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

Migrant workers in the Babilonia gold mine had originally populated San Juan in
the mid 1800s. The population grew as a result of the nearby latifundios. According to
Don Amado González.
Los primeros pobladores eran los grandisimos cafetaleros. Don Pedro Molina,
Don Manuel Ibarra, Don Luis Garcia vinieron para sembrar café y sacar
provecho de estos terrenos. Ellos lucharon para llegar aquí, pero el gobierno les
regaló la tierra por ser tan valientes. No fue fácil, pero se hicieron ricos al fin.
Hay muchos decendientes de ellos por estos lados todavía. (The first inhabitants
were really large coffee farmers. Don Pedro Molina, Don Manuel Ibarra, Don
Luis Garcia came to plant coffee and make the best of this land. They struggled to
get here, but the government gave them the land for being so bold. It wasn’t easy,
but they got rich. Many of their descendants are still here today.)
The population grew significantly in 1928 and 1929 as a result of the the U.S. troops’
actions in the Guerra de las Segovias (Echánove and Rabella 2002; Alcaldía SJRC 2003).
San Juan del Río Coco was officially recognized as a town in 1964 during the
administration of Somocista president René Schick. Prior to that time, San Juan belonged
to the municipality of Telpaneca, but once it generated sufficient export capital its appeal
for municipality status was accepted.
Sandino was never captured; he surrendered willingly once a Liberal president
(Sacasa) was in office. Sandino had originally wanted a council of Latin American states
to oversee the election of a unified national government. The United States would not
condone that approach. Once disarmed, Sandino pledged to organize peasant
cooperatives in Las Segovias, where he first experienced labor exploitation as a young
man working in the mines and where he later waged his rebellion. He was killed by
Somoza’s National Guard in 1934.
The sentiments of rural people toward the national government remained bitter in
the 1930 and 1940s. Twenty-three years after Sandino’s betrayal and assassination in
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