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

high-altitude farmland. Don Mundo, as San Juaneños referred to him, would come upon
farmers who were “tired of transporting their coffee long distances by mule,” as Walter
put it. Then, he would make an offer to handle the transport of coffee, or just offer to buy
the farm. Many times the farmers stayed as workers on the land they sold to Don Mundo.
Then Don Mundo would send tractors and open up access roads. The land value
immediately tripled.
For Walter, his father’s vision for obtaining remote and inaccessible farmland was
entrepreneurial: “Esa gente no sabía lo que tenía (Those people didn’t know what they
had),” Walter said in defense of his family’s expansions across the smallholder
landscape. He also claimed that those who sold their lands to his father were private
landowning farmers from the region, not the marginal indigenous groups that had
adopted coffee farming into their agrarian lifestyles. He is familiar with the indigenous
communities from the area, El Carbonal, El Achiote, and El Chile. Yet he believes that
no native inhabitants were displaced by his father’s development of the land.
At the time of our meeting, Walter was attending to a variety of land and property
claims cases, trying to recover what the Sandinistas had taken. One case in particular was
familiar to me from my work with political advocates in San Juan. This case had to do
with a large beneficio seco (dry processing mill) in Palacagüina that had belonged to the
Delgados. Today it is in the hands of a local cooperative and they acquired it when
another co-op went bankrupt. The beneficio is in operation, but Walter is attempting to
get compensation for the property he considers to be rightfully his. One statement
summed up his feeling for the revolution and its impact on campesinos: “Lo único que
hizo la revolución por el campesino fue quitarle el machete en cambio por el rifle. Ahora
83