Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America

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Description

In the revolutionary decade between 1979 and 1992, it would have been difficult to find three political systems as different as death-squad-dominated El Salvador, peaceful social-democratic Costa Rica, and revolutionary Sandinista Nicaragua. Yet when the fighting used to be after all ended by a peace plan initiated by Costa Rica’s President Oscar Arias, all three had found a common destination in democracy and free markets. To provide an explanation for this bizarre turn of events is the task of this landmark book, which fuses political economy and cultural analysis.

Both the divergent political histories and their convergent outcome were shaped by a single commodity that has dominated these export economies from the nineteenth century to the present–coffee. Jeffery Paige shows that the crises of the 1980s had their roots in the economic and political crises of the 1930s, when the revolutionary left challenged the ruling coffee elites of all three countries. He interweaves and compares the history, economics, and class structures of the three countries, thus clarifying the course of contemporary struggles. The heart of the book is his conversations with sixty-two leaders of fifty-eight elite dynasties, who for the first time tell their own stories of the experience of Central American revolution.

Paige’s analysis challenges not only Barrington Moore’s influential theory of dictatorship and democracy but also recent approaches to “transitions to democracy.” It also shows that a focus on either political economy or culture alone cannot account for the transformation of elite ideology, and that revolution in Central The us is deeply rooted in the personal, familial, and class histories of the coffee elites.

Over the past three decades, nearly every Central American nation has been at some stage of revolution, and understanding the a lot of conflicts required a keen grasp of local politics. The facts were especially hard to discern because other countries, principally america, were throwing their weight around and muddying the political water. Now with a nascent peace shakily in place in Guatemala, the last conflict has come to an end, and Jeffrey M. Paige sheds some necessary light on the issues without lumping all of the region together. By focusing on the lucrative and influential business of coffee production and its connection to politics, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America looks at the shift toward democracy from the perspective of the elite class of coffee growers. Though the different nations share a common agricultural mainstay, the socioeconomic realities vary greatly, and Paige expertly negotiates the subtleties of each.

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