*** Note: This is a translation of an article written by Semana, originally published on June 10, 2021.
See the original article here. ***
Since 1991, the Inga reservation of Aponte lived in the midst of the red of blood and the red of poppies. That year, the arrival of the plant, raw material for heroin, brought with it a bitter bonanza that lasted more than 15 years and almost destroyed the culture, the environment and the life of the community. Every week they killed two or three people in this corner of Nariño, a wave of mountains in the Nudo de los Pastos where first the 48th Front of the FARC and then the Bolívar Block of the (AUC) reigned. “We were clear that every shot we heard meant a new dead indigenous brother, more blood shed for our people,” says Carmen Jansajoy, remembering years of a lot of money and little peace.
Carmen has worked the land all her life. When she was a child, as soon as she finished her work in the kitchen, she ran to the fields to help her parents and siblings in the poppy fields. Her hands know how to caress the earth, weave her thoughts into wool figures and take care of her two daughters. Today, like the rest of her community, the 28-year-old lives by growing coffee, a product that provides her livelihood and has brought peace to her community since 2003, when the indigenous governor Hernando Chindoy began a fight for their people to recover dignity, sovereignty and culture. By then, there were already more than one hundred murders, 60 of which were indigenous.
“In the poppy era,” says Carmen, recognizing the work of Governor Chindoy, “we all had money, we stopped studying. Many became independent, stopped wearing Inga dresses, and stopped speaking our mother tongue. “We were losing our town.” The process to become a sustainable coffee town was difficult. At 2000 meters above sea level, the trees grow more slowly and their grains are smaller, so much so that instead of walking with a bucket tied to their waist, as is customary, the collectors usually kneel or sit on the grass to pluck the hidden grains. between the branches. The size of coffee was a problem for several years, it wasn’t until recently that its physical characteristics, including size, were key to defining the price. They paid for Aponte coffee very cheaply.
For several years, the reservation refused to abandon coffee, despite the low prices paid by intermediaries, with the excuse of its size. But in 2015, luck began to change. José Gómez, manager of the Nariño Specialty Coffee Cooperative, which benefits 2,000 producers in the department, remembers that that year they received a small batch of what he describes as “an exceptional coffee.” It came from Aponte. “We started tasting it and immediately noticed that it had immense potential. We didn’t even know about the reservation,” says Gómez, who decided to present the pleasant discovery to an importing client from Korea. That was the beginning of a new stage for the coffee growers of the Inga community, whose product has since reached Asia, Europe and the United States.
Shortly after the first exports, a tragedy occurred that changed the history of Aponte, whose municipal head is Tablón de Gómez. The reservation is built on a geological fault that months before had announced what was to come, such as tremors and cracks that on the walls. In March, the earth split in two due to a geological fault. More than 300 houses became mountains of rubble. One of them, that of Carmen’s family, who after evacuating the destroyed home, rented a space where other people in the community lived. “We collected the pieces, the wood, part of the roof. With the rubble of the house we made a makeshift house and we lived there: without electricity, without water, without a bathroom,” she says.
Now the situation is different, largely thanks to coffee. In 2016, Enrique Hernández, from the company Think Coffee, a firm that has 11 stores in the Manhattan area of New York, came to Colombia to look for a coffee project for a vulnerable community and support them by buying their coffee. After searching in several regions, he found José Gómez and, through him, learned about the Aponte reservation and its needs. That same year they began a project to provide housing to 20 families who were victims of the tragedy, every two years. Think Coffee and the cooperative give 40 cents per pound of coffee to return housing to those who lost it.
One of them is Carmen’s father, who after living in the midst of the shortages of his makeshift home, now has a decent home. Others, like Hernando Santracruz, who also works in the coffee fields, still live in shelters. That is why greater help from the Government to the victims is necessary.
Despite the harsh land under which they live their lives, the Inga of Aponte refuse to abandon it. Coffee has brought them new hope after years of fear. Much of the coffee that is bought from abroad goes through a process called honey, in which no water is used. The coffee is fermented, depulped and dehydrated. Gómez estimates that 70 percent of the coffee they sell in Aponte is Honey. The fact they don’t use water is closely related to the care for water that the Ingas profess.
The reservation, which produces about 300 thousand kilos of coffee per year, also has its own brand. It is called Wuasikama, which translates “Guardian of the territory.” Those are the Ingas: guardians of nature, of a culture that resists and an ancestral cosmogony, and for a few years, a coffee-growing people.
Carmen, who still collects coffee, now has her first 400 coffee trees of the Castillo varietal. She patiently hopes that they will soon bear fruit. She has become the bridge between Think Coffee, the cooperative and the community. With the pacha on, as they call the skirt of the Ingas, she collects the coffee beans that will later reach the demanding palates of those who consume special coffees. A portion of Aponte’s coffee is currently in a New York warehouse, waiting to be served far from the land where it shyly grew up: high in the mountains of Nariño.
