In the revolutionary decade between 1979 and 1992, it would have been difficult to find three political systems as different as deathsquad-dominated El Salvador, peaceful social-democratic Costa Rica, and revolutionary Sandinista Nicaragua. Yet when the fighting ended, all three had found a common destination in democracy and free markets. In a landmark book that fuses political economy and cultural analysis, Jeffery Paige shows that both the divergent political histories and their convergent outcome were shaped by a single commodity: coffee. His analysis challenges current theories of dictatorship and democracy, and shows that revolution in Central America is deeply rooted in the histories of the coffee elites.




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