System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, Text One

The Social System of El Salvador
The modern history of El Salvador begins with a cup of coffee. A new elite of exporters and bankers were determined to make their country into the coffee-growing capital of Central America, and with the election of one of their own in 1876, President Zaldívar, they actually began to do so. Deploying the argument that neither the indigenous communities nor municipalities of the country were making efficient use of their communal properties, the rising coffee-making magnates pressured the government to eliminate all forms of landholding which were not private. The governor of the Department of San Vicente wrote in 1879: “The majority of these farmers do not wish to change their way of life or to progress, due to their profoundly deep-rooted customs, their lack of financial resources, and their ignorance of the grand advantages of cultivating coffee.”

Soon after, in 1881, the government simply decreed that the communal lands, which had endured since colonial times and beyond, ceased to exist. It approved the legislation to control and round up the dispossessed to work in coffee estates, appointed agrarian judges who drew up lists of those who worked each day on the properties, and ordered their capture if they left before completing their duties. New laws permitted the landowners to expel the poor, obliging the impoverished to rent land or to go roaming around without it. In most of the properties, the owners retained few workers—tenant farmers—to tend to the estates between harvest times, sometimes by a salary and other times by trading for food and lodging.

But such a radical change in such a short time brought the risk of an uprising with it. Revolts of peasants suddenly surged in 1880, 1885, and 1898. To secure their rule, the coffee magnates pushed for the creation of an army. In 1912, the government created a special security force, exclusively for the purpose of maintaining order and fulfilling the law of the rural areas’ patrons; today, this body is the National Guard.

Armstrong and Shenk, 1983, p. 16-17