History: Guatemala’s Inconvenient Truth, Pt 1

When you buy a bag of coffee labelled fifth-generation family farm, it feels like a good choice.

But in Guatemala, that label might actually be a signal for a more uncomfortable truth.

This episode explores how land has been understood, used, and eventually fought over in Guatemala for centuries between indigenous people, Europeans and those in-between.

It’s a story of what happened immediately after Guatemala won independence from Spain. This pivotal period of history gets less attention in the history books, but the suffering of the indigenous people of Guatemala gets arguably even worse.

Fair warning: it's a dark story, and it will make you think twice about what you're really choosing when you pick up a bag of coffee from Central America.

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Read Jonathan’s book, Coffee: A Global History

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