From the conuco | COFFEE CULTURE, REFLECTIONS ON THE ORGANIZATION | By: Toribio Azuaje

By: Toribio Azuaje

“If we cannot put an end to our differences, let us help make the world a place fit for them.”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

When we talk about organizing the peasant and in our particular case the coffee grower, it is not about legalizing a structure or association to serve as a space for those who are a gateway to promote and adapt the domination and exploitation imposed by the centers of power. For a union structure to be useful to us, it must be sufficiently autonomous, independent, agile and modern, allowing us to build from what we are and what we have, a relationship model that frees us, that guides us in the construction of productive and marketing methods that enhance and strengthen the primary sector of the productive chain.

An organization docile to the established powers is not a useful organization, at least not for us. The constituted power is always the same, although new faces appear and novel narratives are constructed that simulate certain stages of freedom that at the end of the road turn out to be non-existent. Their networks of power trap and suffocate us in the same way.

We cannot depend on those who exploit us and those who negotiate with our needs, nor hand over our struggle to interim traffickers who take turns controlling coffee farming. Even less in those who, becoming messengers of power, exchange their dignity for scraps, at the expense of the collective that is dispersed in the sea of ​​its own precariousness. Coffee farming is full of noble and hard-working people, honest people, men and women with kind hearts; Those are the ones who must assume the task of the organization. But also, among the bushes, there are struggle merchants hiding, who prevent and slow down independent and autonomous growth. These must be identified and prevented from coloring the struggle with their style and their businesses.

It hurts so much evil gathered under a single banner, it hurts complicity and even more silence, it hurts pettiness and envy. It hurts to see that enmities are cultivated between the same class, giving free rein to unbridled egos, it hurts in supreme pain and one feels so much helplessness in the face of what is unfair and inhuman.

Coffee farmers are a gale of dreams in an irrational world that tears us apart. They try to turn us into a blind instrument of the dominant power and we do not realize the matter. Coffee farmers are dreamers of freedom in a sea of ​​precariousness and betrayal.

This fight is not to elevate our egos to pedestals that do not belong to us, the fight must be to create a coffee-growing town free of so many ties that force it to live in a world of precariousness. Small and medium producers will never advance until we help them in their drive.

So much suffering and so much betrayal of the peasant is not fair. An organizational method must be born from us that liberates us and vindicates us as honorable peasants and activists of decent work.

[e-mail]