Glowing Guatemala Ceremonial Cacao

The community of San Juan Chivite is based entirely within a 180-hectare cacao farm, abandoned by its owner during the terrible Guatemalan civil war in the 1980’s and handed over in 1985 to the 65 families who were former workers of the farm. In 2002, the families converted a portion of the farm that was formerly coffee over to cacao, and as the community has grown from 64 to 125 families today, cacao cultivation remains the source of over 90% of the community’s income.

The fate of this region stand in stark contrast to other regions of Guatemala, for example the south coast where many cacao farmers had to sell their farms for money and sugar cane, rubber and palm oil took over. Now thousands of hectares are dedicated to farming those products which has introduced chemicals and pollution, and led to habitat loss. Many people have left the villages because of the pollution, and have gone to cities or illegally immigrated to the US.

To get here, one must take the road less travelled from Lanquín, which is the third most popular tourist destination in Guatemala due to Semuc Champey, one of the top ten wonders of the world. Semuc Champey features turquoise limestone pools and underground rapids as the Cahabon river flows through the cave. The region was once surveyed for the construction of a dam but fortunately nothing was built. When we came for our first visit, the community was still apprehensive of outsiders due to this reason. Now new development is coming to the region in the form of a paved road, so our work supporting the traditional cacao farming communities is of critical importance. Besides cacao, the region export coffee and cardamom, and grows abundant corn and black beans for the local market.

Our farmers speak Q’eqchi’ Maya, one of over twenty indigenous languages still spoken in Guatemala today. The cacao farmers we work with here have some of the most intact knowledge of cacao we’ve seen across all of our sourcing trips, and central to their life style is belief in the mountain spirits, and a strong ethic of respecting nature and the environment. A typical greeting is “Masal chol” which translate to “How is you heart?” In response, one could reply “Saa mantiosh”, which translates to “Good, thank you!” The local river, the Cahabón, is a Q’eqchi’ Maya name that means red dust, referencing the red dirt and soil of the riverbed. It’s a long river that runs through about 10 rural towns into Lago de Izabal.

The village and farms are accessible only by a swinging bridge over the wide, rushing Cahabón river. To process their cacao, cacao farmers carry 100-lb sacks over the bridge on their backs, because the fermentery and drying facility is located on the other side of the river, closer to the only road in the valley. This hanging bridge collapsed during a massive rain storm in 2020, and the Ora community rallied to donate for the construction of a new, sturdier bridge.

The farmers sell their cacao to an independently run cacao association that manages their post harvest fermentation and drying. This association (called ADEMAYACH) is governed by 10 organic farmers in a council style, non-hierarchical board. In 2016 the village built their first centralized fermentery and drying decks allowing the farmers to add more quality and value to their crop, and helped them bypass middlemen (commonly called “coyotes”) that offered the farmers poor prices. They also received organic certification in 2016, and in addition to the impact from our cacao purchases, Ora supports the annual salary for the organic cacao fermentation manager.