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

camp, was only 30 kilometers away. Nevertheless, professionals, intellectuals, and
internationalistas (or Sandalistas, as they were endearingly called) worked alongside
campesinos to keep the countryside safe and to ensure a successful harvest in the first
year of the revolution, 1980–1981. In the ensuing years, the struggle to maintain a
successful export harvest became even more difficult. State-owned and -run operations
were direct targets for the US Marine-trained counterinsurgency. The coffee fields were
not safe. Student brigades kept armed watch while pickers worked through the night to
satisfy harvest demands. Much of the countryside had been abandoned because of the
violence and opposition to Sandinista policies, and mano de obra (manual labor) was
difficult to find. Nicaragua’s international reputation as a coffee-exporting nation
suffered as their crop yields progressively diminished while Contra presence increased in
the coffee-growing area.
As noted above, the coyote is presumed by many to be the enemy of organic and
Fair Trade alternatives. In my experience, development workers constantly reinforced the
ideal that farmers needed to liberate themselves from the intermediaries involved in this
traditionally exploitative market. This meant exporting through democratically elected
cooperatives, not selling their product to independent brokers who make a profit by
lending money during the off-season when coffee prices are low and then collecting in
kind when the prices are high. “Model” farmers should learn to manage their finances
and depend on the cooperative when times are tough.
Although this model looks great in theory, in practice it is difficult to live by. One
of the first people I encountered when I began my fieldwork in Las Grietas in late 2004
by conducting a community-wide survey was Raymunda Matey, mother of eight,
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