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

The high ideals of the Sandinista rural assistance program also faltered. Inflation
led to an increase in individual debt, and whatever credit did reach farmers was spent on
immediate necessities or newly available consumer goods. Many campesinos pocketed
the proceeds of their first loans instead of investing in farm inputs. In the end, it was the
rural middle-class—shopkeepers, truck owners, and barbers—that gained the most from
rural assistance and farm subsidies (Collins et al. 1982). As coffee farmer Adrian
González pointed out, “Los que ganaron de las reformas son los que vinieron a vender
los machetes (The people who made money during the reforms were those who sold
machetes).”
This mode of economic and agricultural development mirrored Marxist principles
of development theory. In 1985, Wheelock described the goals of the Nicaraguan
agrarian reform and development policy under Sandinismo in his book, Entre la crisis y
la agresión: la reforma agraria Nicaraguense. This policy inspired the transformation of
peripheral peasant economies into an economically autonomous Nicaraguan nation-state.
Wheelock and the Sandinista directorate recognized Nicaragua’s global economic
position as a producer of raw materials and consumable goods. Rather than participating
fully in the international market as a producer of finished goods and provider of complex
services, Nicaragua extracted primary goods for processing in other countries. In the
Sandinista socialist model, Nicaragua would develop its own industry in order to liberate
itself from dependence on processing nations. Wheelock writes, “Nicaragua must base its
development on the industrial transformation of its own resources, with the agricultural
sector as its framework” (1985: 482).
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