FDR's America Book

Growing, harvesting, processing and exporting coffee has been the main economic life of Central America for the past one hundred years. The families who make up the “coffee elite” control much of the financial power and social organization of El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

Those nations were in very different political and economic situations at the end of the last century. Costa Rica, the country that never really hits the headlines, is a social democracy with a functioning civil society, a decent social safety net for its citizens, particularly when compared to other countries with similar population and economic output. Nicaragua, the poorest country in Central America and the second poorest in the hemisphere, is retreating from its attempts at revolutionary nationalism. El Salvador is home of the death squads of Roberto D'Aubuisson and his ARENA party and was the first place where “to disappear” was used as a transitive verb as in “they disappeared him”. It was under military rule from 1931 to 1979.

Jeffrey M. Paige was invited to teach and do research by Segundo Montes, the chairman of the sociology faculty at the University of Central America located in San Salvador. A month before his arrival, Montes and his Jesuit colleagues at the university were murdered at the Jesuit residence on orders from the high command of the San Salvador military. While there is no direct evidence that the generals consulted with their allies in the upper classes or the government it was assumed at the time that the army was doing the bidding of their political and economic masters since this had been the case in scores of high profile extra-judicial murders throughout the region. Paige interviewed plantation owners and financiers thinking that the same people might have ordered the killing.

The coffee elite controlled the land where coffee was grown and the people who produced it. In Nicaragua and El Salvador the elites expropriated the fruits of the labor of the peasants and workers through systems of debt peonage, one sided labor contacts and authority over their daily lives. Trade union organizers were intimidated or killed, political parties were outlawed or severely restricted and the army was used to enforce civil contracts.

Paige found a lot of class friction among the elites: landowners who controlled growing and harvesting were in conflict with the agro-industrial barons who ran the processing and export side of the coffee business. The processors were “progressive”—they were interested in modernizing their operations, using mechanization to replace human labor wherever possible while the “reactionary” growers wanted to continue the traditional methods that necessitated a large, mobile and hungry workforce. There were national differences as well. El Salvador was efficient and forward looking and produced higher yields per acre with a streamlined export system. Nicaragua was slow to adopt any new technology; the elites there were satisfied with lower but cheaper production.

One of the main strengths of “Coffee and Power” is the meticulous analysis of the leading families in each country that have owned the means of production since, in some cases, the nationalist revolutions of the 1820s and 1830s. Paige has contributed a new way of looking at Central America as the nations there struggle toward durable popular rule.