Coffee and Power:
Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America
by Jeffery M. Paige
(Author)
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 was finally 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 explain this extraordinary 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 recent 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 contemporary 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 America is deeply rooted in the personal, familial, and
class histories of the coffee elites.
