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In the revolutionary decade between 1979 and 1992, it would have been difficult to find three political systems as different as death-squad-dominated El Salvador, peaceful social-democratic Costa Rica, and revolutionary Sandinista Nicaragua. Yet when the fighting was finally ended by a peace plan initiated by Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias, all three had found a common destination in democracy and free markets. To explain this extraordinary turn of events is the task of this landmark book, which fuses political economy and cultural analysis.

Both the divergent political histories and their convergent outcome were shaped by a single commodity that has dominated these export economies from the nineteenth century to the present--coffee. Jeffery Paige shows that the crises of the 1980s had their roots in the economic and political crises of the 1930s, when the revolutionary left challenged the ruling coffee elites of all three countries. He interweaves and compares the history, economics, and class structures of the three countries, thus clarifying the course of recent struggles. The heart of the book is his conversations with sixty-two leaders of fifty-eight elite dynasties, who for the first time tell their own stories of the experience of Central American revolution.

Paige's analysis challenges not only Barrington Moore's influential theory of dictatorship and democracy but also contemporary approaches to "transitions to democracy." It also shows that a focus on either political economy or culture alone cannot account for the transformation of elite ideology, and that revolution in Central America is deeply rooted in the personal, familial, and class histories of the coffee elites.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Social Origins of the Central American Crisis
• 1 Revolution and the Coffee Elite
• 2 Class and Class Relations
• Part 2 History and Memory: The Crisis of the 1930S
• 3 Farabundo Martí and the Failure of Revolutionary Socialism
• 4 Manuel Mora and the Rise of Euro-Communism
• 5 Augusto César Sandino and the Failure of Revolutionary Nationalism
• Part 3 Narritives of Class: The Crisis of the 1980S
• 6 Agro-Industrialists versus Agrarians in El Salvador
• 7 Democracy and Anti-Communism in Costa Rica
• 8 Neo-Liberalism and Agro-Industry in Costa Rica
• 9 Liberty and the Contra in Nicaragua
• Part 4 Social Transformation and Elite Narritives, 1979-1992
• 10 Democracy and Revolution
• 11 From Liberalism to Neo-Liberalism
• Appendix A Marriages and Descendents of Children of James Hill and Dolores Bernal Nájera
• Appendix B Selection of the Interview Population
• Notes
• Index

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CHOICE Review

The central question posed by Paige (sociology, Univ. of Michigan) is how three countries--El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica--so different from each other in the 1930s could develop such similar forms of democracy and neoliberalism by the 1990s. For the answers, he emphasizes the internal contradiction of the nations' social orders rather than stressing external influences. He particularly focuses on the three national coffee elites and the ways in which their relationships with the working classes, their internal fragmentations, and their ideologies have been transformed over the last 60 years or so. This is not a narrow focus; the arguments are consistently set in broad contexts of national social structures, comparative histories, and alternative interpretive frameworks. Paige writes clearly, draws on a wide range of primary and secondary published sources, and uses his extensive interviews to very good effect. Tables; figures. Highly recommended for collections serving graduate students and scholars in social and political change generally and in Latin American studies particularly. F. S. Weaver; Hampshire College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Jeffery M. Paige is Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.