New Forms of Labour Exploitation and New Conflicts

Abstract

An understanding of the conditions that led coffee growers to replace the well-tested colonato system with resident and casual wage labour required two levels of analysis. The coffee growers’ economic success was shown to depend as much on their ability to enforce low labour costs as on the influence they were able to exert over official coffee policy. Labour costs and coffee policy were conditioned by the coffee growers’ power to defend their interests against encroachments on profits by both labour and the state. But to the coffee growers’ dismay, the military coup of 1964, which they themselves had helped to instigate, was followed by a decline rather than a reassertion of the coffee sector’s political power, although in compensation plans for a genuine land reform were warded off.