The name of the
game is coffee
La Dalia is a place of large coffee haciendas, of owners’
mansions, private security forces and wheeler-dealer export
brokers. Also of workers’ barracks and small homesteads
where harvest work for the big bosses is the main source of
income. It is a green place, of cool mountains, icy streams
and creeks, heavy fog in the morning. A place of wealth and
therefore a place of conflict and violence. Workers build
barricades to protest lay-offs. Cooperatives fiercely defend
properties that they think are rightfully theirs, paid for
in lives and years of service in the name of the revolution.
Bosses equally fiercely reject the land reform of the revolutionary
years, defending plantations that their grandfathers carved
from the wilderness, won by force of arms and will from the
“indolent” natives whose descendents now work
their land as labourers. |
