JACALTENANGO, Guatemala - Nothing about this Sierra Madre town with ramshackle buildings, corrugated tin roofs, muddy streets and dangling power lines reflects life in Jupiter, Florida.

    

Coffee facts

The National Coffee Association says that 80 percent of Americans drink coffee occasionally; 53 percent drink it daily.

America's 236 million coffee consumers spent $19 billion in 2004, or $80.50 per person. Coffee accounts for 91 percent of the U.S. hot beverage market by volume and 76 percent by value. Worldwide, about 500 billion cups are served each year. About 58 percent of those cups are consumed in Europe, the United States and Japan. Coffee is grown in about 50 countries on 30 million acres and about 25 million people try to make a living farming it.

Guatemala: A timeline
2600 B.C. Mayan civilization originated in the Yucatan.
300 B.C. Mayans adopt a system of government with rule by kings and nobles.
200-900 A.D. Mayans develop ceremonial architecture such as pyramids and make significant advances in mathematics, astronomy and agriculture, particularly irrigation.
1524 Explorer Pedro de Alvarado defeats indigenous Mayans and claims Guatemala as a Spanish colony.
1822 Guatemala joins Mexican empire.
1839 Guatemala becomes an independent state.
1873 President Justo Rufino Barrios begins two decades of rule. He improves economic conditions by organizing an army and starting cultivation of coffee.
1944 President Juan José Arevalo initiates social reforms that include redistribution of land to peasants.
1954 CIA helps touch off a U.S.-backed coup that makes army Col. Carlos Castillo president and ends redistribution of land and nationalization of plantations.
1960 Guatemala descends into bloody civil war.
1970 With support of the military, Carlos Arena is elected president, and atrocities against Mayans escalate.
1971 Guatemalan peasant and Mayan migration to United States increases as civil war spreads. Florida becomes a destination for refugees.
1982 Gen. Efrain Rios Montt assumes presidency in military coup, then loses it a year later in another coup that elevates Gen. Mejia Victores.
1992 Rigoberta Menchu wins the Nobel Peace Prize for championing human rights of Mayans.
1995 Guerrillas declare a truce after talks with the government. Alvaro Arzu is elected president and ends military rule.
1998 United Nations puts death toll of 36-year civil war at more than 200,000, with at least 50,000 missing and more than 600 Mayan villages destroyed by the government's soldiers and paramilitary forces.
1999 President Clinton admits that the U.S. was wrong to undermine Guatemalan government and assist military regimes.
2000 Estimates of Mayan population in Palm Beach County range as high as 40,000; Florida's population ranks third behind California and New York.
2002 Large numbers of economic refugees from Jacaltenango settle in Jupiter.
2004 Jupiter Town Council considers labor center to keep Guatemalan workers from seeking work on the street.
2005 Jacaltenango Mayor Moises Perez visits Jupiter and signs sister-city agreement with Mayor Karen Golonka.
2005 Tropical Storm Stan's torrential rains cause mudslides and floods in Guatemala, sending more displaced migrants to Florida.
2006 El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center opens in Jupiter.
2006 Spanish judge issues international arrest warrant for Efrain Rios Montt and other military leaders charged with war crimes.

But many of the people who live here know all about Jupiter, regardless of whether they've seen it themselves. An unlikely alliance between the two towns has grown over the past 25 years from an improbable convergence of mutual needs.

As the 1980s began, a bloody Guatemalan civil war deteriorated into wholesale government-backed genocide against the Mayans, the indigenous people who live primarily in the rural highlands and who speak any of two dozen native dialects. In Jupiter, the beginning of the decade opened a period of meteoric growth during which construction and home sales boomed. The town's population would quadruple by 2000.

The first waves of Mayan war refugees went to the Glades and Indiantown in west Martin County to do farm work. The growth in Jupiter lured Mayan men to the eastern end of Indiantown Road for higher-paying construction jobs. Soon, the word about opportunity in Jupiter spread back to the villages in the mountainous Huehuetenango region near the Mexican border.

Relatives in Florida sent for relatives in Jacaltenango, friends told friends, and migration - nearly all of it illegal - brought legions of workers and then their families to north Palm Beach County. Exactly how many still is hard to say.

"The census isn't reliable about counting the number of Mayans," says Tim Steigenga, a Florida Atlantic University political science professor and board member of the migrant advocacy group Corn Maya, "but you can rely on how inaccurate it will be and figure from there."

Professor Steigenga, allowing for the chronic undercounting, estimates the population of Mayans in Jupiter at maybe 2,000, with Jacaltenango claiming the largest number; perhaps as many as 40,000 Mayans live in the county.

"The problem is many Mayans don't answer 'Mayan' when they're asked for the census," he says. "Sometimes, they'll say they're Hispanic, sometimes Indian, sometimes white. Sometimes, they're reluctant to answer at all because they're worried about their immigration status."

Professor Steigenga and Corn Maya were instrumental in forging two of the strongest links between Jupiter and Jacaltenango. Several years ago, the group held its annual Fiesta Maya and Jupiter Mayor Karen Golonka showed up wearing a Corn Maya T-shirt.

"She had a very good time talking to all the people at the fiesta," says Jeronimo Camposeco of Corn Maya and of Jacaltenango. "She was surprised so many people she met were from Jacaltenango. We overheard her say that Jacaltenango and Jupiter should be sister cities. That's where we got the idea."

Last year, Mayor Moises Perez left the Guatemalan town of 20,000 and came to Florida to meet with Mayor Golonka and sign a sister-city agreement. "It was an important act to help our prosperity," Mayor Perez said. "It gave us a partnership in a place where many of our people live and work very hard."

          Then in September, the El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center opened in downtown Jupiter, after two years of debate between immigrant activists and town officials. The center was created to get day laborers off street corners and give them a place to hook up with employers. Catholic Charities and Corn Maya run social and employment services out of the former LifeSong Community Church building, which the town bought for almost $2 million.

The center has exceeded all reasonable expectations in its first three months. About 500 workers have registered, and as many as 150 find jobs each morning, typically earning between $50 and $80 a day. Employers no longer stalk the Center Street sidewalks, which pleases residents and rewards the town council for its progressive approach to solving a politically contorted problem.

"I think the future looks very good," says Mr. Camposeco. Two months ago, Mr. Camposeco was part of a delegation from Jupiter that visited Jacaltenango. The group included El Sol board members, immigration activists and doctors and nurses from St. Mary's and Good Samaritan hospitals who belong to MIMA, a not-for-profit volunteer group that provides medical care to the poor in Latin America.

Camposecos in Jacaltenango are as plentiful as O'Briens in Chicago. His brother is a teacher in the town, a cousin runs a hostel, and much of his extended family tries to earn a living farming coffee on small mountainside parcels.

Coffee is the blessing and the curse, the hope and the futility for Mayan peasants who speak Quiche and make up about a third of the local population. Between the volatility of the cutthroat international commodity market and the bureaucratic morass of government regulation, small farmers struggle to subsist.

When they can't, they migrate to the United States, and many of them end up working in Jupiter.

"Workers don't want to leave their families, but when coffee prices drop, they have no choice," said Miguel Diaz, the president of Rio Azul, a cooperative of Jacaltenango coffee growers. "When men see they can't survive in agriculture, they will head north."

The Rio Azul co-op was formed 38 years ago and has 170 members who grow shade coffee on plots ranging from about 2 to 10 acres. Through intermediaries, Starbucks buys about a third of the co-op's production and much of the rest goes to Europe. Another nearby co-op, Guyab, has 400 members and some of the same buyers. The growers get about $1.45 per pound, and in a good year, each acre can produce about 480 pounds.

But Guatemala is a country with a widely asymmetrical distribution of resources and power: 20 percent of the population control 80 percent of the wealth, and 2 percent own 70 percent of the land. Even with the support of numbers in a co-op, small growers (campesinos) are no match for large plantations (fincas) when it comes to political clout. The fincas have great influence with the government federation that controls coffee production and sales, and the co-ops often find themselves squeezed out of the market, especially when prices fall.

The co-ops can deliver a product that many of the low-lying, mass-producing fincas can't, however. The beans grown at high altitude are coveted throughout the world for their rich and aromatic taste. Mr. Diaz and his partners often grow their plants under avocado or banana trees and use natural fertilizers to appeal to the demand for organic products.

Rio Azul can use the mile-high mountainside plots to produce a gourmet coffee for Starbucks; the fincas harvest long rows of beans that typically are bound for supermarket blends.

But the organic crop is extremely labor-intensive to raise and requires fertilizer called bocashi that is a mix of coffee-plant pulp and cattle manure. This year, the government has capped the amount of organic fertilizer Rio Azul can buy.

"It is a political maneuver because they are protecting the big plantation owners," Mr. Diaz says. "Each plantation owner has hundreds of thousands of coffee acres."

Each acre requires about $180 in labor, transportation, processing and material costs, with the fertilizer accounting for about 25 percent of the bill. For the lack of $45 worth of composted cow manure, young men decide to let their crops rot, leave their children and come to Florida to find work.

Compounding the fertilizer shortage, Mr. Diaz says the international humanitarian group Oxfam, which has assisted the campesinos with subsidies for marketing and administration, may be withdrawing its support because of tight budgets. Mr. Diaz says he will be hard-pressed to replace the grants and the expertise Oxfam has provided.

The Jupiter delegation heard all this during the group's visit to Jacaltenango in September, Mr. Camposeco and MIMA's Mary Kay Thomas, an El Sol board member, hatched an idea: What if the co-op sold its coffee directly to the American consumer and bypassed middlemen brokers, the government and Starbucks altogether? What if instead of making $1.45 per pound the co-op could make $4 per pound and use the added profits to strengthen the business?

"Importing the co-op's coffee to Jupiter is something that makes sense for us to do," Ms. Thomas says. "It would be wonderful to promote it to small coffee shops locally, and ultimately, that would be our goal."

Ms. Thomas, who will lead a MIMA medical care group to Guatemala for a two-week stay in February, says the first shipment of foil-wrapped Rio Azul coffee already has arrived in Jupiter, and more is coming. The hope is by next year, consumers can order it by Internet or at the El Sol center - and that the human pipeline between Jacaltenango and Jupiter soon will instead carry a rich, dark brew.

"This is a way we can stop Jacaltenango people from coming to the U.S.," says a smiling Mr. Camposeco. "You can tell that to Americans who don't want to see immigrants. Buy the coffee, and you won't see them."