Costa Rica After Coffee

The Co-op Era in History and Memory

Lowell Gudmundson

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807176788
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Costa Rica After Coffee explores the political, social, and economic place occupied by the coffee industry in contemporary Costa Rican history. In this follow-up to the 1986 classic Costa Rica Before Coffee, Lowell Gudmundson delves deeply into archival sources, alongside the individual histories of key coffee-growing families, to explore the development of the co-op movement, the rise of the gourmet coffee market, and the societal transformations Costa Rica has undergone as a result of the coffee industry's powerful presence in the country.While Costa Rican coffee farmers and co-ops experienced a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence and expansion of a gourmet coffee market in the 1990s drastically reduced harvest volumes. Meanwhile, urbanization and improved education among the Costa Rican population threatened the continuance of family coffee farms, because of the lack of both farmland and a successor generation of farmers. As the last few decades have seen a rise in tourism and other industries within the country, agricultural exports like coffee have ceased to occupy the same crucial space in the Costa Rican economy. Gudmundson argues that the fulfillment of promises of reform from the co-op era had the paradoxical effect of challenging the endurance of the coffee industry.

1

Green Revolution as Antidote to Red in the Green and White Era of National Liberation

Costa Rica’s Coffee Co-ops and Anticommunist Reform

For some, the title of this book, Costa Rica After Coffee, might suggest an apocalyptic, dystopic vision of a Costa Rica without coffee, denuded, without resources, ruined, historically unrecognizable. But the title intends a different point. On the one hand, it contains a certain allusion or autobiographical dichotomy, since many years ago my first monograph was titled Costa Rica Before Coffee.1 It no longer represents a starting point but rather an arrival, in terms of research themes and periods and of many life experiences in a professional career of nearly a half century dedicated to Costa Rican history. On the other hand, “after coffee” refers not to coffee’s disappearance, nor to any historical failure, but rather to its singular success in transforming a country toward a present, our own, and a future that is radically less agricultural and rural—to which one might add less youthful, less poor, less Central Valley–dominated, less exceptional, and other things. In effect, what I attempt here is an analysis of the process by which the coffee sector and its social actors, especially co-op members, set in motion deeply transformative socioeconomic and political changes in the second half of the past century, the consequences of which, intended or not, have altered the country so drastically in the past few decades.

Among those changes is the apparent swing by the National Liberation Party (PLN), beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, from a self-proclaimed social democratic tradition toward its current center-right position, ever more rightist. I call this the green and white era because green and white are the party’s colors. The historiographic critique begun by Jacobo Schifter, among others, was very explicit in Costa Rica Before Coffee and echoed the reinterpretation of the origins and ideology of the PLN that was in vogue at the time.2 In effect, the data gathering for this project began precisely in the second half of the 1980s and led to several different publications over the years.3 In all of these pieces, I sought to offer a fuller and deeper portrait of the history of small and medium-size coffee growers, mythical heroes of both the briefly hegemonic liberacionista ideology and that of the much older view of Costa Rican democratic exceptionalism.

As often happens with overly ambitious projects that begin in one historical era and end in another, Costa Rica After Coffee has had its share of dead ends and reformulations along the way. Though it began as fashionable quantification in the service of so-called social and economic history and the ideological critiques that were typical as the Cold War waned, prior to the linguistic and postmodern turns, it ended up with a return to oral and testimonial history that had been my first steps into Costa Rican history.4

This project and analysis carries a certain risk of anachronism for readers, given the passage of time, so we will need to better frame its objectives and assumptions in the context of the current situation and not the context present at its birth. I hope to offer the reader a detailed social, economic, and statistical portrait of those figures as foundational as they are elusive in Costa Rican historiography—the small and medium-size coffee farmers of the Central Valley—but also an interpretation of the PLN’s ideological origins and trajectory, which carry a different hue today. After a brief parallel analysis of the imprecision of the labels used both then and now, I offer other historical perspectives on the logic inherent in the often commented upon and readily evident conversion of liberacionismo, from a center-left social democratic party to one on the center-right, and the role coffee growers and their cooperatives have played in this.

Populism, Reformism, Rightist, Leftist: Politics and Antipolitics

In recent times, many people have ceased speaking and writing of a postmodern social context, referring instead, in ominous tones, to a context of “post-truth.” This refers to the rise of a very aggressive form of so-called rightist populism, which is nationalist, nostalgic, and nearly always xenophobic; antiglobalization and protectionist; openly misogynist and racist in some cases, and in extreme cases even antiscientific or antirationalist, in the style of the famous Spanish Franquist slogan “Long live death.” Curiously, this phenomenon gained strength in the North Atlantic just as Latin America’s center-right ideologues stopped using the term “populist” tendentiously and dogmatically as an epithet, or simply as synonymous with misrule, to refer to center-left regimes not to their liking that were elected in the late 1990s in places such as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Even more suspiciously, these same commentators and opinion makers were incapable of recognizing, much less publicly admitting, the enormous similarities between the two phenomena. In both cases, their electoral base tended to feed on those harmed (or those only threatened or angered culturally, not necessarily directly or materially) by the impacts of free trade, structural adjustment, globalization, and cultural secularization of recent decades, especially among the fastest-growing electoral group: infrequent voters without party identification (“independents” to some, poorly informed and naive to others, volatile in any case), as well as less educated males and those with more precarious ties to the formal economy.

The coalitions that several times elected both the brand-new Latin American leftists from the late 1990s and the ultraconservative U.S. Republicans, from George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump, reveal more sociological similarities than differences, independent of the labels and supposed ideologies. And there is nothing strange about it, given that they are generated by the same global transformation, whether we call it neoliberalism, free markets, savage capitalism, deregulation, or globalization. Just as with those mythical elephant cemeteries, there is a certain poetic justice in the fact that the last and most violent reaction to neoliberal displacements should have taken place precisely in its sites of origin and imperial policies.

No nondogmatic observer can fail to see the extraordinary cynicism and short-term view of rightist politicians in the Christian West, in their self-congratulatory use of new, tendentious labels in place of the tired old ones of the Cold War. They have tirelessly denounced Islamic fundamentalism and a supposed war of civilizations while simultaneously hunting for votes among and denying the existence of their own forms of vengeful fundamentalism, whether evangelical or xenophobic.5

While the political forces of both extremes sought to reposition themselves in the new post–Cold War situation, other profound processes of social and political change were being born within postmodern societies. They were more well known in North Atlantic societies that suffered rapid processes of deindustrialization, but postmodernity everywhere was associated with rapid urbanization and notable advances in educational levels and female labor market participation, tending toward a secularization and alteration of traditional cultural norms. New social groups and experiences appeared everywhere, but without a working daily life, without shared physical spaces as before, and with no political organization to bring them together. They shared ideas, preferences, experiences, perhaps even self-affirmed identities, but without the common causes or means to make themselves felt directly or continuously in traditional politics, which no few viewed with disdain.

There was a redefinition of participation, consciousness, and militancy with regard to questions of identity (ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, the holy trinity of the liberal agenda of the 1990s), first visible in leftist or liberal university and intellectual circles. Identity was no longer economic, much less union-based, and was in line with all those changes experienced at work, home, and culturally, all tending toward self-segregation by income and toward cultural self-segmentation within a consumer society that was contradictorily collectivist and individualist, interactive but at the same time isolated. Whether expressed as virtual realities or reality shows, the end-of-century tone was far from that of the world that had formed previous generations and is perhaps best summarized in the title of a recent book on family life in the era of smartphones, Alone Together.6

Parallel identity processes rapidly appeared on the right, around religiosity, nationalism, immigration, and ethnicity, as well as so-called traditional values under attack or clearly discredited, with the additional factor of protest over the loss of employment owing to deindustrialization. Needless to say, all that was lacking was a leader, populist or not, who would unite the traditional bourgeois right with newly “indignant” followers to turn the situation around. Compared to the self-isolated leftism of the cultural elites, the renovated right with a popular base would be likely to win many electoral contests.

Lamentable and painful examples of analytical confusion are plentiful in our postmodern and dangerously post-truth era. Thus, we need to attempt to clarify some of the possible historical meanings of the terms “populism” and “reformism” to better orient the reader on the topic of recent Costa Rican history. In both world and Latin American history, the term “populist” has had almost as many meanings as concrete cases. Without exception, the term refers to popular movements that defend the interests of the people, the majorities, always against the status quo and its dominant elites—in other words, the angry and indignant, potentially as likely on the right as on the left in terms of ideology. Once in power, such movements reveal their Janus-faced nature, that is, their opposed tendencies toward both extremes of the ideological panorama. With a few examples, ranging from curious to pathetic on both sides, we can better comprehend such tendencies and contradictions.

The first U.S. case is William Jennings Bryan, the three-time losing presidential candidate of the Democratic Party (in 1896, 1900, and 1908) who was the unquestionable leader of the Populist movement. No matter how he presented himself as the defender of the people and the common man, however, his ideas about social change and modernity were anything but modern. He played an important role in support of the passage of Prohibition (1920–1933) with the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, avoided his party publicly condemning the Ku Klux Klan for fear of losing Southern support, and just before his death in 1925, had an important role in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, defending the prohibition of the teaching of Darwin’s theory of human evolution in the state of Tennessee.7

The U.S. Department of State offered another spectacle of incomprehension, somewhere between pathetic and laughable, in denouncing the populist governments of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and Getulio Vargas in Brazil—first as pro-fascist before World War II and then as pro-communist during the Cold War. The reason was simple. Populism shares a characteristic commonly associated with paper: it absorbs any color of ink. In this case, Vargas’s decision to support the U.S. invasion of Italy with military resources resolved the problem of pro-fascist accusations long before Perón, since from the start U.S. geostrategic needs were the source of such a voluntary, self-interested confusion of labels.

In the classic cases of the United States and Russia, the populist concept or label refers above all to rural protest movements in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. They arose in response to depressed agricultural prices and the rapid transformation of the social and technological structure of agriculture, as well as the processes of urbanization and industrialization that threatened as never before the cultural and political hegemony of rural areas and tradition. Transferred to the field of Latin American history, the classic cases tended to be urban and tied to labor and entrepreneurial groups emergent with the industrialization process, accelerated by the demand crisis after 1930, and the import substitution process maintained during the following three decades or more.8 Once again, the governments of Perón in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil would be archetypes, but we find echoes of the same process in many other Latin American countries.

If this change of protagonists were not sufficient motive for confusion, Latin American experience offers other complications, with particular relevance for the Costa Rican case. The cases of Mexico during the rule of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and his reanimated land reform, the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario after it took power in Bolivia in 1952, and Castro’s Cuba during the 1960s offer somewhat atypical examples. Once in power, these populist movements headed revolutionary processes combining in novel form urban or nonagricultural union movements with profound land reforms and nationalist expropriations (oil in Mexico; tin in Bolivia; and sugar, oil, and mining in Cuba).

However, within an even broader typology, there are cases, such as Costa Rica in the 1940s and 1950s, where a rural and agricultural base of support appears and is consolidated as a critical source for populist movements and their preferred governments. Like Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Colombia witnessed political contests and regimes in which different forces and leaders attempted to organize critical rural and agricultural populations as the support base for national redemption. In Puerto Rico, this occurred under the rule of Muñoz Marín after 1940, and in Colombia it appeared with liberals like Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934–1938) and later the charismatic and incendiary left-liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Whether these movements are called reform or revolution depends on the case.

Two factors are combined in precise ways in the cases of Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Colombia: coffee is identified with “the nation” and the peasantry, whereas bananas or sugar are identified with the “foreign” and the corporate. The corporations are U.S. in all cases, as with oil in Venezuela, but oil in Mexico or copper and nitrates in Chile invo...