by Bruce Wydick
The development of mechanisms that bridge the economic chasm between the First World and the Third World (rather than merely relieve guilt in the First World) may well be the most critical research problem in social science. The struggle to bridge the chasm often pits left against right, the dispassionate scientist against the vociferous advocate, heartfelt emotion versus reason and evidence. I wanted to tell a story that illuminates the breadth of this chasm and illustrates the struggle of those who seek to bridge it. This book is my attempt.
CHAPTER 1
Guatemala, May 12, 1983
The young Mayan woman fled from her adobe house to take refuge in a neighbor’s barn. Her worn sandals flip-flopped as she ran frantically and awkwardly across the muddy grass of the small village, the small bundle on her back shrouded in a nest of colorful blankets. Glancing over her shoulder, she hastily unhitched the wooden latch, opened the door, and scanned the dilapidated barn for a hiding place. Sliding herself between a feeding trough and the barn wall, she covered herself with straw. She lay on her side, nearly hyperventilating, in muffled silence. The only sounds now were the synchronous rhythms of her wheezing lungs and the pounding pulse inside her head, disrupted by the sporadic rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun bursts. Sweat poured down her head, chest, and back. Her sanctuary smelled of animal dung, old hay, and the dusty pine boards of the barn’s old walls.
Governments at peace with their people are much alike, but genocidal governments are each maleficent in their own way. The human depravity that characterized the massacres of the Quiché, one of the twenty-three indigenous groups in Guatemala, in the genocide of the 1980s was no more and no less ruthless than Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia. But these massacres lacked the twisted creativity of Hitler’s death camps. In Guatemala soldiers with guns unloaded from pickups into indigenous villages and shot everyone.
After hearing of massacres in neighboring areas, they had confronted Father Dias, the local priest, asking him how God could allow such things. The priest had explained that God’s Spirit spoke to the conscience of all people to dissuade them from wrong. But if one disobeyed the voice long enough, it would slowly recede until he no longer could distinguish goodness from evil, until his conscience was defiled and he was no longer able to experience shame. It was only in this way that the young woman could begin to understand what was transpiring in her village.
She peeked through a crack in the wall of the barn. Could she be seen? She saw a group of young women being forced into a line by the troops. Two nervous-looking recruits with sunglasses and automatic weapons stood in front of the women. The soldiers were also young, maybe even still teenagers, and she understood that they had been given a heavy responsibility. They had been given the responsibility of no longer experiencing shame. The women were shaking, crying, one clutching the arm of her friend Mildred, who was trying to plead with the recruits in Spanish.
Virtually all of the women had been friends since childhood. Together they had picked coffee in the fields each November and December in the cool morning mist, through the afternoon sun, and until dusk. They would bring a stack of tortillas wrapped in a cloth to last the whole day. And as they would pick, they would eat and chat together for hours, their delicate fingers effortlessly flowing over the coffee cherries as they slid the red and orange ones off into a sack tied on their waist, careful to leave the yellow and green ones for the second harvest. They talked about parents, school, and boys. And each year as they grew older together, the conversation returned to the latter with greater frequency and enthusiasm than the year before.
Mildred was always the brave one. One time in the fields, Mildred had caught the small son of the foreman stealing coffee cherries from the sack of one of the other women, who was away relieving herself. Many in the village would have let the boy go, pretending they did not see, for the foreman was the right-hand man of the plantation owner. A willingness to confront transgression, especially in the family of a superior, is not characteristic of the Quiché. But Mildred had scolded the boy, and she had scared him. If she caught him again, she would thrash his rear so long and hard he wouldn’t sit for a month. And he did not steal from the workers again. Yes, Mildred would be the one to stand up to the soldiers.
But as the young woman watched through the crack in the barn, she saw an officer with a pistol begin to walk toward Mildred.
Angela
San Francisco, April 5, 2007
Angela arrived at her professor’s office for a special meeting. Taking a deep breath, she tapped lightly on the door. Through the beveled glass, she caught a shadow of movement that beckoned her in. She felt the perspiration on her hand as she twisted the old brass doorknob and entered the office. Today there would be final news on her fieldwork assignment for her thesis.
“Please have a seat, Angela.” Her professor hastily cleared some ungraded papers off a space on the couch next to his desk so that one of the cushions was visible. Displays of indigenous art from the developing world filled the shelves of the office. Above a messy desk, an enormous world map took up most of the space on the wall. Pins in the map described the location of ongoing research projects around the globe.
He sat in his desk chair and looked at her. “I have a research project for you in Guatemala.”
Angela raised her eyebrows and felt a surge of excitement.
“It’s sitting on my desk.”
Angela looked and saw nothing extraordinary except the desk full of more ungraded papers, a stapler, and an old coffee mug with an uncommonly high steam vapor rising above it.
“I share at least one heartfelt conviction with millions of others in the world,” he said as he reached for the mug and swallowed contentedly from it, “and it is that without a cupful of Juan Valdez’s Best before nine a.m., the day is off to a bad start—almost by definition.” He paused and looked up at Angela. “And for some consumers, if it’s not fair trade, it’s not ethical . . . almost by definition. But does it matter?”
Angela grinned. “You got my attention, Prof.” She could sense where this was going.
The professor smiled. “The project is part of an impact study on fair trade coffee for which we just received funding with some researchers over at Berkeley. As you probably know, fair trade attempts to guarantee coffee growers a minimum price for their crop in exchange for promising to comply with some basic labor and environmental standards.”
He pressed his fingertips together under his chin, making eye contact with her over his bifocals. “It’s funded by the US Agency for International Development. Our government has an interest in preventing another outbreak of civil war in Central America. Seems to feel a little guilty about its involvement in the last ones.” He swallowed another mouthful from his mug and then added, “We know that these wars are incubated in the economic disenfranchisement of the rural poor . . .”
She finished the sentence for him. “. . . many of whom are coffee growers.”
Her professor nodded. “Correct. Profits of the multinational coffee conglomerates have never been higher. But coffee growers remain impoverished. USAID is engaged in a concerted effort trying to find ways to augment their incomes.”
“And fair trade coffee is one way?”
“The expansion of fair trade marketing channels is one possibility,” he affirmed. “But we need to find out if fair trade coffee is worth expanding.”
Angela knew that her part was next. Her professor continued. “We want you to follow a bag of coffee beans from peasant coffee growers in Guatemala to the coffee drinker in the States, tracing the path of the beans through all the intermediate links in the chain: local buyers, processors, fair trade exporters, roasters, and retailers—calculating the profit made at every stage.”
“Like how the $3.50 some guy pays for a latte gets divided between everyone who touches the beans?”
“Precisely.”
Intriguing, but it sounded like a big job.
“Do I have help?”
He took another sip. “Of course. You’ll be part of an excellent team that will include two top doctoral students from Berkeley, Sofia Cavallera and Richard Freeland. Rich is being temporarily diverted from another project in Guatemala and Sofia is already there working on another aspect of the study.” Angela smiled—a chance to work with doctoral students at Berkeley. She had even seen Sofia present at a conference in the spring. It had been an impressive paper.
The professor reclined back in his chair, happy to see Angela’s interest. “You are from Guatemala originally, if I remember correctly?” He toyed with the earpiece of his bifocals in his teeth.
Angela hesitated. “Well, kind of. My mom and dad are from north of LA. I was adopted.”
“Ever been back?”
“No, actually. Suppose I’ve been looking for an excuse the last few years.” Angela gazed at the world map. “Especially since studying international development, I’ve kind of wondered what life would have been like if . . .” Angela returned eye contact.
“. . . if your life would have been lived in Guatemala instead of Simi Valley?”
“Yes, Prof.”
“Do you know where you were born?” he asked.
“Somewhere in the northwest highlands, I think.”
“That’s coffee country, Angela. In fact, you’ll be based in the highlands, in Huehuetenango.” He smiled. “I believe this summer you will learn about much more than the distribution of profits in the coffee value chain.” Angela returned his smile a little self-consciously. She tucked a lock of her dark brown hair behind her ears.
The project was more than she ever could have hoped for: working with outstanding researchers and a chance to explore the place of her birth for the first time. She got up to leave.
“Angela, there’s something else. I’ve also asked Alex to be part of the team.”
He might as well have told her that at every moment during the trip, she was to be accompanied by an untamed chimpanzee. “Alex?” The soaring helium balloon that had ascended so high the last few minutes had just been pricked and had descended back to earth.
“Prof,” she pleaded. “Alex is a left-wing nutcase.”
“Perhaps, but one with a keen interest in fair trade coffee. He’s a good student, Angela, quite smart actually. And he’s even learning something about economics. I think he’ll work well with you . . . if you can forgive him for his behavior in the debate.” He looked at her wryly.
“Thanks, Prof. We’ll see.” She shook hands politely and left the office with emotions that could not have conflicted more sharply.
Angela walked down the stairwell and passed the classroom where the infamous Debate had taken place early last semester in their international trade class. It caused her to reflect on the event, which to this point she had endeavored to exorcise from her mind. In a deliberation over the merits of globalization, Alex had used a presentation that unfairly relied on emotional manipulation and pictures of physically abused multinational factory workers that, by some miracle, captured more votes from the inexperienced class than her rigorous presentation of Ricardian comparative advantage. At least for that day, the activist had triumphed over the scientist. But even more than this, Angela resented his insinuations that she cared less about the poor in the developing world than he did. The difference between them, at least as she saw it, was her commitment to what well-constructed theory and a scientific evaluation of the evidence might bring to the subject.
On top of this, Alex had recently dated her housemate for a few weeks, quickly dumping her for a relationship with a cute little college sophomore that lasted again only so long. Alex was able to do this, because even Angela admitted that at least on the surface he was tall, boyishly attractive with a cute accent, and far too charming for his own good, or anyone else’s. Her housemate cried all night on the couch. His looks, his manner, and the way he used them to satisfy his own ends only magnified her antipathy toward him. Yes, Alex Van Vleck was an ideologue and a flake, and the thought of three months working side by side with him was a vile one.
But even Angela could see how their personalities and motivations had swept them from opposite angles into the same research project. For different reasons, it was too interesting for either of them to resist: For him it would be a way to validate the efforts of those who circumvented exploitative corporate coffee conglomerates. She, on the other hand, was genuinely curious about the impact of fair trade coffee. And there was that further curiosity she shared with many adopted children, of wanting to see and explore their origins. Only added together did it marginally outweigh the bane of a summer full of Alex.
Just before midnight on June first, the twin engines of United Airlines flight 805 from San Francisco to Guatemala City droned through the darkness that enshrouded northern Mexico. As she tried to sleep, Angela’s head kept drooping off to the side, waking her up again. It was a vicious cycle, afflicting her at a time she knew she needed sleep.
Alex was sleeping soundly in the seat next to her, wearing a bulky, inflated neck support he bought on a whim at an airport gift shop. Angela grew more irritated as she watched him sleep, partly because she was frequently irritated with Alex anyway, and partly because the neck brace made Alex’s jaw hang open while he was sleeping. It gave him a cadaverous look, like a slain gangster in a movie, shot dead but still sitting upright. A thin line of drool leaked from the corner of his mouth. His longish blond hair and a facial expression that more or less permanently projected cynicism, even when parked in neutral, completed the picture. His satisfied snore only slightly trailed the engines of the 767 in the competition to keep Angela awake.
A flight attendant passed by with the drink cart and stared just momentarily at Angela. “Jugo o café quisiera Usted?” she asked, quickly identifying her as one of the Guatemalan passengers and asking for her preference in Spanish. Angela also could sense that the stewardess was staring at the conspicuous birthmark on her left cheek.
“Jugo, por favor,” replied Angela in the cleanest accent she could produce. She turned her head so that her cheek was no longer in the attendant’s line of vision, a habit she had cultivated from long years of trying to avoid unwanted stares.
Angela Lopez-Williams was adopted as an infant by Kevin Williams and Maria Lopez of suburban Los Angeles. Although her mother was Mexican-American, Angela had grown up with mostly English-speaking friends, in a mostly English-speaking neighborhood, and attended mostly English-speaking schools. Yet she knew that she was an artifact of globalization, the product of two worlds.
Angela knew that to the casual observer, with her stature on the short side of average, bronze complexion, and dark brown hair, she looked as Guatemalan as any native, to the point that she would often draw initial conversation in Spanish. But as she grew older, even when her mother spoke to her in her native tongue, she had developed a lazy, teenage habit of answering her mother in English. As a result, she never developed full fluency with the language. And she found that when she did speak Spanish, she realized her accent had been poisoned over the years with a rounded North American drawl that lacked the stiletto-like precision of a native speaker. It frustrated her. But she didn’t want to be a Latina anyway. But maybe she did; it kind of depended on the day.
Once when she was a little girl, her mother told her that her family was just like the coffee she used to make at the café, cafe con leche, coffee with milk and two spoons of sugar to make it extra sweet. Her mother’s unwavering kindness helped, at times.
Unable to sleep, she unbuckled her seat belt, walked down the aisle, and opened the latch to the cramped toilet. She splashed warm water on her face. Drying it with a paper towel, she looked in the mirror at the large birthmark in the shape of a spotted crescent that ran from the corner of her left eye, across her cheek, and down to her chin. When she was a toddler, the doctor told her mother it might fade away after a few years. It never did.
Angela dwelled on it more when traveling to a new place because in new places
one met new people, and the conspicuousness of it always made first meetings awkward. During conversation, she had become sensitive to when someone’s angle of eye contact with her moved almost imperceptibly away from her own eyes toward her cheek.
This was always more of a problem relating to people in the Latino community, a culture that often makes physical irregularities fair game for frivolous nicknames. There was that time, that stain in her memory, when her high school offered a Spanish literature class, where they were reading Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. A group of Mexican sophomores sitting together in the back of the class pounced on the word mancha, also the word for “blemish” in Spanish. Jonathan Dias stood up and pointed at her: “Y aqui tenemous Angela de la Mancha!” They all hooted with unabated laughter, high-fives slapped all around the group. Humiliated, she had quickly looked to the teacher, Mr. Pérez, for support. Instead she saw the faintest smile edge up the corner of his mouth. In that split second, before he regained his composure to begin a ritually ineffectual round of reprimanding, it was obvious that he found the remark humorous too. It had become lodged in her mind like an inoperable bullet.
It caused her to forsake her Latin identity for some time, determining never to visit the country of her birth—or any place like it. She favored vacations with her father’s extended family. At school she retreated into a world of books, history, and mathematics. She found it was a world in which she thrived, and was lauded for her efforts. It was a space in which people were rewarded for the quality of their ideas and the crispness of their proofs, where irregularities and cultural contradictions became irrelevant. It was a safe hiding place, the refuge of so many bright but socially marginalized teenagers who later emerge as society’s great thinkers and scholars.
And well before graduation, colleges began throwing scholarships at her.