i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

engañar facilmente (They [the broker] paid a pittance because the coffee wasn’t
depulped. They could cheat you easily).”
The farmers of Las Grietas noted little difference between how the coffee
oligarchs took advantage of poor, rural farmers in the distant past and the way the
Sandinista government operated in San Juan del Rio Coco in the 1980s. Essentially, in
Las Grietas farmer Don Amado’s words, “El gobierno revolucionario se hizo un gran
coyote. No había como empoderarse si cada quien entregaba a un solo sitio y recibía lo
que le diera (The revolutionary government became a big broker. No one was
empowered by submitting coffee to a single buyer who paid whatever it wanted).” The
government mills purchased and processed much as the private brokers had done during
the dictatorship.
Once the Sandinista government lost power, the government-owned coffee
brokerages were privatized and sold to independent operators. A situation similar to the
pre-Sandinista era began to arise. However, the post-Sandinista Nicaraguan countryside
had thousands more independent small-scale coffee farmers than had existed prior to the
Revolution. This fact, combined with the dual blow of the international coffee crisis and
Hurricane Mitch in the late 1990s, spurred international efforts to empower this
vulnerable agrarian sector with on-site quality-control measures through attentive
plantation care and improved post-harvest handling procedures.
I asked about quality production during the latifundio period while visiting Don
Amado as he and his youngest son, Melvin, were washing coffee that had been picked the
day before. He told me:
Nunca nos importaba el lavado o despulpado. Muchos entregaba en uva. Así era,
el pequeño productor no sabía realmente como procesar el café. Además, como el
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