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

El estado cuenta con nosotros porque de esto vivimos, pero si tuvieramos que
depender en el estado estaríamos muertos. La injusticia más grande es que
nuestro esfuerzo cafetalero mueve la economía de este país, pero al estado poco
le importa esta zona. Nos cobran impuestos por ventas, por empleo, y por
insumos, pero nunca invierte en nuestra región. Somos sujetos a la empresa
privada hasta que haya un fondo para el desarrollo cafetalero . . . o quizás nos
desaparecemos. (The state depends on us because this is our living, but if we had
to depend on the state, we’d be dead. The biggest injustice is that our coffee
farming efforts move this country’s economy, but the state government hardly
cares about this region. They tax us on sales, employment, and purchases, but
never do they invest in our region. We are subject to private enterprise until there
is a coffee farmer development fund . . . otherwise we might just disappear.)
Thus, cooperative organization represents a potential leveling mechanism for
small farmers, enabling them to respond to the neoliberal policies in the hemisphere and
defend local interests in the face of institutionalized marginalization and exploitation.
San Juan Cooperatives: The Community Base for Corporate Influence
In this section I describe my involvement with several cooperatives and how that activity
brought me into a suitable context for conducting ethnographic inquiry and rich
participant observation.
The four farmer-owned cooperatives that export Fair Trade and organic certified
coffee from San Juan (Table 3) vary in terms of membership and administrative structure.
They also ally with different political parties or attitudes. I was fortunate to work closely
with La Union de Co-operativas Agropecuarias San Juan del Río Coco (UCA), La Union
de Co-operativas Productores de Café Orgánico (UCPCO), and Co-operativa Regional de
Cafetaleros de San Juan del Río Coco (Corcasan). They are all based in San Juan and had
an accessible administration and membership with whom I could interact on a daily basis.
The fourth cooperative, Prodeco-op, is one of the two largest certified organic/Fair Trade
export co-ops in the nation, but I was not able to work with them. I did interact with some
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