Protesters Brew Trouble for Cargo of Salvador Coffee

For days, the Ciudad de Buenaventura has plowed the waters up and down the Pacific Coast in search of a place to unload 34 tons of Salvadoran coffee beans.

Each time the Colombian freighter docked at a West Coast port, it was turned away. In San Francisco, then Vancouver, British Columbia, and finally Seattle, activists sponsoring a boycott of Salvadoran coffee--with the help of sympathetic longshoremen--have forced the vessel to move on, its cargo unrelieved.

This weekend, the ship is due in Long Beach. And with its arrival, scores of protesters are planning to erect a picket line to make sure the coffee stays on board.

“We want it to go back to El Salvador; that would send the strongest message,” said Fred Ross, executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor, a private organization that called for a boycott of Salvadoran coffee on Nov. 21 to protest the murders there of six Jesuit priests, in which government troops have been implicated.

Coffee is one of El Salvador’s principal exports. About 60% of the Salvadoran coffee harvest, worth $400 million, is shipped to the United States annually.

After the boycott was declared, and union dockworkers announced their support for it, major U.S. coffee companies decided to stop shipping Salvadoran coffee through West Coast ports. But last week, two shipments of Salvadoran coffee reached piers in San Francisco, and the activists mobilized.

Longshoremen refused to cross a picket line of about 100 placard-waving people at Pier 96, where the Ciudad de Buenaventura was docked. During negotiations involving the union, agents for the shipping company and the terminal operators, it was agreed that part of the cargo, consisting of Colombian and Costa Rican coffee, would be unloaded.

But no one would touch the Salvadoran beans.

The freighter parted for Vancouver, where unionists alerted by Neighbor to Neighbor offered a similar challenge, and dockworkers refused to unload the controversial cargo. Then, Ciudad de Buenaventura sailed to Seattle, where much the same scene was repeated.

“It is inconvenient for us, of course,” said an exasperated Felipe Torres, manager of the Pacific Coast division of the Flota Mercante Gran Colombiana, the company that owns the Ciudad de Buenaventura.

Torres, speaking from his office in Bogota, calculated that the company’s losses could rise to $15,000. The Ciudad de Buenaventura’s odyssey has been more of a nuisance, he said, than a devastating economic setback.

“If they were going to boycott, why not boycott a significant amount (of coffee)?” Torres said. “I don’t think (this amount) makes such a difference. It will not solve the conflict.”

Stored with the coffee are 14 tons of watermelon, Torres said, in an unrefrigerated container.

A second shipment of about 40 tons of Salvadoran beans on the Dutch-owned Barcelona managed to escape the boycott and was unloaded on Feb. 9 in San Francisco. Protesters delayed the off-loading by about a day, but ultimately an arbitrator was brought in to determine whether it was safe for the dockworkers to cross the picket line, union officials said. It was safe, the arbitrator ruled, and the longshoremen had to go to work.

Torres is hoping something similar will happen when the Ciudad de Buenaventura comes ashore at Long Beach. His agents may also try to obtain a court order to force workers to remove the shipment, but it was not clear whether such an effort would get very far.

Regardless of what the ship’s owners do, it was full speed ahead on Friday for activists in Los Angeles: They were charting the Ciudad de Buenaventura’s move down the coast, painting signs, alerting each other to last-minute changes in the expected arrival time.

“People are poised to go,” said Mark Dohan, the Los Angeles director of Neighbor to Neighbor. “We are in touch with the union (and) working on our side to make sure everyone knows where to go and when to be there.”

At last check, the ship was expected to dock at midnight tonight. Supporters of the boycott were prepared to rush to the harbor on a few minutes notice. They plan to form a picket line and said they were confident union dockworkers would back them.

Representatives of the local branch of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, which has supported the coffee boycott, were awaiting marching orders from their regional leaders in San Francisco.

“Basically, our folks don’t cross picket lines,” said Gene Banday, secretary-treasurer of the local ILWU chapter.

“If there is no way for the guys to work, they lose a day’s pay,” he added. “It’s a bad situation all around when guys can’t work. But they will recognize a picket line.”

The Salvadoran government has said the boycott has had little effect on it, and in fact may have backfired by doing greater harm to peasant farmers whose livelihood depends on coffee. But promoters of the boycott maintain that it will put economic pressure on the U.S.-backed government.

The boycott may not have had much impact in supermarkets or in the world’s trading houses. But sponsors of the boycott said with the voyage of the Ciudad de Buenaventura, they hoped to score a few points in the propaganda war.