Nina Lakhani

Neris Gonzalez would journey 25km every week from her rural village in San Vicente, El Salvador to the nearest town in order to phone Archbishop Oscar Romero. Gonzalez, a 23-year-old community leader, would recount the latest murders, disappearances and mutilations committed by security forces in her district to the Archbishop.

This was 1978, a time of increasing repression and human rights violations in El Salvador in the run-up to the coup d’état in October 1979 and subsequent 12-year civil war.

Archbishop Romero founded the Human Rights Office, originally known as Socorro Juridico (Legal Relief) in 1977, in order to document these abuses from across the country. It was one of the only places people could go to report state-sponsored crimes.

Every Sunday until his assassination in March 1980, Romero would broadcast a homily from the grand cathedral in the capital San Salvador which included the latest denunciations. Communities in every tiny village and hard luck neighbourhood could be found huddled over battery-operated radios listening to his homilies which disseminated the horrors being inflicted upon civilians.

Since then, the Archbishop’s Human Rights and Legal Aid Office, known as Tutela Legal since 1982, has documented more than 50,000 cases of human rights abuses – before, during and after the civil war which ended in 1992. It holds the most comprehensive archive of El Salvador’s bloody history and its lawyers continue to represent survivors of notorious massacres including El Mozote and Rio Sumpul.

End of an era

On September 30 the staff arrived at work to find the locks changed and armed guards on the doors. They were allowed 10 minutes to clear their desks chaperoned by the security guards.

The current Archbishop, José Luis Escobar Alas, had closed Tutela Legal and issued a statement saying its work was “no longer relevant”. Two days later Escobar Alas said it was a normal part of restructuring and modernisation and a more relevant organisation would open in due course.

The closure triggered national and international condemnation from faith, human rights and solidarity groups, with large protests outside the Archdiocese. The biggest concern is about the safety and preservation of the huge paper archive without which any future legal action against perpetrators, who have enjoyed full impunity until now, could prove impossible.

The disbanding of Tutela at this moment in El Salvador history cannot be a coincidence.

– Patty Blum, legal advisor

The timing of the closure has caused widespread suspicion.

Ten days earlier the Supreme Court accepted a case challenging the constitutionality of the amnesty law brought by several human rights organisations.

The highly controversial amnesty law passed by the military-allied Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) government in 1993 absolved all those guilty of human rights atrocities. It meant the death squads, paramilitaries, security forces, and Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) leftist guerrillas responsible for the 80,000 deaths and 8,000 disappeared have never been held to account.

The surprise decision by the usually conservative Supreme Court Constitutional Chamber renewed hope of the amnesty law being repealed and the possibility of finally prosecuting those responsible for thousands of crimes forensically investigated and documented by Tutela Legal.

This court ruling came soon after the FMLN government’s attorney general re-opened the investigation into the 1981 El Mozote massacre in which at least 800 civilians were killed by the army. This decision was a direct response to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) which in October 2012 ruled the amnesty illegal.

Tutela Legal began gathering testimonies and investigating the El Mozote massacre almost immediately. They first lodged the case with the IACHR in 1990, sticking with it for 22 years before last year’s ruling.

In the past 15 years Tutela Legal’s work has proven crucial in cases brought against senior military figures living in the United States.

‘No coincidence’

Patty Blum, senior legal advisor to the San Francisco based Centre for Justice and Accountability, told Al Jazeera: “We owe a debt to Tutela Legal for their scrupulous documentation of the abuses occurring during the Salvadoran conflict. We made use, in multiple ways, of their materials in the civil cases we brought in the US and Spain against top commanders of the Salvadoran military for crimes, including the murder of Archbishop Romero and the 1989 assassinations of six Jesuits priests.”

She added: “The disbanding of Tutela at this moment in El Salvador history cannot be a coincidence.”

Tutela Legal was also active in new cases, such as the 2007 Red car battery factory lead-poisoning case, and ran education programmes and human rights training across El Salvador.

CAFOD, the official Catholic aid agency for England and Wales, is among dozens of groups demanding a U-turn by the Archbishop and guarantees about the archives.

Clare Dixon, CAFOD’s head of Latin America, told Al Jazeera: “Whilst the civil war may be over, El Salvador is a desperately polarised society and there are still huge issues of justice and peace and human rights violations. Tutela’s forensic research and legal accompaniment is still vital as communities find themselves at the mercy of abusive practices by mining and extractive industries, gang violence and organised crime.”

Oscar Romero’s libertarian theology and work with the country’s most oppressed people continued after his murder with Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas until 1994. But since then the Catholic Church hierarchy in El Salvador has reverted back to its conservative roots, with many social and education programmes closed by Parish priests, Bethany Loberg from NGO Share-El Salvador told Al Jazeera.

Escobar Alas, appointed Archbishop in 2008, is a well-known religious and political conservative, widely reported as a member of the right-wing group Opus Dei.
A Salvadorian walks by a poster with portraits of El Salvador’s last civil war (1980-1992) victims [EPA]

In August 2011 he said: “I cannot imagine if all the cases were opened. When will we live in peace, I do not think this generation want to spend their lives discussing the past, especially as there are abundant cases committed by both sides … Possibly the Amnesty Law is the most appropriate mechanism to maintain peace.”

Escobar Alas caused controversy last December after ordering the removal of a symbolic peace mural that adorned the San Salvador Cathedral without consulting anyone, not even the government or revered the artist, Fernando Llort.

His most recent communique on Tutela Legal cast a shadow over the reputation of staff with nebulous accusations of corruption and mismanagement.

In response to the closure President Maurico Funes has said: “I am concerned by the bad sign and message this sends. With this decision the Archbishop is not accompanying the just causes of people.”

Human Rights Ombudsman David Morales, a former Tutela Legal employee who helped take the Romero murder to the IACHR, has threatened legal action against the Archdiocese unless his team are given access to the archives.

Opposition party Arena, current favourites to win next year’s general election, have remained silent on the closure and did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

The Tutela Legal cases include Neris Gonzalez. In December 1979 she was subjected to two weeks of horrific torture by National Guard officers who left her for dead on a dump.

Gonzalez told Al Jazeera: “This arbitrary closure is a disrespectful hijacking of the historical memories from us victims. I feel re-victimised by the Archbishop’s abusive act but there must be others behind it.”

By David Alire Garcia

MEXICO CITY, Sept 25 (Reuters) – Mexico’s Congress will consider spending 2.75 billion pesos ($212 million) to help coffee farmers hit by a major outbreak of leaf rust and falling prices, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday.

The funding would aim to provide farmers with subsidies, replace ageing plantations, and give new credit and training opportunities following the spread of the tree-killing fungus roya.

“Those of us on the agriculture committee are budgeting 2.75 billion pesos to be able to address all of these questions,” Hector Narcia, chairman of the coffee sub-committee from the lower house’s agriculture committee, told Reuters.

“What we’re going to do is convince our colleagues to approve a significant budget. If that doesn’t happen, we are practically sounding the death knell for this product.”

Coffee prices have fallen by about half from a mid-2011 peak, leaving farmers to face a double-whammy of less revenue on top of depressed output from infected trees.

The deadly fungus that has hit Central America particularly hard this year kills leaves on coffee trees, with weakened plants producing less coffee. Between them, Mexico and Central America account for more than a fifth of global output of arabica beans.

Coffee farmers also need affordable insurance and price hedges, which the proposed funds could provide, said Narcia, a member of Mexico’s Green Party, coalition partners of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The finance ministry submitted the 2014 budget proposal to the lower house earlier this month and Congress is due to approve the funding plan for next year by mid-November.

Narcia said he and other members of Congress had been touring major coffee-producing areas, and that the government’s campaign launched in February to prevent coffee leaf rust had had some success.

PRICE PRESSURES

Gabriel Barreda, head of Mexico’s national coffee association AMECAFE, said in a separate interview that he strongly supports subsidies for farmers and that the lobby will present its own budget request in “less than 20 days.”

Mexico’s southern Chiapas state is the country’s top coffee producer, and also most affected by roya, Barreda said.

Chiapas is home to about 36 percent of Mexico’s coffee-farming land, and about 16 percent of the state’s farms, or 40,000 hectares, are currently blighted by roya, said Greens lawmaker Narcia, himself a native of the state.

Narcia said about a quarter of Mexico’s 700,000 hectares of coffee plantations had been infected by roya.

Government subsidies have been used in other coffee-producing countries in the region such as Colombia, and they help producers to remain competitive, dealers say.

Producers in Colombia, the world’s top supplier of washed arabica coffee, lowered their price premium for so-called usual good quality (UGQ) beans to an 11-month low last week as they drew in more business ahead of their biggest crop in six years.

Latin American growers are already suffering from low coffee prices, which are believed to be below the cost of production in several countries. Abundant global supplies have pushed the arabica market to the lowest in more than four years.

The price of the most active arabica futures contract fell last week to $1.1110 per lb, the lowest since April 2009. ($1 = 12.9693 Mexican pesos) (Additional reporting by Marcy Nicholson in New York; Editing by Dave Graham)

The EU restored aid earlier this year but not to farms on ‘disputed’ land – excluding the majority of small coffee growers
Beta

A misty dawn has not yet given way to daylight in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands. Lenard Moyo, a coffee farmer near Chipinge town, is prising red arabica beans out of their trees and putting them in his bag – as he does every morning during harvest season.

“It’s hard when it’s so cold outside, but we have to pick them early,” he said.

Zimbabwe’s coffee belt has the perfect growing conditions for the beans: high mountain peaks and cool climates, and the country used to be famous for its “super-high-quality” product, slowly sun-dried, and tasting smooth and fruity. In the 1990s it produced some of the best coffee in the world, alongside South America and Kenya, generating crucial foreign currency and a livelihood for many labourers and small-scale farmers, as well as the big commercial farms.

But today the industry is in decline: many of the mills have been abandoned, farmers are in debt, and Zimbabwe produces just 60 “bags” of coffee beans a year compared with 250 bags in 1988 – with one bag amounting to 60 tonnes of coffee.

Earlier this year the European Union announced €10m (£8.4m) in aid to Zimbabwe’s medium and small-scale farmers, in an attempt to revive the industry. But there’s a catch. “Coffee is an important crop and we’ll consider funding requests from small farmers provided the land involved is not in dispute,” Aldo Dell’Ariccia, head of the EU delegation to Zimbabwe, told the CAJ news agency.

Moyo said this caveat disqualified the majority of farmers. “Most of our small coffee plots are on land being contested in court by former white farmers. We’ll simply not qualify,” he said.

The disputes began in 2000, when young militants loyal to the president, Robert Mugabe, stormed white-owned farms to reclaim the land. At the time, Moyo was what was known as an “out-grower” – a black farmer owning a small plot of land next to a large commercial farm, relying on his neighbours for finance, expertise and machinery.

“First, [the militants] pruned down our coffee beans and burned hectares of trees in a week of rage. Coffee drying pens were turned into nurseries for marijuana and wild vegetables,” he said. “The new farm owners wanted instant profit but a coffee tree once planted takes three to five years to mature.”

Production plummeted as the new land owners could not secure bank loans to buy fertilisers or repair ageing infrastructure. Many were new to the business, and lacked the expertise to keep quality high.

In turn, international buyers began to shun Zimbabwean coffee, and in 2010 the Mutare Coffee Mill, considered one of the best in Africa, was forced to shut down. It required at least 4,000 tonnes of coffee to operate profitably but was receiving just 300.

And while Zimbabwean coffee growers struggle, elsewhere the industry is booming. Ten years ago the average cost of a tonne of coffee was $1,400, now it can fetch up to $4,000 (£2,500), according to the International Coffee Organisation.

“Zimbabwe is losing billions of dollars annually as the price of coffee has increased to about $3 per pound, up from $1 per pound in the 90s,” Gifford Trevor, president of Zimbabwe’s Coffee Growers Association, told News24.

Most of the country’s coffee farmers lack cash reserves to support themselves when the crop fails or yields are low, according to World Vision. The charity is training farmers and offering much-needed supplies such as fertilisers, irrigation systems and pesticides. But the farmers are still unable to compete with better organised growers in countries such as Rwanda, Kenya and Malawi.

The global coffee industry is also stacked against suppliers, with the bulk of the profit going to those further up the chain.

In August, on a sponsored trip to Johannesburg, 39-year-old Moyo tasted his first cappuccino. “I thought it was bitter lemon,” he said. He was particularly horrified to pay $3 for one cup, compared with the $5.30 he receives for a bag of raw coffee beans.

Peter Multz, a former consultant for the Dutch charity SNV, which works with Zimbabwean farmers to improve their business skills, said most of the profit went to shippers, roasters and retailers. He said Zimbabwean farmers also faced particular problems. “Sometimes the coffee is delayed at border crossings for up to a week, and without proper facilities the beans go bad. Sometimes buyers have to pay a bribe to let their coffee shipments go through,” he said.

With a more stable economy and western governments starting to release aid, Zimbabwean farmers hope that the country’s coffee industry will recover. But for Moyo times are still hard: “I can’t even pay my farm workers and coffee pickers properly,” he said. “Sometimes we reward them with milk, soya meals, and clothes after every harvest. As we say here, cash is a crunch.”

Biologists at Stanford have for the first time put a monetary value on the pest-control benefits of birds on coffee farms. While the research was localized to a Costa Rican farm, it may help shed some light for coffee producers worldwide on how to mitigate borer beetle infestations through better land management.

The Stanford biologists noted a direct correlation between leaving some land in its natural state and the number of birds that return, many species of which feed on the coffee borers. The closer a patch of unfarmed land with trees is to the crops, the less infestation. The research team even discovered that a small stand of trees in farm land can be more productive in naturally fighting off beetles than large swaths of natural land that may be on the periphery.

“The benefits that we might get are huge,” said Daniel Karp, a graduate student in biology and lead author of the study, published last month in Ecology Letters. “There’s lots of unrealized value in these small patches of rainforest. This looks like a sustainable, win-win opportunity for pest management.”

Stanford biologists have been studying coffee farms in Costa Rica since the 1990s, but the research has recently focused more on problems caused by the borer beetle, which burrows its way through the coffee cherry and back out, destroying it. The beetle was first found on Costa Rican coffee crops in 2010.

In this latest study, researchers first calculated coffee bean yield of infected plants that were housed in bird-proof cages versus yield from infected plants in the open, where birds were eating the beetles. Next, they needed to confirm which species of birds were eating the beetles, and whether the birds required forest to survive.

“We had the not-so-glamorous task of collecting the birds’ poop, and then taking it back to Stanford and looking through the DNA within it to learn which birds were the pest preventers,” Karp said.

The team said five species of birds contributed to cutting infestation rates in half, and the birds were more abundant on farms featuring more forests.

Said Karp, “Depending on the season, the birds provide $75 to $310 increases in yield per hectare of farmland.”

” Dear Joe,
I am trying to bring the coffee bags over today but our truck has a bit of problem as we are trying to get it sorted, esp., with registration. Also the weather is not good as it is raining outside right now and can’t able to load the green bean bags onto truck. I therefore would like to inform you that I want to have them to the FTM yard as soon as I get stuff here sorted and if the weather gets better.

I am also thinking of making it tomorrow, around 10 -11:00 am, will this be okay with you?

Thanks and regards,

Ben ”

Enjoy your coffee!