Tachira, pioneer in coffee growing in Venezuela, lost its national leadership starting 1990. The reasons have been both internal and external. Among them are: absence of technical assistance; limited photosanitary control; subtle but progressive advance of contraband; difficulty acquiring official permission; permanency of old coffee plantations; low productivity; high cost of required products; unpaid public debits to producers for surplus of coffee; inefficient agriculture loan gratings; high interest rate from private banks; loss of property committed to pawnbrokers; difficulty to find workers; change the land use (coffee to cattle raising, construction…); absence of productions, prices and commercialization politics; bureaucracy of institutions and coffee organizations; intervened firms; silos full of coffee in the national warehouses. Despite all the above mentioned problems that the Venezuelan coffee grower faces, a meaningful portion of people from Tachira has made great efforts to solve them. Our objective is to analyze how these small coffee producers have been able to face the up hill work at the end of the millennium.