EDITORIAL In Guatemala, bishops crusade for justice to match peace
accords
What happened in recent weeks on a large coffee plantation in
Solola, Guatemala, won't make it to the evening news, probably not even to the
inside pages of most newspapers. But it is worth noting and watching, for this
is the Guatemala -- the dangerous, arbitrary and unjust Guatemala -- behind the
peace accords.
Guatemala has a law describing a normal work day as eight hours.
The plantation manager ordered workers to stay on and perform tasks that would
have extended the day to 11 hours, but without adding anything to the paltry
wage of 14 quetzales or $2.26 a day.
When the workers refused, they were threatened with loss of their
jobs. Being fired from a job on the coffee plantation for most workers means
losing their shelter as well as wages, and it means uprooting children from
familiar surroundings, schools and friends. But the 15 workers involved in this
incident have refused to undertake the extra work, and the plantation owner has
given them a month to get off the land.
An appeal has been made to the national Labor Office, but the
owners and managers of the huge plantation that employs several hundred workers
have refused to recognize the appeal, saying the Labor Office has no
jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, there are other reports of landowners refusing to pay
wages and firing workers in large numbers for protesting what they believe are
unjust conditions. Law, in recent times, has been a slippery matter in
Guatemala, and it remains so even in peace time.
Don't expect the United States and other Western countries that
benefit from low-priced imports and access to Guatemala's rich resources above
and below ground to take up the cause of the plantation workers.
Few would be willing to rock the boat for mistreated campesinos.
But the Catholic bishops in that wildly beautiful but injustice-plagued country
know well that the few campesinos, multiplied thousands of times, are the
central element to Guatemala's tragic recent history.
The bishops and a handful of others in the religious and human
rights communities have given voice to the campesinos' concerns. It is
dangerous advocacy in a land where, so recently, defying authority often
brought a secret death sentence carried out by faceless paramilitary
squads.
In fact, the bishops have incurred the anger of landowners, who
charge that the Catholic leaders are encouraging campesinos to break the law.
Fundamental to Guatemala's long troubles -- an internal war of varying
intensity that began in the late 1950s and ended in peace accords early this
year -- has been the issue of land. Indigenous people -- the country's majority
-- and other poor people have been swept off their land over the decades.
The bishops have openly supported the rights of the workers on the
coffee plantation in question. They also maintain, in a recent statement, that
the church "respects the right to private property," but at the same time
affirms that "private property has a social function; in other words, it is a
good that should be, in its use and possession, for the common good in order to
generate social welfare for all people; however, there are many people who have
no property."
The peace accords are hardly a conclusion. The long journey toward
justice has just begun in Guatemala. Events like that on the coffee plantation
in Solola are the tiny steps that move the cause along.
As the bishops said, "the demand for land is present everywhere
and the campesinos have the right to demand it." And they have the right to
demand just wages and humane treatment. And the world has an obligation to hear
them.
National Catholic Reporter, May 16,
1997
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