I don’t know how many people knew Benito as a friend and colleague, but they must number in the hundreds. Benoît Maria began life as a farm-boy in France. He grew up in a peasant family in the wheat-growing region of Eure-et-Loire near Chartres. A scholarship enabled him to go to university in Lille and he graduated with a degree in agronomy. In 1992 he came to Guatemala to work with the French branch of Veterinarios Sin Fronteras. Except for an assignment in Haiti, Benito spent the next three decades working with Mayan campesinos in Guatemala.
Unlike most aid workers who move on to the next contract somewhere else, Benito stuck around year after year, decade after decade, and the experience he acquired was large. I got to know him in Nebaj, Quiché. As a campesino himself, Benito knew how to ask the right questions. Along with his VSF colleagues he began training village veterinarians, and for a time the resulting association, Apaptix, became the most effective campesino development network in Ixil country.
Around 2003, VSF sent Benito to work with the Q’eqchi’s of Chisec, Alta Verapaz. Here he designed a sustainable micro-credit program for Federación FAMA-Q’eqchi’. Revolving-loan programs meet their end when borrowers fail to repay, with hard-luck stories often serving as a masquerade for connivance. To discourage cronies from swallowing the revolving loan fund, Benito borrowed a model from NITAPLAN in Nicaragua: different organizations share out the revolving-loan pie but also keep an eye on each other. If an organization fails to recover its loans, this cuts them out of the next round of lending, and the system apparently continues to work well to this day.
In Nebaj, working with Ixils, Benito had focused on agricultural production; in Chisec, working with Q’eqchi’s, he became absorbed in strengthening indigenous territoriality and land ownership. VSF’s partner in Chisec was APROBA-SANK. Among the ideas that he and APROBA-SANK developed were community-level land registries and “mercados campesinos”—short supply chains in which producers sell directly to consumers.
What Benito learned about village authority systems, municipal governance, and attempts to modernize them was breathtaking. His insights grew out of his relationships with a wide range of Ixil and Q’eqchi’ leaders. The question of tierra (land) is not the same as the question of papeles (titles), Benito told me. Titles are an endless source of contention, attracting a never-ending succession of government agencies and NGOs, with their never-ending proclamations, committees, inspections and legal appeals, that provide employment for lawyers and bankrupt the litigants. One day a villager gladdened Benito’s heart by saying, “no queremos papeles, queremos la tierra.”
As we followed the hydroelectric issue in the Ixil area, Benito explained how it revealed a fourth layer of ownership: not just the Guatemalan state, the municipio, and private property owners, but the indigenous community—subject to competing claims to leadership. Everything in this country has been privatized, Benito said. Everything has been individualized, even human rights comes into conflict with collective rights of the community. Individualization of land tenure has become a disaster because the community is no longer regulating access. Constitutionality, the law, has all been written to legalize what was grabbed, he told me.
And so Benito argued for the restoration of the comunidad indígena and its collective control of land. I considered this idea utopian, but Benito knew more about indigenous communities than I did, and he did not build castles in the sky. In Nebaj he worked closely with Fundamaya, an organization of former insurgents which has established the alcaldías indígenas as a high-profile, neo-traditional, and hotly contested form of governance.
Just this summation of Benito’s partnerships illustrates how deeply he was enmeshed in the NGO world and its limitations. Despite disillusioning experiences, he never lost the idealism that brought him to Guatemala. What I found most remarkable was his faith in peasant agriculture: that it could be reconfigured to become organic, sustainable and sufficiently remunerative for Mayan youth to see their future in farming, rather than risking their necks migrating to Guatemala City or the United States. On one occasion, Benito declared that he was an “ex-agronomist” because the agronomists and their advice have been screwing peasant agriculture ever since arriving in the 1970s. You dig in the soil and you won’t find any worms, Benito said. You won’t find any natural nitrogen, potassium or phosphorus because they’ve killed off their soil with chemical fertilizers and non-stop monocropping.
Benito believed that chronic deficits in peasant agriculture—such as high prices for buying fertilizer–could be reduced by using animals to produce fertilizer. He also believed that, instead of introducing new crops that require expensive input, small farmers should intensify the production of existing cultigens. Just twenty cuerdas (.9 hectares) of cultivatable land should be enough for a household, he calculated (for a vivid description of the alternative development model in which he was a key player, see VSF and APROBA-SANK’s online report Agriculturas indígenas y Campesinas).
Benito knew the shame of being from humble origins and this shaped his calling. Above all, he wanted Mayan youth to be proud of who they are. To counteract the humbling impact of formal education, electronic media and pop culture, he looked for ways to encourage village-level communication with the elders who alone could pass on local traditions to their children and grandchildren. Benito’s name for these hopes was the Ixil University. Implemented by Fundamaya, since 2011 the Ixil University has brought together youth and elders to think about the past and share a vision of the future.
Benito cultivated a placid exterior and usually came across as mild as a lamb. With the help of his big farmer’s body, he gave the (false) impression of not worrying about anything. His first five years in Ixil country, as a member of the VSF team, required diplomacy with the civil patrols, the Guatemalan army, and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Haiti was even more challenging by the time he worked there in the early 2000s. When I asked what living in Haiti was like, Benito described waking up slowly and pleasantly every morning, lying in bed with his hands behind his head and wondering, “que me va a pasar hoy?”
In recent years Benito lived with his wife and two children—now aged fifteen and eleven—in the city of Quetzaltenango. Every Monday he boarded his pickup truck—zebra-striped to discourage carjackers—and bounced all the way to Nebaj or Chisec before returning to Quetzaltenango at the end of the week. Covid interrupted this routine but in July he resumed it. At 5 AM on Monday August 10, he set off for Chisec in the distinctive vehicle that made him all too easy to track. Around 6:30 AM, as he drove from San Antonio Ilotenango to Santa Lucia La Reforma, a muscle pickup or SUV seemed to be waiting for him and chased him down the road for two kilometers, pumping a hail of heavy-caliber bullets into the back of his cab.
I can imagine how Benito would react to news of his murder. He would give us a Gallic shrug, spread his arms, and purse his lips into a small, sad smile: “a saber quién fue?” There is so much concern for this case, from the Guatemalan authorities to the French government, that we may find out. According to the public prosecutor’s office, robbery has been discarded as a motive. Either someone was very angry with Benito, or his murder was intended as a warning to the international aid community, or perhaps this was just an initiation rite for Quetzaltenango gangsters. Whoever was responsible, Benito dedicated his life to Mayan campesinos and their way of life, and he still had energy and hope for them when his life was taken from him at the age of fifty-two.