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Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America. By Jeffery M. Paige Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997. xvii + 436 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $45.00. ISBN 0-674-13648-9.
Reviewed by Timothy J. Henderson
There are two key threads in Jeffery Paige's new book. One is a structural analysis of three Central American coffee industries, based upon Barrington Moore's model of the origins of democracy and dictatorship. The other is an examination of the ideologies of Central American coffee elites. Paige's theme, then, is the relationship between structures and ideas within the often violent world of the Central American coffee industry.
Paige focuses on Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, while Guatemala serves as a kind of foil-the unredeemedly repressive agrarian economy. Paige aims to discover how countries so close to one another, and which from the late nineteenth-century have specialized in coffee exporting, developed such different socio-political structures, and why they all recently converged on neoliberalism. He finds the answer to this puzzle in the differing relations between the "agrarians," whose power is founded on land and the exploitation of rural labor, and the "agro-industrialists," who process coffee using relatively modern forms of organization. The former are intransigently opposed to democracy,...