I try to pay attention to what’s going on in Latin America, my major at Cal was Latin American Studies, after all. But Latin America doesn’t lead the news in the US, unless events there impinge on us, and even then the slant is often unsympathetic. The rage on the American right wing against immigrants from the south seems mostly racism — and, yeah, deeply antagonistic, way beyond unsympathetic. Sadly, even in news sources that aren’t pushing an anti-immigrant agenda, the lede is how US authorities are dealing with the immigrants rather than the root causes that force them to leave their homes. I could have delved deeper into what has caused such trauma recently -- in Central America in particular -- but I confess I really haven’t. I remember the civil wars of the 80s and 90s, but I hear that deaths and crime has spiked in the 2010s and 2020s beyond even those horrible times. Yet there are no rebel armies to negotiate with.
So I’m reading a book on coffee, where it originated, how it spread throughout the world, and what its current situation is, and I come across this passage:
In 2013, coffee rust affected 74 percent of El Salvador’s crop, 70 percent of Guatemala’s, and 25 percent of Honduras’s, causing losses of nearly two hundred thousand jobs in the trio of countries. … Coffee was the livelihood for more than two million Central Americans. For many of those households, it was their sole source of income, money they used to cultivate staple foods. Jobless farmworkers poured into the cities looking for employment. Gang membership increased. Violence surged. El Salvador became the word’s murder capital, only to be overtaken by Honduras in 2016. Parents sent their children north, often unaccompanied and entrusted with coyote smugglers, passing through a series of way stations as they tried to reach extended family in the United States. … ‘To discuss the current Central American immigration crisis without talking about the coffee rust,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘is like talking about the 1845 Irish immigration without mentioning the “potato blight.”’
As my source was published in 2017, I looked at current news for an update. Says a December 2021 Reuters story: “[T]his year has been particularly ruinous, according to interviews with about a dozen farmers across the region, the heads of one regional and three national coffee institutes plus an executive at a U.S.-based international coffee association.” Damn.
source:
Where the Wild Coffee Grows: the untold story of coffee from the cloud forests of Ethiopia to your cup
by Jeff Koehler
2017. Bloomsbury, New York
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