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Latin America and the Caribbean Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua. By Elizabeth Dore. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 272 pp., $21.95, paperback, ISBN 0-8223-3674-X.
Based on a local case study of an 1870-1930 coffee boom in the municipality of Diriomo, Dore argues that landholding patterns and labor exploitation systems impeded, rather than facilitated, capitalist development in Nicaragua. Marxists have long questioned whether twentieth-century Latin American agrarian economies retained feudalistic characteristics or had developed into a mature capitalist mode of production. They also argued about whether the agrarian workforce was best interpreted as a traditional peasantry or a rural proletariat. Dore demonstrates how these seemingly academic debates had far-reaching implications, as the leftist Sandinista government in the 1980s misinterpreted-according to her-Nicaragua's level of capitalist development. Rather than engaging in the land redistribution that the peasantry wanted, the leaders geared government policy toward issues of wages and working conditions. The ramifications of this misinterpretation, according to Dore, were the alienation of the Sandinistas' rural support base and their fall from power in 1990.
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