By Matija Šerić
After 1945, widespread rural poverty in Latin America, along with equally pervasive exploitation of workers on coffee, banana, sugar, and other plantations, fueled left-wing (socialist) activism. During the “hot” phase of the Cold War, Washington—fearing the influence of the Soviet Union in its “own backyard” and seeking to protect the financial interests of large corporations—intervened in several Central American countries. These interventions had horrific consequences: coups d’état were encouraged, and bloody civil wars escalated.
Coffee and Civil Wars in Latin America
The first such event was the U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA initiated a plan to overthrow the democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, after he began redistributing more than 100 uncultivated coffee plantations to peasant cooperatives with the support of Guatemalan communists. The coup plotters installed the right-wing president, General Carlos Castillo Armas, who abolished agrarian reform, reinstated the secret police, and violently expelled peasants from the land they had been granted. Armas’s assassination three years later led to three decades of repression and bloody violence carried out by government death squads and guerrilla groups. The elite retained their coffee estates and social status, while workers continued to suffer terribly.
During the 1970s and 1980s, similar conflicts unfolded in neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador. In El Salvador, a U.S.-backed military junta confronted leftist insurgents seeking to overthrow a government closely aligned with the United States. Right-wing Salvadoran death squads trained in the U.S. joined the civil war, and rural fighting left 50,000 people dead. Coffee exports—the country’s main source of income—collapsed dramatically. Nearly one million people fled the country because they had no means of survival. A similar situation occurred in Nicaragua, where approximately 50,000 people also lost their lives.
A Colombian Coffee Documentary
Coffee – A Bridge Connecting Different Cultures
Coffee consumption has become an integral part of many cultures and has often served as a means of connecting different societies. Its presence at cultural events, rituals, and celebrations has enriched human interaction and created lasting bonds among people. Throughout history, various communities have shared their coffeehouse customs and rituals. This “coffeehouse” cultural bridge has contributed to understanding and tolerance among people from different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.
Different communities have developed unique coffee rituals, from Turkish coffee to Italian espresso. Coffee has become a symbol of hospitality and togetherness. Italian espresso spread around the world thanks to Howard Schultz, the former marketing executive of the American company Starbucks, who visited Milan in 1983 and was fascinated by the hundreds of bars serving lattes and espressos. Upon returning home, he persuaded Starbucks’ owners to let him open an espresso bar. By 2020, Starbucks owned nearly 9,000 cafés/restaurants in the United States and could boast more than 30,000 cafés/restaurants worldwide. In the 20th century, coffee was considered the drink of intellectuals in the West, embraced by renowned writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot. This helps explain why coffee is popular among people and why neither the political left nor the right seeks to ban it (at least for now). Around coffee, there exists a political consensus encompassing parties across the entire political spectrum.
Top Coffee-Producing Countries
More than 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide every day, and consumer demand is substantial. Countries that grow coffee are mostly developing nations located along the so-called coffee belt around the equator: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Mexico, Kenya, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and others. Stable temperatures, moderate rainfall, and fertile soil create ideal conditions for coffee trees to grow. From Ethiopia, coffee spread throughout the Arab world and then, by the end of the 17th century, across Asia to Java and Sumatra. In the 18th and 19th centuries, coffee cultivation spread throughout Latin America, giving the coffee belt its final shape.
The top 10 coffee-producing countries in 2021 were: Brazil (2.6 million metric tons), Vietnam (1.5 million metric tons), Colombia (754,000 metric tons), Indonesia (669,000 metric tons), Honduras (475,000 metric tons), Ethiopia (471,000 metric tons), Peru (346,000 metric tons), India (312,000 metric tons), Guatemala (254,000 metric tons), and Uganda (209,000 metric tons).
