Wake up and smell the Contras!

Fair-trade coffee’s not just for lefties. Now the Contras are in on the action, says mike power

Nicaraguan coffee has been a staple of any good liberal's shopping basket since the 1980s. But now misty-eyed Reaganites can get their hands on the fair-trade action as well, with Contra Coffee.

Gourmet coffee grown by former Contras – the US-supported militia who tried to topple Nicaragua's socialist Sandinista government in the 1980s – is now available and offering customers a chance to "Wake up with freedom fighters!" according to company founders Tom Kilroy and Ryan Myers, two MBA graduates from New England.

During the bloody civil war in the 1980s, many left-leaning US and

European volunteers helped the Nicaraguan government with its coffee harvest, and bringing home coffee to sell was seen as a sign of direct solidarity with the Sandinistas as they fought the Contras.

But all that has changed now. "Fair-trade coffee [in Nicaragua] has always been in the hands of the left," Jose Adan Lopez, the president of the farming cooperative that supplies Contra Cafe told the Miami Herald. "We decided why not sell to those on the right? There are a lot of former Contra [supporters] who can help us by buying this coffee."

The Contras carried out political killings, kidnappings and torture in their fight to overthrow the Sandinista government. Today, some ex-Contras grow coffee on small lots in Jinotega, northern Nicaragua. But as coffee markets slumped in the mid-1990s following a bumper global harvest, prices fell