building up enormous collections of well-documented, rigorously researched evidence to support land claims and defend Indigenous and campesino territorial claims. This is where real change is being driven from, rather than through top-down affordances from a state that does not represent their interests.
For me, the key takeaway from our visit to the CCDA came from Leocadio’s insistence – in line with Neydi’s own messages in her presentation – on the need to develop and guarantee food and land sovereignty for campesinos in Guatemala as the essential condition for the success of their work. Without this, it will not be impossible for the CCDA – or their wider allies in the movements for land, justice and development for the people in Guatemala – to sustain their projects or achieve victory.
Mural at the CCDA beneficio.
This linked directly to our time as a delegation with IMAP in the few days prior. IMAP’s work to preserve, maintain and reinvigorate traditional, organic, balanced and sovereign agricultural practices through the system of permaculture is a vital component of establishing the basis for food sovereignty on which the wider campesino movement in Guatemala rests. The work of both organizations shows two things of importance to us as international partners in solidarity with Guatemalan campesino organizations. The first, and most important, is that organizations such as IMAP and the CCDA are autonomously, and with great creativity and vigour, working to create the conditions for their own survival and success in the most challenging of conditions. They are not in need of charity or externally imposed frameworks for how to build their own projects of resistance and persistence. Yet, for both organizations, taking the time to receive us, welcome us and enter into dialogue with us as an international delegation showed that they also place a profound importance on international solidarity as a two-way process of learning and exchange. The task for us now that we have returned to our day-to-day lives in Canada is how to deepen and continue these processes of solidarity, learning and exchange from a distance, in support of the remarkable work being done by organizations like the CCDA and IMAP in Guatemala.
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