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

Danilo received several of the benefits of the IDR-Corcasan project. One item in
particular drew my attention: the new drying boxes with Gobierno Bolaños and
Corcasan-IDR stenciled on the sides. He also got some of the orange saplings. Even
though Danilo was not selling his coffee through Corcasan, his membership is still
recognized and he has benefited from Corcasan’s need to spend program money and
increase the number of farmers served.
Corcasan has also experienced scandals in the recent past. The board president,
Hector Cornejo, and vice president, Salvador Ortéz, were arrested and jailed because a
case of coffee was missing from the cooperative’s storage facility. According to Danilo,
they were caught either selling coffee that they did not have or diverting funds earned
from coffee that the cooperative had sold. Either way, Corcasan members asked for an
accounting of the coffee they had turned in and they found some to be missing. Cornejo
and Ortéz paid the debt and were released from the local jail.
Danilo won the Cup of Excellence award after the 2003–2004 harvest. He and I
joked that since I had picked coffee on his farm that season I therefore had played some
part in his victory. He even gave me a laminated reprint of his award. However, a
disagreeable situation arose between Danilo and the Corcasan board of directors as a
result of his award-winning coffee. The cooperative was the first to hear of Danilo’s
selection as a Cup of Excellence finalist. The board directors, Cornejo and Ortéz, did not
intend to inform Danilo and intended to take the victory for themselves. According to
Danilo, he had to fight to prove that the coffee that Corcasan entered in the competition
was in fact his. Corcasan had purportedly misplaced the records of his deposit of coffee
and his intention to participate in the Cup of Excellence. In Danilo’s words,
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