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News from SAPED Maya  Altiplano 

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[Editor’s Note: I first met Iyra Zabarsky back in February of 2000 when I was publishing my monthly hard copy tabloid The Radical. It was then that I began supporting SAPED’s ongoing initiatives to work with the Guatemalan people. That said I would encourage anyone reading this article to help get the word out to folks in the Vancouver area that SAPED will be selling their fairtrade products at the Britannia Community Centre 55+ building. See map below for location. I have sold their products myself here in the Cariboo and can vouch for their organic high quality.]

News from SAPED Maya  Altiplano   
April 2023

Received from Iyra Zabarsky

BC Society S0026402

Iyra writes: “As I await the final collapse and hyperinflating Canadian dollars….I plan to do a small fairtrade distribution at Britannia Centre 55+ building…Commercial Drive at Williams…so maybe you may wish to notify some friends still caught in the city? …fond regards…Iyra

Participating Communities:

• Nueva San Juan Chamula, Chiapas
• Caxlampon, Izabal, Guatemala   
• Semuy 2, Izabal, Guatemala
• Chitanya, San Pedro Carcha, Guatemala
• Bola de Oro, Chimaltenango, Guatemala
• Chinavenque, Izabal, Guatemala
• San Andres Itzapa (our base of operations) Guatemala
• Barrio Corosa, El Estor, Izabal, Guatemala

Coordination Team:

• Evirilda Bol, El Estor
• Roberto Caal, Pocola, San Pedro Carcha
• Jose Xo, Caxlampon
• Romeo, Zona Sur, Izabal
• Evirilda Can, San Andres and Noela Socoy in Chimaltenango

Special Thanks to:

Carlos Teni, our computer technician based in El Estor and coordinating our computer academies in El Estor, Caxlampon, Semuy 2 and Manguitas and to Julio in El Estor, our machine fabricating tech.

OUR 2023 COFFEE HARVEST IN SAN ANDRES

This is our base of operations. We’re buyers for the towns organic coffee growers.

Thanks to Evirilda Can for the coordination, reception and fermentations of the fresh coffee in uva (cherry). Our fairtrtade price this year at 3 quetzal/pound is a 20% markup on the market price.

But due to the power of the elite coffee cartel (constitutionally illegal!) we try to restrict our purchases. We have stored for the 2021 and 2022, still some 1500 pounds, curing in its dried fruit.

So far this year we’ve bought some 2000 pounds of fresh coffee.

We work with a women’s group here managing a 40 foot greenhouse in these altitudes of some 6500 feet.

COMMUNITY AUTONOMY

In Mexico we have 2 sets of laws, approved by National Congress and by our own Community General Assembly. Our laws and COCODE control the Territory. We decide who can live here, who can buy land.

We’ve decided; no exploitation of our mineral and petroleum resources.

For the present time, the Federal Government supports this 2 tier system.

Otherwise the Rebellion of ’94 would be reignited!

We feel badly for the people of Guatemala…they had their revolution in 1954, aborted by the CIA coup d’etat.

In our case throughout these rainforests of Chiapas, we’re descendants of revolutionaries. We won our struggle in the early 30’s. The Government gave us 3000 hectares, which we divided equally, each family receiving their equal share of the land.

The struggle now is not so much to plant their food and cash crops, but how and where to sell their surplus, given total control by the Mexican oligarchs over the shipping, brokering and trucking industries…this is our collective SAPED/rainforest community challenge!

We chose well with this community, with their good leadership, generous with their time and limited resources and hard working. So after a 3 hour workshop exploring our recipe for pineapple drying into fruit leather…and if the product stands up well…no mould, no fermentation…we’ll be into major production!

NOTES ON FAIRTRADE

You can say that the essence of our work is its support for the community groups with exemplary models of participatory democracy in productive sustainable horticulture and nursery projects.

Good non corruptible leadership is critical, their motivation springing from some form of higher and Maya cosmological belief. Admittedly we’ve likewise tried in rural BC, innumerable time, but without such idealistic attitude!

One of our pleasures continues here in Chitanya: It’s about an hour’s walk up and down these hillsides to the community’s base of operations, the homestead of their woman leader, who speaks only Maya Q’eqchi!

Except for our patch of recently purchased and planted mountain forests, these women have limited plots to grow their crops and our joint green housing operation.

Every available space is devoted to growing their cash crop medicines for our fairtrade distributions to BC. So we bring them seeds and plants and new varieties of trees to add to their collection…for propagating and harvesting. Money changes hands as just some 4 hours later I walk out of these mountains with quantities of orozus for our chai tea blend, insulina…all the rage here for curing diabetes.

GIFT EXCHANGE

(As Fairtrade buyers, we’ve had great opportunities to explore such alternatives to fiat currency exchange for product, such as work exchange, product exchange and gift exchange).

Emilio certainly has “earned” his right to gift exchanges. Standing up to the corporate net fishers, risking his life for his union membership, single handedly fighting to build their lake fishery providing work for the fishers during down season.

My surprise, returning to Caxlampon (our regional warehouse) to pick up a small quantity of roasted makuna for shipment to Canada (the high in L-Dopa neuro synapse hormone), that it had mostly been distributed, as gift exchange to Emilio’s wife and to Evirilda, our regional coordinator and Maya spirit guide. Clearly the herb is catching on as a roasted pinol, a tasty coffee like drink and brain tonic!

FAIRTRADE PRODUCTS AVAILABLE
(late March, early April)

Limited supplies of our rainforest honey vanilla chocolates…our natural sugar cardamom and vanilla chocolates, our fermented arabica coffee, our orozus (super aromatic lung tonic) chai tea blend, our spices; cinnamon, cardamom seed, turmeric, ginger, clove bud…and medicinals; makuna, insulina, moringa, sarsaparilla, passiflora (nerve medicine) and a first batch (still not perfected) of our pineapple fruit leather.

~Ω~

British Columbia to decriminalise hard drugs to ‘end stigma’ amidst unsolvable addiction crisis

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British Columbia to decriminalise hard drugs to ‘end stigma’ amidst unsolvable addiction crisis


January 30, 2023
by Save Britain

Canada will temporarily decriminalise the possession of certain illegal drugs such as cocaine, MDMA, and opioids for personal use in British Columbia (B.C.) to help combat the province’s burgeoning drug abuse problem effective on January 31, 2023. 

The exemption, which is a first in Canada, is intended to reduce the stigma associated with substance use and make it easier for people to seek help from law enforcement and other authorities.

The provision will be in effect from January 31, 2023 to January 31, 2026, and instead of punishing those found in possession of small amounts of exempt drugs, police will provide information on available health and social supports.

Broken behind the beauty

Canadians are proud of their country’s beauty and the generosity of their people. And, as you drive past rows of gleaming glass towers framed by the snow-capped Rockies and the Pacific waters of the Burrard Inlet, Vancouver is undeniably stunning — widely regarded as one of the world’s most ‘desirable’ cities to live in.

However, driving down the “drug city” dispels all such optimism.

Tents line the entrances to every building that hasn’t bribed them to leave or pleaded for police intervention. The goods they stole to satisfy their drug cravings litter the street, waiting for someone to buy them.

Addicts huddle in doorways, openly injecting, cooking, and smoking hard drugs like heroin, crack cocaine, crystal meth, and fentanyl — a lethal synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin that has killed hundreds of thousands in North America. Others lie motionless on the ground, even in the rain, or stagger around in search of their next fix.

The crisis is about to worsen as a result of Canada’s ruling class’s disastrously misguided, woke politics.

Drug decriminalisation – is it the best decision?

Canada, which announced plans last year to put warning labels on fatty or salty foods as well as ‘poison in every puff’ warnings on cigarette packets, is more than happy to stigmatise drinkers, smokers, and obese people in the name of improving their health.

British Columbia, particularly Vancouver, has become a haven for liberal Canadians, who have elected a provincial government that believes society is too harsh on addicts.

They insist that decriminalisation will end the “shame” of drug use.

Anyone will be able to inject, smoke, snort, or swallow whatever they want, whenever they want — even if they want to sit on the swings next to children in a playground. And the police will have no authority to stop them as long as they have no more than 2.5 grammes of a drug in their possession.

Between 2016 and 2021, over 26,000 people died in Canada as a result of opioid-related overdoses. Overdose deaths have killed over 9,400 people in British Columbia since the province declared a public health emergency in 2016.

“Substance use is a public health issue, not a criminal issue,” said Sheila Malcolmson, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions in British Columbia, adding that the exemption will help the province combat the crisis.

~Ω~