Issue 9 — Bitter Fruit, a weekend long read
Issue 9 — Bitter Fruit, a weekend long read
When the Q’eqchi’ first moved northward, to a place then uninhabited, the land was tranquil and bountiful. There was maize to harvest, leafy hierba mora to forage, deer and the spotted tepezcuintle rodent to hunt. If you wanted fish, there were plenty. If you needed water for cooking, bathing, or drinking, it was abundant. But there was a rule: no one was to submerge themselves in the small river that cut a winding path through the indigenous community’s new land. There was no name for this seeming paradise, so the self-described community of believers turned to a place that Jesus once walked and christened the village Palestina II—the second Palestine. There was no way to know then that a blessing could become a curse.
Beneath the shade of a thatched-roof palapa, the glowing embers of a low burning fire at its center, Maria Alciro Bolon stirs a blackened pot of atol de plátano—a thick, spiced plantain drink—from which steam rises in swirls amid the torpid September air. Around her, tan and black mutts slink under tables in search of scraps and affection. A teenage girl molds fresh dough into round tortillas. Outside, a water delivery truck rumbles along the white gravel road that skirts the outdoor kitchen and divides the center of Palestina II.
In lilting Q’eqchi’, Bolon, a community leader, welcomes a dozen or so women, each wearing a bright lace huipil top and woven skirt that skims the ankles. Some arrive with babies slung across their backs, their dark hair tousled by sweat. With a broad, gummy smile, Bolon greets Maria Tec Pop—an older woman with dark hair pulled taut at the nape of her neck and gold stars pressed into her front teeth. Both hold a seniority that stretches back to the founding of their village some thirty years ago. They remember a time when everyone had land to cultivate, when the water was carried by current and not by truck. They remember Rudy—the man with the light-colored eyes.
He was an intermediary. A ladino. Someone who was not indigenous, as they were. He arrived in Palestina II hoping to buy land from a community who had only just acquired it. During Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, Bolon, Tec Pop, and many other Q’eqchi’ left their native home in the region of Alta Verapaz and followed the mountain’s slope north to the country’s largest department, the Petén. In the southern swath of this green sea, in the place they called Palestina II, they found the land they had been systemically denied elsewhere. It would be theirs to borrow, to pass on, Bolon says. When Rudy made his offer, the community refused it. As a people repeatedly displaced for some five hundred years, a people who bind the word loq’laj, or sacred, to ch’och’, or land, the Q’eqchi’ would not cede it so easily. They did not expect that the ultimate deceit would come from one of their own.
Now seated on a wooden bench, with Tec Pop to her right and a tower of empty plastic cups, sticky with atol, on a table to her left, Bolon tells me about the man from Palestina II. Tasked with persuading the community to sell their land, he promised they would be paid very well. Some, trusting their neighbor, decided to sell and made hopeful plans to rent land elsewhere. Others refused. Then came the threats. As each plot of maize, each square of tilled earth, was encircled by private property, families such as Bolon’s were warned that should they cross land they did not own, something might happen. In Guatemala, such implications are not made without intent, and one by one, most people in Palestina II agreed to sell. But two families fought to keep their land. One of them was Bolon’s.
At the furthest boundary of her family’s home—past the palapa, past the muddied, free roaming chickens, past the children climbing skinny trees that buckle beneath their feet—begins a contested terrain. It is an uninterrupted landscape of short, stout palms that unfold in waves of curved frond and feathered leaf. Each former patch of family farm in Palestina II has become part of a palm plantation, transforming a harvest of subsistence into one of capital. It has placed the hunger of a global industry on Bolon’s doorstep. And even the protected, the revered, is now imperiled.
Bordered by palms, the only river in Palestina II is an opaque, oil-slicked symbol of what has been lost. Once used for cooking, cleaning, bathing, and drinking, the river’s water is now said to cause unexplained fish die-offs and irritating rashes that spread across the body. The skin bleeds, I am told. The women of Palestina II suspect it is the palm pesticides and poison used to keep rats at bay. They have told the company, Nacional Agro Industrial, S.A., that the plantations inch too close to their homes and their river. They have spoken of it, again and again, making their desire, their unwavering demand, known—the palms should not be here. But no one will listen, Bolon says. The companies do not care about the people of Palestina II. It is the fortune of a few pitted against the burden of many. And the palm oil industry is nothing if not rapacious.
Read the full story at The Baffler
In Palestina II, Maria Alciro Bolon (far left) stirs a pot of plantain atul as neighbors and friends, all of whom are part of the local women's group, arrive at her home. Photo by Alessandra Bergamin.
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