Coffee and Power

by Jeffery M. Paige

"Extraordinary wealth and variety of historiographical, interview, and statistical data undergird a critical application of Barrington Moore's theses on revolution and democracy to the cases of Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Three different class-and-state structures, largely generated by their coffee economies, are analyzed by dividing the upper classes into (purely) agrarian elites and their agroindustrial (processor/exporter) counterparts. A deepening split between them paved the recent path toward democratization in both El Salvador and Nicaragua. Costa Rica's earlier, smoother democratization is accounted for by the processor-grower social pact of the 1930s. Yet all three arrived arrived at more democratic, though flawed, neoliberal systems by the 1990s"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.