Even when they lost their jobs and their bosses destroyed the only food they had, the peasants stayed in the homes their families had occupied for generations.
But when the babies began to get sick and the adults were weak with hunger, they finally left, setting out on foot through mountains so high they were gazing down at the clouds.
They walked for three days. And when they reached the nearest city, Matagalpa, the tattered group set up camp in a municipal park, many sleeping in the open without so much as a blanket for protection. There they waited for someone -- anyone -- to help.
"It's not easy to grab your sick children and get on the move," said Jose Angel Perez, 35. "But when the kids start clinging to you and saying, `Daddy, I want food,' you have to do something."
The events that sparked the hunger and homelessness of the people of Los Milagros -- "the miracles" in Spanish -- were unwittingly set off more than a decade ago by bankers in Washington and politicians in Paris.
In an effort to help Vietnamese peasants develop a new cash crop, both the World Bank and the French government invested heavily in the Asian country's coffee industry.
The industry flourished, and Vietnam is now the world's second-largest coffee producer, after Brazil. But Vietnam's success has come at the expense of the world's coffee industry, sending prices plummeting from Congo to Colombia, Ethiopia to Ecuador, Indonesia to the Ivory Coast.
"It's not too complicated. It's all supply and demand," said Tommy Westfeldt, president of the Westfeldt Brothers coffee importing company in New Orleans. "Because of the increase worldwide in production, you're going to have a depressed market."
With the falling prices, coffee farms that had been profitable for generations began to fail. One of those was Los Milagros, a estate of lush coffee fields perched high atop a mountain in central Nicaragua.
In August 2000, the company that owned Los Milagros stopped paying workers their daily wages -- US$1.48 for men, US$1.11 for women and US$.55 cents for children -- saying it simply had no money.
Many of the peasants came from families that had worked the fields of Los Milagros for three generations or more and had nowhere to go. They kept working in exchange for a daily meal of rice and beans and the promise of pay when things got better.
"We ate little and took the rest home for our children,'" said Justo Cesar Mendoza, 28.
But in November, the company defaulted on the mortgage, and Nicaragua's private Finance Bank repossessed the plantation just as workers were harvesting the last of the 2000 crop.
The bank sent in administrators with a new mission: to spend only US$.42 on the production of each pound of coffee. The on-site administrator, Jaime Ortiz, said even that would be operating at a loss, but stopping production would lower the value of the plantation the bank was trying to sell.
As the workers tell it, Ortiz rounded them up one morning and told 15 of them they would remain on the job. The rest, he said -- 480 people, between the workers and their families _ would have to leave.
"They lined up all the men and chose the ones closest to them," Mendoza said. "They told the rest of us to leave. They said they didn't have money to support us."
Ortiz denied firing anybody. When asked about Perez, he conceded Perez had been fired -- for disobeying orders, he said -- but insisted nobody else had gone.
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