[link removed] Share ([link removed])

[link removed]: https%3A%2F%2Fmailchi.mp%2Frightsaction%2Frebuilding-sustainable-communities-in-aftermath-of-genocide Tweet ([link removed]: https%3A%2F%2Fmailchi.mp%2Frightsaction%2Frebuilding-sustainable-communities-in-aftermath-of-genocide)

[link removed] Forward ([link removed])

January 21, 2025


**
“The Green Cornfield of Alfredo Cortez”
The Association of Community Production Committees (ACPC) is re-building sustainable communities in the aftermath of the 1980s genocide in Rabinal, Guatemala
------------------------------------------------------------
[link removed]
Below:
Project proposal: $10,000 for ACPC in 2025
Two background articles about vision and methodologies of the ACPC
Alfredo Cortez. Photo: Rights Action
Since 1994, Rights Action has worked in the Rabinal region supporting multiple ‘Truth – Memory - Justice’ projects of community organizations of survivors and children of the victims of the U.S. and Western-backed genocide carried out in the Maya Achi region of Guatemala from 1978-1983.

Over the years, Rights Action has brought many human rights delegations of North Americans to Rabinal, to meet with and learn from the Achi people. In recent years, following the lead of friend and colleague Nate Einbinder, Rights Action began funding the agroecology work of the Association of Community Production Committees (ACPC), founded and operated by survivors and children of the Achi genocide.

ACPC’s main focus is working is home to home, village to village, strengthening community-based transitions back to agroecological production processes used by their grandparents and previous generations for food security, environmental recuperation and protection, and self-sustainability.

Please read and consider sharing this information.

Rights Action will continue to send regular small grants to ACPC, while at the same time we are looking for funders/ organizations that might want to directly establish longer term support and learning relations with ACPC. (If interested in building lasting relationships: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) )

ACPC Proposal 2025
Strengthening community-based transition in agroecological production processes for capacity building, self-sustainability and community upscaling.

General objectives
* Generate agroecological capacity and innovation on the efficient use of beneficial mountain microorganisms, for their adoption and transition to agroecology.
* To recover ancestral values and practices from the innovated Mayan Achí culture.


Specific objectives
Accompany 90 families during community transition cycles in agroecological productive units for 10 months, in the application of bio-fabricated products.

Justification
The organization of ACPC's technical team of 6 promoters and producers will develop productive agroecological activities with direct community training and accompaniment.

Expected results
The 90 families that will be accompanied during the transition process will acquire knowledge and practices to increase agroecological productions in order to improve livelihoods regarding food security, and environment.

FUND APPLICATION PROPOSAL.
Hiring 3 agro-ecological technicians (local Achi speaking people), February to November who will be assigned to the communities where ACPC works.

Stipend Q2,500/month (approx.. U$300), each technician: Q25,000.
Total amount requested: Q75,000.

Means of verification: Constant community visits, report, photos, videos, logbook, interviews.
Reporting: Delivery of monthly reports on field results and harvested product.

ATT.
President ACPC, Gabriel Cajbón
ACPC Coordinator. Alfredo Cortez
Guatemala: How farmers from Rabinal overcame drought
By Sebastian Escalon ([link removed]) / NOMADA / September 18, 2019
(This is a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay Latam ([link removed]) and Nómada)
[link removed]

• Some 40 plots in the municipality of Rabinal are among the few that have managed to cope with the increasing annual drought and will be able to be harvested this year. •

Unlike the plots with conventional crops, those in this story carry out agroforestry practices and their success has begun to attract the attention of the authorities.
Alfredo Cortez shows the agricultural products produced by his project.
Photo: Sebastian Escalon
Alfredo Cortez's plot of land is an oasis of life amidst the desolation left by the drought.

We arrive at the community of Xesiguán, in the municipality of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, about 120 kilometers north of Guatemala City. All along the way, the cornfields are yellow. This year they will not produce a single ear of corn and the farmers will soon be left without a livelihood. As if out of desperation, several of them let their horses and cows eat the dying cornfields. It is the middle of the rainy season and the sun beats down from a cloudless sky. Clouds of dust rise from the dirt road that runs through the mountains.

But on Alfredo Cortez's small plot of land, the atmosphere is different. There, the air is fresh, humid and full of the smell of organic matter from the forest. Large trees provide shade and beneath them, dozens of plant species cover the entire range of greens of a tropical garden.

Alfredo Cortez is a 39-year-old Maya-Achí farmer. He has sun-tanned skin, slanted eyes, and wavy hair that covers the back of his neck. He is a nursing assistant, an agricultural promoter, and coordinates an organization called the Association of Community Production Committees (ACPC) that brings together some 150 families from various communities in Rabinal: Xesiguán, San Luis, Chixim, Concúl, among others.

For about fifteen years, ACPC farmers have been experimenting with an alternative production system called agroforestry. The name is new, but the techniques are as old as agriculture itself.

The green cornfield of Alfredo Cortez
Agroforestry consists of integrating trees, animals and various crops in the same space. In an agroforestry plot there are three levels of vegetation: trees, shrubs and plants. Together they make the most of the resources – water, light and soil nutrients – and provide the farmer with an unrivalled variety of products.

Before joining ACPC, Alfredo Cortez worked for nine years in the maternity ward of the Ministry of Health in Rabinal. “My job was to weigh malnourished children. I would weigh them one day and the next month I would weigh them again to confirm that they were still malnourished. That was useless. I would argue a lot with the doctors and tell them, ‘Why am I going to weigh them again if we already know that they haven’t eaten? ’”

Fourteen years ago, Alfredo decided to resign and dedicate himself to agriculture and the organization of his community, Xesiguán.

He started working on a small plot of land, a family inheritance. He wanted to cultivate it in an unconventional way: recovering ancestral agricultural techniques, abandoning the use of agrochemicals and diversifying crops.

This, with one goal in mind: food self-sufficiency for his family.

It was not easy. When he started, there was no terrain less welcoming than his plot for a business like the one he was determined to undertake. His land measures approximately four acres (1.7 hectares) and is a steep, rocky hillside that suddenly falls into the Xesiguán River in a sheer drop.

When he decided to work it, it was a “guamil,” a ravine covered in weeds. To cultivate, he created stepped platforms and flattened a space to build his adobe house. He dug irrigation ditches, trenches across the plot that prevent the water from running hard and eroding the soil during downpours.

He also planted trees: mango trees, avocado trees, orange trees, lemon trees, mandarin trees, papaya trees, macadamia trees. With their roots, these help to fix the soil and their tops maintain freshness and humidity. Then, he populated his terraces with all kinds of plants.

Walking through the plot, you can see, scattered like crazy, chiles, passion fruit, güisquiles, nopales. A bunch of amaranth here, some bananas there, a thicket of sugar cane here, chipilín, ruda, macuy, yuca and all kinds of vegetables.

There are flowers, aromatic herbs and medicinal herbs. Further down, a good production of malanga, a tuber that in other times was part of the daily diet of the Achí population.

He also raises animals: a couple of pigs, a cow, chickens and turkeys. He even has a small pond with tilapia and snails that he feeds with malanga.

With this, Alfredo Cortez's family is self-sufficient in protein. In addition, the manure is used to fertilize his crops. He has his compost bin in a wooden container. Cortez reaches into it and pulls out a handful of worms that are wriggling around in the compost.

Down towards the ravine, under large shade trees, he has a plantation with 400 coffee plants. On one side of the road he has his cornfield. And this is where the principles of agroforestry are most clearly illustrated.

It is not a cornfield like any other. Alfredo Cortez's milpa is a tangle of plants under trees. It is like a jungle where food grows. The corn plants are arranged as if Alfredo had thrown handfuls of seeds blindly. Other species grow among the corn: chipilín, chiltepe, squash. There are also beans and pigeon peas that enrich the soil with nutrients.

In his milpa, Alfredo does not fight weeds because they also have their purpose: they make the plant layer continuous and, in this way, the humidity does not escape from the soil. The water stays there, between the roots, stems and fallen leaves of the trees that slowly degrade.

When a downpour falls, the water does not flow like a river of mud. At every step it encounters obstacles that slow it down. The treetops cushion its fall, then it runs down branches and trunks, drips onto the cornfield and bushes, and finally most of it penetrates into the porous layer of soil rich in plant matter that farmers call "mulch."

Alfredo Cortez says that some 40 ACPC plots are as attractive as his or even more beautiful. These are, in fact, the few that will produce this year in the entire municipality of Rabinal. That is why other plots are also in the process of being converted to an agroforestry system.

Feliciano Acox, another Achí farmer from Xesiguán, has tried both planting systems. On his agroforestry plot he continues to diversify his crops. On a rented plot two hundred meters from Alfredo’s plot, he also planted a conventional cornfield, with a single species and using fertilizers. This was a failure. Not a single plant survived. Without his agroforestry plot he would now be in serious trouble. “Organic planting yields less, but it is safer,” he says. “If corn doesn’t grow, we have cassava or malanga to sustain us.”

A model that is beginning to be recognized
What Ivan Aguilar, humanitarian coordinator for Oxfam, an NGO that brings together 17 non-governmental organizations that carry out humanitarian work in 90 countries, has seen is the collapse of a way of life.

The Dry Corridor, where the municipality of Rabinal is located, is a strip vulnerable to droughts that runs through Central America from southern Mexico to Panama. In Guatemala, the corridor crosses the territory from east to west, and it is there where extreme poverty and hunger are concentrated. According to Aguilar, farmers in these areas never lived in abundance. Many families suffered, year after year, from seasonal hunger: the shortage of food when the product of the previous harvest runs out.

A 2015 World Food Programme study found that 27% of families in Guatemala’s Dry Corridor needed food assistance and another 68% were at risk of falling into a situation of food insecurity. According to Oxfam, that prediction was fulfilled for many families, as, according to its surveys, chronic malnutrition among children under five increased from 61% in 2016 to 68% in 2019.

The life of the farmers of the Dry Corridor, Aguilar explains, was based on two pillars: the cultivation of their plots and day labor on coffee farms and other farms. With their own cornfields they covered their needs in corn and beans for six to nine months. With the daily wages, however meager they were, they could buy other basic products.

But a new climate regime has been taking hold. Since 2012, only 2017 has had an average winter. All other years have had a rainfall deficit. 2018 and 2019 have been catastrophic, with periods of between 25 and 30 days without rain in the middle of the maize planting season. Oxfam monitoring carried out in 2018 found that 76% of the maize crop in the Dry Corridor was lost. In the first months of the 2019 rainy season, this figure rose to 80%.

At the same time, coffee production is also in crisis: rust, drought and low international prices have depressed the sector and reduced its labor needs to a minimum. Without their own crops and without the resource of daily wages, families in the dry corridor have nothing to eat or how to buy. According to estimates by the FAO and the World Food Program, 1.4 million Guatemalans need urgent food assistance.

Those who can, leave. According to Oxfam, people with mild and moderate food insecurity migrate 38% and 28% more (respectively) than people who have food security. In fact, a 2017 World Food Programme report showed the relationship between food insecurity in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and the migration crisis on the southern border of the United States. An indicator of this phenomenon is that among the migrants who are captured at the border and then deported, there are increasingly more farmers; if in 2009 they made up 31% of those deported, in 2015 they were 53%.

For Iván Aguilar, part of the problem that leads to poor harvests and hunger is the lack of care for the soil. “The areas where producers are in the worst condition are those with a forestry vocation, which should not be used for cultivation. The soil is unprotected by erosion,” he says. The Oxfam coordinator is committed to the transformation of production systems into agroforestry systems and the promotion of good practices that help to recover soil fertility. “There is no magic solution, but it is a way to recover fertility,” says Aguilar.

The ACPC farmers are involved in this process and they are not the only ones. Alfredo Cortez knows that the quality of the soil and the water in the wells and springs depends on the trees he plants. Thanks to funding from FAO, ACPC reforests nine hectares per year and cares for the forests in the basin, which provides the water consumed by the population of Rabinal.

Qachuu Aloom, Mother Earth in the Achí language
In the municipality, another association works under similar principles. It is called Qachuu Aloom, Mother Earth in the Achí language. Founded in 2002 by survivors of the massacres in Río Negro, this association promotes family gardens, soil protection and the rescue of native seeds. Today it has about 500 members in 18 communities in Rabinal, Cubulco and San Miguel Chicaj, municipalities in Baja Verapaz.

Miguel Chen, a farmer from Pacanal village, is one of these partners. He is fortunate because he has a well that still supplies him with water. Although it is not enough to irrigate a cornfield, it is enough to grow a small vegetable garden and sell the surplus to buy corn. Qachuu Aloom advises him on the care of his plot, the use of natural pesticides and practices to limit erosion.
The association also offers cooking workshops with local products: amaranth, macuy, güisquil, pigeon pea.

The idea is that by diversifying the diet of the farmers, who have also become poorer over the years, the health of the families will improve. Miguel Chen likes these workshops. “When my wife can’t, I go. What she likes the most is stuffed chile. It also has chopped vegetables, but it is wrapped in an amaranth leaf. Another one that I like is egg cake with amaranth seed. You beat the egg, pour the amaranth on top and it becomes like a really nice pancake,” Miguel Chen says, licking his lips.

Qachuu Aloom is part of the Guatemalan Food Sovereignty Network (RedSag), which brings together 80 associations nationwide that practice agroecology and crop diversification. ACPC is part of Utz Ché, another organization that brings together 40 local associations dedicated to reforestation, forest care and agroforestry.

But all together, admits Ronnie Palacios, coordinator of RedSag, they are islands scattered across the territory. “The Ministry of Agriculture,” he explains, “is not interested in agroecological initiatives.”

With the drought, however, things could change. In the community of Xesiguán, Alfredo Cortez's fertile plot is already a topic of conversation. "More and more people are coming to see what we do. I want my plot to be an agricultural training center," says Cortez, who spends a good part of his time giving talks and workshops to agricultural promoters who want to replicate Alfredo's model plot on their land.

A couple of weeks ago, Cortez received a call from an engineer from the Ministry of Agriculture. He was asked to present ACPC’s work to the Baja Verapaz Food Security Commission, which brings together several government institutions. “I was very surprised that they called me, because until now, they hadn’t been interested in our work,” Cortez says.

Community and environment first solutions in agroforestry
The model promoted by ACPC consists of thinking first about the family's own consumption. The harvested surpluses are sold at the Rabinal market. There, the prices of the products are low. Even so, Alfredo Cortez assures that his plot yields about Q500 ($US65) per week with the sale of coffee, eggs, avocados, citrus, chiltepe, and fish. This is more than what a peasant earns working for daily wages, which in the area are paid Q35 or Q40 (about $US5). In addition, his expenses on food are almost nonexistent.

Recently, ACPC managed to get the rural school of Xesiguán to buy school lunch products from them. The paperwork with the Ministry of Education was long and tedious, but it was worth it. In many families, women are in charge of the family gardens. They are the ones who supply the school with their surplus products. Everyone wins: they receive income, the children eat fresh vegetables, and above all, they relearn to eat local food. “A child today wants to eat a hotdog, a junk food. Give him a boxbol (a specialty made from güisquil leaves and seasoned corn dough) and he complains. Give him a guava, he doesn’t want it. You have to teach them,” Cortez explains. “I tell my daughters: if you want to suck on a candy, it’s better to cut a sugar cane or eat an orange.”

Another project underway involves taking advantage of the forested areas in the upper part of the Xesiguán basin to grow coffee. ACPC will soon be roasting and packaging its own organic coffee, which will also be a source of income for the community.

For researcher Nathan Einbinder of the Colegio de la Frontera Sur de México , a scientific research center specializing in sustainable development, the benefits of agroecological plots are multiple. The diversity of crops allows for year-round harvests, and although these practices require more work, they reduce expenses on chemicals. Sales of surplus produce provide an income that frees some farmers from day labor on industrial farms.

Another key to the success of these projects, says Einbinder, is that the farmers who develop them are particularly enterprising and motivated. They are the most determined to recover traditional practices, to experiment with new techniques, and to react to climate change.
Agroecological practices were long considered anachronistic.

This is changing. According to the FAO ([link removed]) conventional agricultural systems have managed to produce large quantities of food. But the cost has been high, as they “have contributed to deforestation, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, soil depletion and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.” The international organization, which promotes agroecology on the global stage, assures that this practice ([link removed]) on the other hand, brings benefits to both farmers and the environment and represents a hope for achieving sustainable agriculture that helps reduce malnutrition and poverty rates among the rural population.

Another example of this shift in perspective is the IPCC's Report on Climate Change and Land ([link removed]) which indicates that actions such as forest conservation, sustainable agricultural methods and soil protection contribute to mitigating the effects of climate change, as well as increasing food security and effectively combating desertification.

Thanksgiving ceremony to Ajaw, creator of heaven and earth
Before each planting and harvest, Alfredo Cortez offers a thanksgiving ceremony to Ajaw, the creator of heaven and earth, the central divinity of the Mayan cosmogony. The care of the forests, the water and the work of the land define the place in the world of the Achís peasants. “My grandfather used to say: you will live if you take care of the water and the land and take up the machete and the hoe. If not, you will die in the street,” Cortez recalls.

(Sebastian Escalon ([link removed]) / (Toulouse, 1977). A biologist by training, he wrote a thesis on the sexual reproduction of polychaetes (a class of marine worms). He later turned to journalism. He is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, 2018.)

ACPC re-building sustainable communities in the aftermath of genocide against Maya Achi people, in the age of increasing environmental harms and climate heating
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action, August 2, 2021
[link removed]

In the mountains of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, the Asociacion de Comites de Produccion Comunitaria (ACPC) works home to home, village to village, to re-build community self-sufficiency in the aftermath of the Guatemalan State genocide against the Maya Achi people in the 1980s. The 1999, UN Truth Commission concluded that the U.S. and Western-backed Guatemalan military carried out genocide against for Maya regions of the country, including the Achi people of Rabinal.
Juan Manuel Geronimo. Photo: Rights Action
I have returned to Guatemala for the first time in 18 months, since COVID raced around the world. One of my stops was in Rabinal, where Rights Action has worked since 1994. Plan de Sanchez was just one of the villages in Rabinal that suffered the US-backed regime’s scorched earth military tactics.

On our 3 hour walk about (July 30) with ACPC leaders, we stopped first in the home of 78-year old Juan Manuel Geronimo, eye-witness to and survivor of the July 1982 army massacres that killed over 275 men and women, young and old, in his village of Plan de Sanchez. Juan Manuel lost his entire family, including parents, siblings, wife and children.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Juan Manuel has spear-headed close to 30 years of community work and struggle for truth and memory, justice and reparations for the crime against humanity they suffered. Rights Action supported this work for many years, and has published numerous articles.

In these times of increasing environmental harms and climate heating across the planet, in these times of Covid-19 ravaging discriminated, impoverished communities most of all, and in these times of corrupt, repressive governments in Guatemala (“democratic allies” of the U.S. and Canada) continuing to hand over Guatemala’s richest lands and other resources to global companies, investors and consumers, the work of the ACPC is visionary, supporting a locally-controlled, designed and implemented response to these systemic ills and injustices.

During our hike from the mountain-top village of Plan de Sanchez, around and about, down to the village of Xesiguan, I was able to witness just a bit of what ACPC is doing.

Alfredo Cortez, founder of the ACPC, was born in 1979 in the fields and mountain crevices we walked through. Achi families – fleeing scorched earth aerial bombardment campaigns and patrols of marauding soldiers – subsisted and tried to eek out their survival for as many as 4 years in these forest and mountains, scattered as internally displaced populations during the worst years of the genocide, 1978-1983.

Today, Alfredo leads the work of ACPC providing an alternative to the violently imposed global economic model that systematically impoverishes Guatemalans, forcing thousands off their lands and into forced migrancy, year after year, decade after decade.

ACPC’s work is a combination of teaching, and working to recover ecological agricultural practices that are sustainable in the Rabinal region, part of the ever widening “Dry Corridor” that carves through Central America.

I recommend this article, by Andrew Wight (January 20, 2020), about the work of the ACPC (Indigenous Women's Agro-Ecology Is Healing Guatemala's Landscape, [link removed]):

“In the Achí community of Xesiguan, 7 miles outside of the town of Rabinal, the rocky soils and dry landscapes [of the “dry corridor”] seem to drop away suddenly on the site of a farm that serves as an example to other farmers throughout the region. Blecin Rublia-Cajuj, 31, one of the key figures in this community showed me the various parts of the farm: the small pond that holds Tilapia fish and snails; the chicken coop; the coffee bushes; a wide variety of legumes, fruits, and vegetables.”

“Here, farmers learn about incorporating agro-ecological principles into farming practices. These techniques include rotational cropping, agroforestry, integrated crop and livestock systems, and the use of local varieties.”

Walking forward, one ecological agricultural project at a time
As the global economy churns steadily forward, the work of the ACPC - rooted in millennial practices and believes of the Achi people in this region of what is now called Guatemala – provide an utterly sustainable, healthy alternative model for current and future generations.

It was an altogether uplifting and enlightening hike. The best people and work for Rights Action to support, empower and learn from.

Grahame Russell
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])

Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)

To support land and environmental defenders, and human rights, justice and democracy defense struggles in Honduras and Guatemala, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:
* U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
* Canada: Box 82858, RPO Cabbagetown Toronto, ON, M5A 3Y2

Credit-Card Donations: [link removed]
Direct deposits, write to: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])
Donations of securities, write to: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])

*******
Please share and re-post this information
*******

More info: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) , www.rightsaction.org
e-Newsletter: [link removed]
Previous e-Newsletters: [link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed] ([link removed])
[link removed]
[link removed] Facebook ([link removed])
[link removed] Twitter ([link removed])
[link removed] Website ([link removed])
[link removed] Instagram ([link removed])
[link removed] YouTube ([link removed])

============================================================
Copyright © 2025 Rights Action, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you are one of our subscriptor

Our mailing address is:
Rights Action
Box 50887
20091-0887
Washington, DC 0
USA
** unsubscribe from this list ([link removed])
** update subscription preferences ([link removed])
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
[link removed]