(Neruda, 1967), Central America' has been associated in the popular mind with the production of bananas, and with little else. The force of this image is also reflected in radical viewpoints where the idea of an undifferentiated, exploited population subjected to repressive regimes - seen as little more than the police force of a monopoly which has historically thwarted all efforts to bring about autonomous national development - continues to have wide currency. This paper does not seek to deny the reality of exploitation nor the legacy of economic backwardness for Central America, but it does attempt to challenge simple formulations which obscure real social differentiations and thereby impair understanding of the actual complexity of the class struggle within the region. In this regard, the intense debate that is presently taking place among some of the main theoretical currents claiming an intellectual debt to the Marxian tradition, in the context of the Third World countries in particular, makes imperative the need for theoretical clarity. Therefore, we shall endeavor at the beginning to expand upon the basic elements of the conceptual framework within which the present analysis is developed. In contrast to those who see the backward countries of the world as fundamentally conditioned by exploitive mechanisms existing between countries, thereby locating the roots of this backwardness in the sphere of circulation, (for example, Frank, 1969:5-6), we take the sphere of production and the determination of the social relations of production under which the surplus of a society is produced and appropriated to be the correct starting point for the analysis of such questions. It is the relationship of the direct producers to those controlling the means of production that is significant, a relation that is always: *The author is completing his dissertation on rural development in Central America for the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Presently, he is the Canadian coordinator for the journal Estudios Rurales Latinoamericanos. The author would like to extend special thanks to Miguel Murmis for the many helpful discussions and to Norma Chinchilla and Eric Schlockman