Ripton-Export Ag and Crisis in El Salvador

Export Agriculture and Agrarian Crisis: Salvadoran Peasants and the Global Market
Author(s): John Ripton

Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 6, Migration, the Global Economy, and Latin
American Cities (Nov., 2006), pp. 101-135
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27647974
Accessed: 20/09/2010 15:08
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Latin American
Perspectives.
http://www.jstor.org
Export Agriculture and Agrarian Crisis
Salvadoran Peasants and the Global Market

by
John Ripton
Integration of El Salvador's agrarian resources into the global economy

has contributed to periodic agrarian crises, including the 1932 massacre of
10,000 peasants and the civil war of the 1980s, in which 75,000 perished.
The formation of the state, the emergence of an oligarchy, the role of the mil
and the poverty of the peasants are shaped by commercial agricultural
itary,
"
production for the global market. Recent neoliberal and "free-trade poli
cies are a neglected part of this history. Whereas coffee exports dominated
the Salvadoran economy throughout much of the twentieth century, emigra
tion of rural people is now the nation s main export, and there are significant
with remittances as a development strategy. Liberal theory gener
problems
ally fails to recognize that integrating resources of a poor country into the
global economy is as much a political project as it is an economic one.
Keywords: El Salvador, global economy, agrarian crisis, peasants, remittances
A brief description of one young Salvadoran peasant's struggle to survive

identifies one of the central crises of El Salvador's history (Ripton, n. d.: 31):
We lived in the countryside. My father would often go to the city looking for
work. My mother coffee and I helped her. We lived on properties
picked
which were owned by the wealthy, and we had to beg work and shelter from
to place. The finqueros did not allow peasants to settle in any one place,
place
so we never had a permanent to live and the poverty was terrible.
place
Peasant families worked hard, and yet we did not have enough to eat.
While this remarkable individual escaped from these conditions in the

mid-1980s, generations of peasants have borne the burden of expanding
global commerce. The story of their struggle is centuries long, originating
John Ripton is an adjunct professor in the Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies Department
at Rutgers University and chair of history at Gill St. Bernard's School in Gladstone, New
Jersey. He thanks Barbara Ripton for her support and advice and gratefully acknowledges the
comments of the peer reviewers and editors at Latin American Perspectives.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 151,Vol. 33 No. 6, November 2006 101-135
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X06294114
? 2006 Latin American Perspectives
101
102 LATINAMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
with the international market for indigo during the Spanish colonial period,
and continues grown corn sold in town and markets
today. Locally village
must compete with subsidized imported corn. Commercial export crops
compete directly with subsistence crops. As global competition drives
down the prices of commodities on which small producers subsist, growing
hunger is one pernicious consequence. In 2004 the Food and Agricultural
Organization (FAO) reported that 800,000 Salvadorans, or 14 percent of the
national were undernourished, compared with 10 percent for
population,
Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole (Replogle, 2004: 2056).
Hern?n Delgado, director of the Nutritional Institute of Central America
and Panama (quoted by Replogle, 2004: 2057), succinctly reflects the cen
tral of under "free-trade" policies: "The message of
irony globalization
... is that there will be cheaper and more accessible food for
globalisation
the population at the global level. In theory, this can be correct, but in prac
tice, it can also be a sword for the small who sud

double-edged producer
denly finds that his product has no value."

Moreover, in the wake of the Chapultepec Peace Accords of 1992, the
neoliberal agenda of successive Salvadoran governments has encouraged
unregulated globalization. Since the civil-war period, economic plans

over may be mistaken for a
emphasizing manufacturing exports agriculture
new Some argue that the displacement of the tradi
wholly phenomenon.
tional landed oligarchy by enterprising elites who support "free trade" is a
new and promising stage in the economic development of El Salvador and
other poor nations (seeWorld Bank, 2005; also Ratha, 2003: 157-159 and
164-165). Considered in a longer historical frame of reference, however, the
current seems yet another form of economic integra
strategy elite-managed
tion of rural and other national resources into markets.
expanding global
Because of the Salvadoran government's dedication to free trade and its
distinction as one of the most open economies in the world, wealth disparity
is greater than it was in the 1970s, and unemployment leaves 43 percent of
Salvadorans in poverty (Dellios, 2005). Again, the longer historical view
indicates that globalization processes have deleterious effects on Salvadorans
in general and its rural poor in particular, whether they be the first tentative
steps of the colonial period, the liberalizing policies of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, or the present actions of the neoliberal regime.
El Salvador dollarized its economy in 2000 and became the first Central
American country to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement
(CAFTA) in 2004. Perhaps themost evident social and economic result of this
crude free-trade form of development is the flood of rural migrants into the
cities of Central and North America as dispossessed and unemployed agri
cultural workers abandon the countryside in search of job opportunities.
Ripton / EXPORTAGRICULTUREAND AGRARIAN CRISIS 103
International migration of rural workers is the newest way of incorporating El

Salvador's rural resources into the global economy, and the cash remittances
these workers send home may represent a new form of economic dependency.
While, historically, export crops such as indigo and coffee constituted
the principal linkage to the market, remittances as a source
global today
of foreign earnings easily outpace agricultural exports. Indeed, the govern
ment has embraced and remittances as a
emigration development strategy
(Popkin, 2003: 367-368). Twenty percent of Salvadoran households
receive remittances, accounting for 14 percent of the gross domestic prod
uct (GDP) (Andrade-Eekhoff, 2005: 47). In a 2001 report commissioned by
the World Bank, remittances were to increase economic
predicted growth
in the long run by stimulating local production (Taylor, 2001: 18). The
value of El Salvador's remittances doubled from 1999 (US$1.34 billion) to
2005 (US$2.6 billion), accounting for more than 60 percent of the country's
and thus a source of for sus
foreign earnings suggesting promising capital
tainable, locally based development.
Subsequent reports have been far less sanguine. The argument that
remittances and emigration represent potential economic in
development
the communities from which Salvadorans emigrate appears to depend on
superficial analysis. Pointing out that most of the remittances received by
Salvadorans are used for consumer to meet basic needs, one
purchases
researcher argues that remittance money has not the roots of
"changed
poverty" (Martinez, 2004: 25). In a study of remittances in several coun
tries, Popkin reports that transforming remittances into the neces
savings
sary to invest significantly in income-generating activity will require broad
government support (see Popkin, 2003: 349). Still another group of schol
ars reports that local remittance-based economies but
produce "nothing
future migrants" (Miyares et al., 2003: 84).
Other deficiencies and complications with remittance-led economic
development have surfaced. Some researchers report that without appropri
ate investment in infrastructure to facilitate rural economic growth among
small remittances can divide families and foster in com
producers, anger
munities (Miyares et al., 2003: 83). Correlatively, the neoliberal policies of
the Salvadoran government in the past two decades have slashed public
employment, privatized state-owned utilities, and lowered barriers to for
eign investment. Far from improving the Salvadoran economy, with its
chronic unemployment, these measures have eliminated thousands of jobs
and contributed to the emigration of many more Salvadorans. It is hardly
surprising, then, that in 2003 the Salvadoran government estimated that
2.5 million citizens, 29 percent of the total population, lived outside of
the country (Popkin, 2003: 352-353).
More surprising, however, is the breathtaking speed with which neoliber

alism has reestablished a familiar social order in postcivil-war El Salvador.
The Alianza Republicana Nacional (National Republican Alliance?
ARENA), in power since 1989, swiftly negotiated the official economic shift
from to maquila or assembly-plant and toward an
away agriculture exports
unofficial growing dependence on emigration and remittances. A decade of
civil war had uprooted the traditional landed oligarchy. Weakened by pro
tracted war and abandoned by the United States, this older elite was dis
a new, even more one under the banner of ARENA.
placed by enterprising
Moreover, the 1992 democratic opening in which the Frente Farabundo
Mart? para la Liberaci?n Nacional (Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Front?FMLN) laid aside its weapons and embraced party politics deterio
rated as its political party split into factions. These divisions soon under
mined socially progressive politics, rendering the challenge to the ARENA
neoliberal agenda ineffectual at best (Biekart, 2001: 196).1
The neoliberal economic strategy of the governing ARENA party is the
latest stage in the long trajectory of El Salvador's integration into and depen
dence on global markets. In the eighteenth century indigo dominated society,
and throughout much of the twentieth century the coffee oligarchy ruled.
Now the ARENA "new right" has aligned itself with the Washington
Consensus on free trade as a central element of U.S.
(the convergence
foreign policy). With billions of dollars in economic, military, and technical

assistance from the United States, ARENA constructed the political and eco
nomic institutions that currently promote the export-led transnational project
within the strictures of structural adjustment and free trade (Robinson,
2004).
Successive ARENA governments have limited not only the revolution
aries' military objectives but also any anticipated social reform (see Guido
B?jar, 1994: 24-32). The new maquiladora sector illustrates this point.
While the industry grew by more than 300 percent in the decade following
the peace the wages were not wages and workers received
agreement, living
little protection from the state (Popkin, 2003: 353). Consequently, in the
1990s, according to the UN Development Program, the gap between rich
and poor Salvadorans significantly increased, providing the wealthiest 20
percent with 18 times the income of the poorest 20 percent (Swedish, 2002,
cited by Popkin, 2003: 353).
If it were not for massive emigration from the rural areas, moreover,
opposition to the current economic regime would likely have engendered

resistance and militancy, as had so often occurred in El
greater popular
Salvador's Some scholars contend that neoliberal policies deliber
past.
withhold investments from rural areas to encourage and
ately emigration
remittances in an effort to maintain political stability (see Popkin, 2003:

351-352). In this light, then, rural emigrants become the new agro-export.
Emigration also serves as a safety valve (see P?rez Saenz, 2000) for the new
right and its transnational project, much as the Central American Common
Market did in the rural crisis of the 1960s (by 1969, one in eight Salvadorans,
300,000 in all, had fled to Honduras to find food and work [see LaFeber,
1984: 175]).
Meanwhile, the U.S. Agency for International Development helped the
Salvadoran government develop the national reconstruction plan that shaped
the neoliberal regime of the 1990s. By 2001 remittances constituted 13.8 per
cent of the GDP and today more than a quarter of Salvadoran adult residents
receives remittances. to the Inter-American Bank
According Development
(IADB), the value of these remittances substantially exceeds official devel
opment assistance inflows to El Salvador and much of Latin America and the
Caribbean. At the current rate of growth, the IADB predicts that remit
tances to Latin America and the Caribbean may well exceed US$300 billion
in the period 2001-2010 (MIF, 2005). Yet, according to Asociaci?n de
Comunidades Rurales para el Desarrollo de El Salvador (Rural Community
Development Association of El Salvador?CRIPDES), poverty remains
endemic in the countryside. Despite remittance flows, moreover, Oxfam
warns that "free trade agreements [such as CAFTA] will bring an increase in
poverty and crime, more out of rural areas, and an increase of
migration
social problems stemming from family disintegration" (Hufstader, 2005).
Today, with U.S.-led economic integration of this hemisphere under the
banner of free trade, scholars need to look more closely at the historical
relationship of the world market to the rural populations of the formerly
colonized nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Structural inequities in the global economy such as unequal access to mar
kets, capital, and technology have often victimized small and communal
producers. The ongoing struggle in the Mexican state of Chiapas drama
tizes these inequities and misplaced priorities. Echoes of these concerns can
be heard throughout the Americas among the critics and protesters of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), CAFTA, the Free Trade
Association of the Americas (FTAA), and theWorld Trade Organization
(WTO). The International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment therapy,
calling for privatization of public enterprises, liberalization of capital mar
kets, market-based pricing, and the elimination of barriers to free trade, has
produced protest and rebellion from Seattle to Santiago.

This new stage of integration into the global economy fits the cycle of
global market restructuring and rural dispossession and marginalization
that has plagued El Salvador and many other poor nations since Western
colonization. Variations and deviations are of course part of this history, but a
larger pattern is evident. Accordingly, the history of this capitalist-driven glob
alizing economy and the impact that it has had on rural peoples in Latin
America should be one of the most critical concerns of contemporary scholars
and policymakers. El Salvador's history offers some enlightening insights.
BACKGROUND
Under the regime of indigo export production at the close of the eighteenth
century in El Salvador, a rural tableau strikingly similar to the one described
at the beginning of this article already existed. A Spanish royal official at that
time reported that "all classes of strangers from diverse places arrived at the
hacienda at harvest time, constructing theirmakeshift huts of discarded wood
and leaving once the harvest was done" (Cortes y Larraz, 1958: 34). Since the
colonial period, it seems, Salvadoran agrarian social relations have been con
ditioned by the country's relationship to the world economy.

Within this context, as depicted in the opening vignette, land ownership
and labor arrangements are institutions rural life,
primary structuring giv
to expectations and a
ing shape particular production regime. Today's rapid
restructuring presents immediate challenges to a world in which the break
down of rural economies continues to fuel the exodus of rural people. At the
same time, however, the roots of this market
seemingly unprecedented
restructuring can be found in the relationship of poor rural people to the
globalizing capitalist market. In El Salvador at least, production for distant
markets over centuries has involved of market and civil
cycles restructuring
violence.
Access to world markets has enabled of Salvadoran

generations planters,
processors, and exporters to appropriate the most land, often
productive
rendering the peasants landless and impoverished. Rebellion and resistance
to the agro-export system began in the colonial era. The Spanish indigo
planters of the seventeenth century intruded into the highland native com
munities to persuade or force Indians who had the worst of
escaped ravages
disease to cultivate for the export market (MacLeod, 1973: 229). These
export planters established a fledgling link with world markets and intro
duced the measures for the new agro
rudimentary politico-legal enforcing
export production regime.
While historical records of the beginnings of agricultural export produc
tion in El Salvador may be scarce, the methods used to press Indians into its
service certainly existed in the late seventeenth century. Head and other per
sonal taxes (to be paid in coin [seeWortman, 1982: 174] or cash) compelled
Indians to dedicate a portion of their land and labor to cash crops, often
indigo. Communal lands and town ejido tracts (lands attached to colonial
towns for the use of its citizens) were encroached on and other
apparently
wise appropriated by indigo planters through disingenuous economic and
schemes. Isabel Casin's of the records of a
legal study seventeenth-century
Salvadoran hacienda suggests that indigo hacendados commandeered as
much as a third of Indian village land and a substantial portion of Indian
labor to produce indigo at a fixed price in perpetuity. The tribute and tax bur
dens borne by the Indians during the colonial period were the main ways
Indian communities became indebted to indigo planters and eventually lost
their lands to them (Casin, 1972: 33-34, cited in Lindo-Fuentes, 1990).
With their numbers already depleted by disease introduced with the
European invasion a century earlier (MacLeod, 1973: 184-185) and some
of their communities disintegrating under the economic pressures and polit
ical circumstances of indigo production, other Indians apparently resisted
incorporation into the new commercial regime. Isolated communities may
have been attempting to maintain their isolation while others defied the
authorities by fleeing to remote locations (de Solano, 1971: 75, cited by
Flores Macal, 1983: 29). MacLeod (1973: 190-191), however, reporting
that as many as 40 percent of the Indians had succumbed to the epidemics
of the sixteenth century and the remainder were reduced to a "demoralized
remnant" of their former condition or state, sees more

problems arising
from the importation of African slaves to replace the dwindling indigenous
labor.Whatever the case, it is clear that by 1803, when the colonial official
Antonio Guti?rrez y Ulloa traveled throughout the Salvadoran colony to
survey its population and resources, he found that inmany towns the ejidos
had been completely taken over by the haciendas (Guti?rrez y Ulloa, 1962:
45). While the survey findings may reflect the results of indigenous depop
ulation and the migration of Indians onto haciendas as the social cohesion
of the traditional Indian communities weakened, they certainly also reflect
aggressive encroachment by large landowners onto communal lands (see
Browning, 1971: 78-138). These circumstances reflect the general insecu
rity of traditional community life as the forces of production for world mar
kets impinged on the lands that sustained it.
The or forced labor was another instrument that
repartimiento, system,
compelled Indians to produce for European markets. In 1737 the crown's

prohibition against employing Indians in indigo production was removed.
While the indigo planters had earlier maneuvered around it (Rubio S?nchez,
1976: 82), its formal removal indicated that the need for workers out
weighed the crown's interest in protecting the Indians. By this time, accord
ing toMacLeod (1973: 189), the crown had also become corrupted in the
oversight of laws protecting the Indians and was benefiting financially from
overlooking violations. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, as the
European industrial revolution increased the demand of its textile mills for
indigo, the demand for labor increased and the colonial government actively
promulgated orders against those who fled or evaded their obligations to
work (Flores Macal, 1983: 27).
Access to the land, labor, and capital needed to produce for the indigo
export market was a source of conflict among the colonists them
Spanish
selves. The assignment of forced labor exclusively favored the largest pro
ducers, leaving the small producers to scramble for whatever other labor was
available (Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 23). Added to this source of conflict was the
pressure placed on Salvadoran indigo producers by Guatemalan merchants
who controlled access to the markets and the scarce In the precari
capital.
ous economic environment of Salvadoran
indigo production, planters
became heavily indebted in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and
many lost their haciendas to these merchants, especially when the
Napoleonic Wars interrupted trade in the early 1800s (Wortman, 1982: 192).
In spite of the social conflict and the economic risks of commercial pro
duction so far from the European commercial and political centers, indigo
became the economic foundation of Salvadoran colonial society. By the
close of the colonial period, indigo was being produced in much of the
colony, and local governments everywhere were controlled by the indigo
planters (Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 32). And while indigo probably never
accounted for more than 15 percent of the provincial product, it had a
strong impact on Salvadoran colonial life. From late September into
November the harvesting and marketing of indigo brought all other activi
ties in the territory to a virtual halt. Government functions were disrupted
as officials, who were often the planters and marketers of the pre
public
cious export crop, abandoned their posts to oversee the harvest (Rubio
S?nchez, 1976: 110-111).
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite the commercial dis
ruptions caused by European wars and the internecine
subsequent struggles
over the formation of the Central American republics, the newly
indepen
dent nation of El Salvador had created a state dedicated to commercial
ization of its agrarian resources. State involvement in the commercial
modernization of El Salvador began in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century as the French Bourbon rulers of Spain tried to rationalize and
implement economic planning in its Spanish American colonies. The
Bourbon reforms not only deepened links to the industrializing European
economy but also increased pressure on Indian lands. From this on,
point
as the Salvadoran state matured in the nineteenth it became
century,
an active agency for the of its agro-export economy, at times

expansion
ruthlessly repressing the peasants.
One of the most authoritative sources on El Salvador's development in

the nineteenth century, however, disagrees with the conclusions just drawn.
H?ctor Lindo-Fuentes offers another interpretation of El Salvador's colonial
and early republican development. His artful and useful treatment nonethe
less suffers from an essential shortcoming of liberal theory in general and

modernization theory in particular: the notion that the state and the economy
are discrete entities subject to independent analysis. For example, while
Lindo-Fuentes acknowledges that "the significance of [indigo] lay more in
the fact that itwas the main source of income of the ruling class and its link
to the world economy" (1990: 31), he underestimates the deleterious impact
of commercial relations on the course of El Salvador's
agrarian develop
ment. The primacy of agro-export production in building the institutions that
structure society is hardly considered. Moreover, his analysis diminishes the
culture and value of His concentration on the of
indigenous peoples. scarcity
labor, the low level of technology, and the vagaries of international trans
portation and marketing contributes significantly to our understanding
of why the economic modernization was not more successful.
country's
Nevertheless, his analysis is predicated on the assumption that progressive
integration into global markets engenders greater political participation and
more broadly shared benefits of economic growth. While new evidence
supports the view that many peasants participated in agro-export commerce
as small and even communal much of the nine
part-time, producers during
teenth century as hacienda production declined and the national state was
struggling to organize itself (see Lauria-Santiago, 1999), once the state
became more at the end of the century an oli
effectively organized agrarian
garchy emerged and the peasantry became progressively marginalized and
proletarianized.
Indeed, several scholars of the colonial period recognize similar forces of
commercial agriculture already at work. Murdo MacLeod's extensive
research on the socioeconomic history of the Central American region finds
"frequent land usurpations and annexations" early in the colonial period.
MacLeod characterizes the colonial period in El Salvador as "one of greatest
pressure on the surviving Indian communities" and concludes that indigo
quickly became the economic lifeline of the colonizers (MacLeod, 1973:
381, 181-182, and 229). Lindo-Fuentes, for his part, regards El Salvador's
particular integration into the globalizing economy as inevitable. Like the
rest of Central America, in Lindo-Fuentes's estimation, El Salvador was des
tined to be poor and underdeveloped. He explains (1990: 1): "There aremany
routes to underdevelopment. [El Salvador's] position in the international
market was the of the It could never

epitome 'small-country hypothesis.'
bargain for the prices of the things it bought and sold; it had to accept what
ever the international economy imposed. The wisdom of increasing
with the outside world was seldom
exchange questioned."
Lindo-Fuentes's argument suggests that a more enlightened agrarian elite
willing to invest in education might have improved conditions for themajor

ity of Salvadorans, but he fails to ask why this course was not taken. Yet his
research indicates that the Salvadoran state became an instrument
essentially
of the elite for reinforcing the integration of Salvadoran resources into the
world economy. Meanwhile, his observations sometimes fit the arguments of
dependency theorists, who argue that dependent economies such as El

Salvador cannot improve the lives of the majority unless they systematically
discontinue or reformulate their economic with the world market.
relationship
He even concedes that "it is quite possible that depressions in the indigo
market benefited peasants since a smaller indigo harvest meant less demand
for their services and therefore more time to spend on their own crops" (1990:
32). But, whereas the dependency theorists see the economic project of an
agrarian elite as an agency of El Salvador's underdevelopment, Lindo-Fuentes
sees the emergence of an agrarian elite, with its capacities to exploit opportu
nities in the world markets, as the fulcrum of modernization (2).
El Salvador's current position in relation to global markets and the
poverty that still bedevils it are complex and critical subjects for further
scholarship. Emigration from Central America and other impoverished
areas of the world is a critical concern. Such developments do not
portend
greater international stability and peace. On the contrary, if poverty and
emigration are driven by private market forces, itmay become imperative
tomodify those forces in such a way as to distribute wealth more equitably
and stabilize rural economies. A first step is to take the measure of the lib
eral market forces historically?to critique the role of liberal economics
and free trade in the history of poorer nations.
LIBERALISM, COFFEE, AND PEASANTS
Liberalism was midwife to the birth of the Salvadoran republic. The

Bourbons had introduced liberal ideas, but itwas the actual and potential inte
gration of the nation's agrarian resources into expanding commercial markets
in industrializing Europe that lent force to them. Propelled by the industrial

revolution and the commercial expansion of Western Europe, political inde
from was a new rationale. Salvadoran lib

pendence Spain accompanied by
eral independence leaders in 1824 invoked the principle of natural equality in
the service of their commercial designs on Indian lands and their veiled attack
on the privileges of the older conservative agrarian order (Rodriguez, 1824):
In the old system class differences

impeded the use of land, and in the so-called
Indian towns, they [the Indians] decided how to use their land, cultivating part
for neighbors of the same towns who did not belong to their class. The law
of equality established by our current system must abolish every privilege.
Since there is only one class of citizens, every one with the same options, it
is very just to level all to the same rights and obligations.
For Indians, independence from Spain must have initially seemed mean
ingless. Their economic and political fortunes appeared circumscribed by
familiar historic circumstances. Though their putative protection under
Spanish colonial law had vanished with independence, commercial inter
ests connected to global markets in the eighteenth century had begun to
erode the brakes that the law and the crown might have applied to the pro
duction of commercial crops. At however, conserv
globally independence,
ative and liberal factions scrambled to prosper in the new political age. In
the first two decades of independence they fought over control of the
region's resources. A Central American federation (1821-1838) was
formed, but it could not endure the constant civil wars of the various con
servative and liberal factions. Deeper still and ultimately more profound in
its implications for peasants than the civil turmoil and destruction caused
by the internecine struggles for power lay the distant industrial revolution
of the North Atlantic. Indeed, the promise of greater wealth through pro
duction for markets in Europe was a primary driving force in the politics of
early independence (see MacLeod, 1973: 385).
The tortuous course of El Salvador's was
early independence emphati
cally punctuated in 1833 by the indigenous rebellion at Santiago Nonualco,
in the south-central part of the country. Faltering indigo prices (Mulhall,
1883: 473)2and the pressures of an increasingly monetarized society con
tributed to the rebellion. Though ethnic division between Indians and ladi
nos also contributed, it is often difficult to divorce ethnic or racial elements
from class and other economic conditions (Anderson, 1971: 30-33).
Nevertheless, at least one cause of the rebellion is quite clear: the usurpa
tion of Indian lands by indigo producers and exporters, liberals and conser
vatives alike. In addition, it seems more than coincidental that the
movement was born and thrived in San Vicente then known as
Department,
the a where the "most had been com
"indigo emporium," region iniquities
mitted against the Indians" (Flores Macal, 1983: 58).
Several decades later, in 1872, another Indian rebellion occurred, this
time at Izalco in the western area of El Salvador. historical evidence
Again,
indicates that the cause of this rebellion was the intensifying pressure
placed on Indian communal lands (Anderson, 1971: 33). By the middle of
the century, influential commercial interests had embarked on a national
program of infrastructural development designed to facilitate growth in
agro-exports. Improvements in ports and roads strengthened the linkage
between the resources and distant markets. Work
country's agrarian global
on the road from San Miguel to the Pacific port of La Uni?n was started in
1845, and the road connecting Sonsonate and Santa Ana to Acajutla was
improved in the same year. Dock facilities at La Libertad were upgraded at
the same time (Flores Macal, 1983: 57). In 1855, the completion of the
Panama Railroad across the Isthmus of Panama brought more shipping traf
fic to El Salvador's improved Pacific ports (Otis, 1861: 145; Larde y Lar?n,
1957: 27). Larde y Lar?n reports that after 1855 Acajutla received an aver
age of 50 ships annually, compared with a yearly average of 6 ships prior
to the Gold Rush and the opening of the railroad.
Additionally, to ensure that agricultural exporters obtained access to
both land and labor to expand production for foreign markets, the
Salvadoran government assumed responsibility for civil security, putatively
rationalizing police and army involvement in mobilizing and regimenting
an agricultural labor force (Menendez, 1855-1856: 185; Lindo-Fuentes,
1990: 79). In 1860, a civil code was adopted that formally concentrated
power in the hands of the agrarian elite and insulated its state executive
power from popular control (Rep?blica de El Salvador, 1860). Indigo
remained the principal export, reaching its apex of production in the same
year as the Izalco rebellion (Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 112).
Another crop with export potential beyond that of indigo?coffee?was
being promoted atmid-century by the government and enterprising growers,
and it was coffee that became the economic foundation of the state and
society. In the 1840s the perceptive Englishman John Bailey, while traveling
in El Salvador, observed the potential for coffee exports. Notwithstanding
his enthusiasm for the crop's commercial expansion and his conviction that
it would contribute to the welfare of the Indians, Bailey's observations can
not hide that such "progress" portends social instability and even calamity.
Though Bailey did not intend it, his observations reveal that "many of the
Indian towns, where the inhabitants now cultivate the lands for the general
benefit of their inhabitants [my emphasis], in grain or in other articles for

common use, might, after a little while, by granting them some little favour
in the beginning, be encouraged to become coffee growers" (1850: 91). Of
course, this single observation by Bailey does not prove that Indians were
prospering in self-sufficient communities. It would be imprudent, however,
to ignore the broader implications of what Bailey reported. Indeed, as the
nineteenth century drew to a close and coffee exports three

represented
fourths of Salvadoran exports (Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 113), conditions in the
Indian communities apparently ignited a series of rebellions; in addition to
the Izalco rebellion in 1872, there were other rebellions in 1875, 1880, 1884,
1885, 1889, and 1898 (Torres, 1961: 25; Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 136).
With a 600 percent growth in foreign trade between 1854 and 1896
(Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 76), coffee led the nation into an unprecedented era
of economic expansion. Itwas a period in which liberal ideology, especially
the ideas of a free market and laissez-faire economics, in
reigned supreme
the minds of Salvadoran authorities. an coffee oli
Eventually, emerging
garchy systematically violated these ideas, using the state as an instrument
to expand commercial agricultural However, with the North
development.
Atlantic industrial revolution booming and the nation's foreign commerce
taking off, Salvadoran leaders were convinced of the efficacy of their lib
eral ideas. The United States became their economic model. In a speech
delivered in 1876, Salvadoran President Andr?s Valles (quoted in Lindo
Fuentes, 1990: 134) enthusiastically embraced the free market. The laissez
faire principle, he admiringly noted, "observed with very few limitations in
the United States of North America, has transformed deserts which until
recently had been inaccessible into very beautiful cities, has crisscrossed
the territory of the union with railroad tracks, and has taught and proven to
the entire world the value and potential of free institutions."
But, despite the tripling of commercial sea traffic in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, at a time when the size and of
tonnage steamships
increased as well (Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 174), scholars disagree on whether
the sixfold growth in international commerce redounded to the general wel
fare of the nation and its people. Aldo Lauria-Santiago's investigation of
peasant petitions, letters, and municipal and other local records convincingly
demonstrates that many peasants, perhaps most, had access to land and par
ticipated in the planting of coffee and other export crops, at least prior to the
1880s (1999: 70). He also finds that the Salvadoran national state encour
aged peasants to plant coffee and often protected their rights to common
land. His research a of peasant and other small
provides portrait producers
landholders participating in commercial production as late as the 1890s. By
this time, however, those who controlled the large milling and processing
facilities used access to external credit sources to gain control of the export
trade and "served as the bankers to myriad small producers" (138).
Many other scholars and reports raise significant issues that Lauria
Santiago's sources apparently do not address. First, as measured by agri

cultural real wage rates, it seems that the masses of Salvadorans were better
off in the 1850s than they were in the 1890s. Rural day workers' wages in
1886 were exactly the same as they were in 1858, even though the price of
maize, under the land pressure from commercial export expansion, had
increased more than three times (Consul Duke, June 10, 1886, and L?pez,
1858) Moreover, toward the end of the century Salvadoran peasants paid a
sales tax of more than 120 percent on the imported cotton shirts (Consul
Duke, March 17, 1882) that had replaced local textiles (Menjivar, 1980:
28-29).
Second, the disparity in political as well as economic power between the
elite coffee merchants and growers and the coffee pickers further illustrates
the pressure placed on the livelihood of the poor majority. The geographer
and historian David Browning baldly asserts that "land came to be viewed
as the estate of the coffee and the state was "a coffee
planters" planters'
government" (Browning, 1971: 174). President Carlos Ezeta was ousted for
having had the temerity to levy a 5 percent tax on coffee exports. He also
fell into disfavor among the coffee elite for trying tomaintain a living wage
for coffee workers by decree (Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 177; see also White,
1973: 87, 89, and 92).
A third development near the end of the century was the passage of the lib
eral reforms of the 1880s. While these reforms were not always enforced in
the first two decades of their passage (see Lauria-Santiago, 1999: Chap. 7),
they ultimately eliminated common lands, making them available to market
forces. Liberalism was embraced in the name of individual freedom and
ideals. As global market forces increased in strength, an agro-export
republican
oligarchy used the liberalism of the market to dispossess the majority of

peasants. As Flores Macal observes, "The lands [the coffee planters] wanted
were not the lands at low elevations near the sea, where many and
indigo
cereal haciendas were [but] the lands of the State, themunicipalities' [ejidos]
and the indigenous communities' land" (1983: 60). Because coffee grows best
at higher elevations, these lands were primarily in the western and central
highlands, the most densely populated region of the country.
Land registry figures on the distribution of land in the western coffee
growing provinces of El Salvador from the period of 1882-1885 underscore
the distorted, dependent model of development that the open market fos
tered. The distribution of common land is particularly telling. Approximately
three-fourths of all this land now pertained to plantations of greater than
100 hectares (see Tables 24 and 25 in Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 149-150). One
estimate indicates that with the enactment of the liberal reforms the wealth
iest coffee barons were able to acquire another 25 percent of the nation's
land (Browning, 1971: 190; for a more conservative estimate see Lindo
Fuentes, 1990: 130), most of it ranging across the upland towns and settle
ments of Indians and ladino peasants.
the most decisive set of factors in the coffee encroach

Perhaps planters'
ment onto the lands of subsistence cultivators was in trans
improvements
portation and communication. While the indigo planters of the previous two
centuries had also used their access to the world market to encroach on the
lands of subsistence farmers, they could not match the coffee planters'
modern technical and financial advantages. Browning (1971: 166) explains:
In contrast [to indigo], commercial coffee farming, introduced rapidly and on

a large scale, made immediate and pressing demands on the existing pattern
of land use and ownership. Large-scale production and bulk transport were
made possible by access to large markets and by the construction of roads,
railways, local ports, and the introduction of regular steamship service.
Thus, by the late nineteenth century, with the development of railroad and
El Salvador had overcome its natural dis
steamship transportation, largely
of absence of a Caribbean coast and distance from the world
advantages
commercial markets. Its connection to the world economy had now over
whelmed the natural constraints that held back modern capitalist develop
ment throughout the country. Linkages between foreign and domestic capital
were investments in banking, railroads, and
strengthened through mining,
minting (see Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 159-175), as well as through the credit

for the harvest, processing, sale, and transportation of the valuable coffee
production.
Despite occasional efforts to diversify in the nineteenth century, El

Salvador was, at the end of the century, a economy,
virtually single-export
with all the financial and economic problems that attend monoculture
dependency (see Flores Macal, 1983: 56-58, for a list of crops introduced
as as the 1830s). Five-sevenths of its total export came from
early earnings
one crop: coffee (Flores Macal, 1983: 70). By the 1920s, coffee's annual
share of total export earnings had risen to more than 90 percent
(Montgomery, 1995: 32). Over the course of the twentieth century the land
devoted to coffee production continued to rise, from 70,000 hectares in
1919 to 139,000 hectares in 1961, the latter figure representing 87 percent
of the total land under cultivation in El Salvador at the time (Brannon,
n.d.: 22-24, cited in Montgomery, 1995: 32; Colindres, 1977: 72). The
Salvadoran state and were the coffee elite.
society profoundly shaped by
Using the rhetoric of free markets, modernity, and republicanism, the cof
fee planters organized police forces and judicial processes to regiment the
rural population into a compliant workforce (Montgomery, 1995: 30;
Cardoso and P?rez, 1983: 231).3 The national army, which had been mod
ernized in the 1860s, was also apparently used to guarantee disciplined
coffee workers under a legislative decree dated March 17, 1881.
Lauria-Santiago's research (1999: 174-175) describes a Salvadoran

national state often intervening on behalf of peasants in their struggle for
land. For a few decades in the late nineteenth century the state apparently
protected segments of the rural poor against market forces. The rapidly
on markets for coffee, however, concentrated
growing dependence foreign
control of the valuable coffee crop in several families with profitable diver
sified investments, including milling, processing, and transportation facili
ties and the access to capital, equipment, and markets (160-161).
But, at the same time that many scholars' research results confirm the
of the market to and many appear uncon

power shape reshape society,
cerned with the ideological and philosophical forces propelling the market.
The market is frequently considered neutral, a set of natural laws of supply
and demand. Such arguments often lose sight of the political course of
expanding global commerce because the long-term growth of global trade
seems inevitable. They do not adequately address the principle of the free
market, as if the economy were separate from the sphere of politics in
which power is brokered and social policy is engineered. Lindo-Fuentes,
for example, admits that the coffee elite denied the Salvadoran masses the
opportunity for education, yet he insists that this was a political decision
without direct relevance to market forces (1990: 80). International com
merce is, however, itself a political force. Capitalist interests have implicit
as well as explicit values, and the explicit calculation of production and
market factors that determine coffee or workers' wages,
ostensibly prices
even state support for education, is an implicit political calculation.
At times, as in the late nineteenth century in El Salvador, the commer
cial forces of the market are not yet sufficiently developed to allow one
class or social sector to dominate the state and society. In such inchoate
and economic stages groups of peasants may exert

political organized
effective political influence at the local and even state level of governance.
As the connection to the global market matures, however, individuals and
social sectors with the greatest access to capital and markets acquire dis
tinct economic and political advantages. By the turn of the twentieth

century in El Salvador an elite connected to coffee exports had emerged,
and the machinery of state power protected its interests.
THE COFFEE REGIME
The massacre thousands of rebellious peasants in 1932 (see

of untold
Anderson, 1971: 174-175) constitutes the most dramatic and visible conse
quence of El Salvador's integration into the world economy. As overall world
trade grew to unprecedented levels, from an estimated $US7 billion in 1880

to $US69 billion in 1929 (Cardoso and P?rez, 1983: 189), coffee exports
brought both economic modernization and social deprivation to the Salvadoran
Modern financial instruments, methods, and trans
countryside. accounting
port facilities, for example, while contributing significantly to the commer

cial success of the coffee industry, just as clearly contributed to the increasing
regimentation, poverty, and repression of the rural populace. One could
argue, then, that the El Salvador of the early twentieth century was as mod
ern as its historical relationship to the expanding world markets of the North
Atlantic permitted, given the political constraints inherent in the free-market
model of national development that the coffee elite and the state pursued.
A central social feature of El Salvador's agro-export modernization
model was the legions of landless rural workers that migrated throughout
the in search of work on the estates. The increase
countryside large private
in population, which virtually tripled between 1878 and 1930 (Cardoso and
P?rez, 1983: 189), and the land dispossessions radically changed life in the
available a veritable army of and under
countryside, making unemployed
workers. Rural laborers were on the move,
employed continually seeking
work at one estate and then moving on to the next. Few found permanent
Peasants could no return to their communal lands after sea
jobs. longer
sonal work on the plantations as they had done throughout the indigo pro
duction regime and into the late nineteenth century. These rural migratory
work became a permanent element of modern agrarian El Salvador
patterns
(Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 156).
With the liberal reforms, the Salvadoran state soon became a power
ful managerial instrument in the hands of commercial interests. In El

Salvador's case, at least, the liberal state benefited directly from the growth
in international commerce that it vigorously promoted. In turn, it provided
both the justification and the coercive force necessary to dedicate far more
of the natural and human resources at rates to foreign
country's cheaper
markets than was possible before this period. In this sense the liberal state
may be seen as a part of the commercial infrastructure needed to expand
At some however, as the world

export production. point, happened during
wide depression after 1929, the Salvadoran liberal state could no longer
effectively manage the social conflict inherent in the agro-export model.
The economic disparity among the social classes had become politically
unsustainable (Flores Macal, 1983: 60 and 71; Lindo-Fuentes, 1990:
156-157; White, 1973: 92). Class organizing and antagonism reached crit
ical levels, challenging the legitimacy of the liberal state (White, 1973:
96-97; Dalton, 1982). Dispatching police or promising populist reforms
could not placate the restive and increasingly militant populace.
The coffee elite itself became more reactionary and socially rigid and
exclusive in the 1920s. Lindo-Fuentes, Eduardo Colindres's sur
examining
vey of the Salvadoran elite, concludes that between 1880 and 1920 the
Salvadoran elite consolidated itself, giving birth to the mythical "fourteen
families" (1990: 184). Colindres's (1977) study, identifying 63 of the rich
est families in El Salvador, indicates that the vigorous commercial expan
sion of coffee exports had, by 1920, firmly established an oligarchy of
agricultural, industrial, and banking interests that persisted over time.4 In
1929, as the national and international crisis deepened and popular
demands for governmental reform expanded (Anderson, 1971: 45), the cof
fee planters formed the Society for the Defense of Coffee (later called the
Asociaci?n de Cafetalera de El Salvador), apparently out of concern that
the government could no longer adequately protect their interests. White
(1973: 97) reports that with this association "the planter elite could more or
less autonomously control the production and marketing of coffee without
interference from the government and, after 1932, from the military."
Theliberal state had become largely a fiction in any case. It was princi
pally dependent on the revenues the coffee exports permitted. When the inter
national weakened coffee and rural workers' wages were
depression prices
cut in half, raising the discontent and militancy of the coffee workers to crit
ical levels, the government did little to avoid the coming catastrophe (White,
1973: 99). A popularly elected president, Arturo Araujo, presided over very
little reform as the persecution and torture of radical leaders and the killing
of university students continued. The repression climaxed in a state of siege
in July 1931 (Montgomery, 1982: 49; Dalton, 1982: 218-281). White (1973:
98) contends thatAraujo was not "a traitor to his class" and thatmembers of
the oligarchy checked any reform he might have introduced by blocking
administrative appointments. As the earnings of coffee pickers fell below the
subsistence level (Montgomery, 1995: 30), Araujo was overthrown by amil
itary coup inDecember. His vice-president, General Maximiliano Hern?ndez
Mart?nez, was installed as the new president. The new
military government
wasted little time weighing in against popular organizing, especially in the
countryside. In January 1932 there were violent confrontations between gov
ernment forces and peasants and workers (Anderson, 1971: Chap. 6). Then,
a before the insurrection the peasants and workers, a state
just day planned by
of siege
was declared in the western coffee region and martial law was
imposed on the rest of the nation (Anderson, 1971: 129).

With the rural uprising in 1932, the social conflict driven by the agro
export model of development reached a tragic watershed. By the late 1920s,
the noninterventionist pretensions of the liberal state were being directly
challenged by the masses' demand that the state act in the interest of the
least privileged. With the subsequent massacre it became obvious that the
military could not retreat from center stage. From 1932 onward, the fear of
communism or of labeled "communist" became a central tenet of a
being
pragmatic national security policy that enabled the military and its conser
vative supporters to renew repression, fix elections, and reassert their dom
inance whenever their interests were threatened.
Though the oligarchy stood silent as the military brutally crushed the
rural rebellion, it does not appear that the coffee elite entrusted its national
economic policy to the new military dictatorship. In the governing rela
tionship that emerged between the military and the coffee oligarchy, key
positions in the economy were occupied by the civilian ruling elite, and cof
fee did not come under control of theMinistry of Agriculture at all (White,
1973: 103). Private producer organizations, first the Asociaci?n Cafetalera
de El Salvador (Salvadoran Coffee Growers Association), and later its suc
cessor, Compa??a Salvadore?a de Caf? (Salvadoran Coffee Company),
founded in 1942, continued to manage coffee production at the national
level. Though the oligarchy may have relinquished the presidency and a
number of other positions in the government in order tomaintain its power
and privileges, itmade sure that coffee, the economic bulwark of the status
quo, remained firmly in its own hands.
The geopolitics of the 1932 rebellion and massacre may also illustrate
the significance of the between resources and world
relationship agrarian
markets. It is revealing that the rebellion took place in the western coffee
zone, where coffee had been so that there was
growing extensively planted
reportedly no space left for subsistence agriculture (see Browning, 1971).
In contrast, there was no rebellion in the eastern zone (east
coffee-growing
of Lake Ilopango), where land concentration and dispossession were less
advanced. one may argue that there was a greater concentration
Although
of workers in the western zone and therefore was easier, the
organizing
presence of numerous landless workers there is in itself related to the
region's into the world economy. Furthermore, there were areas
integration
in the western zone where no rebellion took These were
place. exceptions
apparently communities in which resident landowners attempted to miti
gate the impact of declining coffee prices on their workers (White, 1973:
101). Thus, in the region where coffee was most intensive and
production
integrated into the world market and, more important, in the very commu
nities where international market forces were not blunted or diminished by

the benevolence of the large coffee growers, global market relations wors
ened both the immediate and long-term prospects of rural workers and
peasants and precipitated the rebellion to which the military so brutally
responded. The combination of the deteriorating standard of living and the
to it seems to have so radicalized social

military's response agrarian
relations that became state policy.
repression
Giventhe discrepancy in firepower between the insurrectionists and the
army (Dalton, 1982: 249) and the savagery with which the militarized state
often attacked peasants and workers throughout the subsequent
organizing
decades of the twentieth century, it is little wonder that organized opposi
status was silenced. The
tion to the quo by workers and peasants repression,
of course, did nothing to ameliorate the inequity in society; it only wors
ened it. The inchoate but hated Communist party was liquidated, and peas
ant organizations were banned. Labor unions were as
officially discouraged
"communist." Even Indian (traditional fraternal societies) came
cofrad?as
under similar pressures and declined in number (Wilson, 1968: 258). Thus
General Martinez and the military became the guardians of the oligarchic
state, a central role in the administration of national policy.
assuming
Despite the massive bloodshed and political repression of peasants and

workers, the United States found a way of supporting Martinez. In
December 1931 U.S. Ambassador Charles Boyd Curtiss became involved
in the political machinations aimed at overthrowing the democratically
elected government of Arturo Araujo, directly encouraging the military
coup (Anderson, 1971: 84). At first adamant about nonrecognition of a dic
tatorship, the United States quickly abandoned that position. In neighbor
U.S. marines were to contain a fierce nationalist
ing Nicaragua trying
resistance movement. The United States and the Salvadoran elite feared just
such a nationalist movement in El Salvador. Indeed, the slaughter of rebel
lious peasants crystallized the oligarchy's respect for Martinez, and the
United States began to see the merits of a regime that restored order
(LaFeber, 1984: 74).
Anderson concludes (1971: 195) that the Martinez regime "could not
have endured without U.S. recognition." Because of its rhetorical adherence
to the 1923 Treaty of Peace and Amity, which forbade support of military
coups in Central America, the United States granted the new military gov
ernment only informal recognition (Grieb, 1971: 151-172). For formal
recognition, the appearance of legitimacy of the new military government
was required (Anderson, 1971: 86). Eventually, U.S. insistence on this gave
way to its desire for stability and order (LaFeber, 1984: 74), and the
Martinez government was formally recognized in 1934.
Throughout his tenure as president, Martinez suppressed any political
activity by advocates of structural reform. He founded an official governing
party, Pro-Patria, and intimidated or banned all other political organizations.
He nationwide espionage and intelligence operations, exercised
organized
strict control of the press, and injected military politics into state-sponsored
schools (Flores Macal, 1983: 78-79). White reports that "there were a number
of violations of university an extreme measure in Latin America"
autonomy,
(1973: 101), and when university students rose against Martinez near the end
of his government the uprising was "drowned in blood" (Anderson, 1971:
197). Under Martinez's citizens became a pop
dictatorship ordinary "captive"
ulation, required to carry the official political party card (c?dula patri?tica) to
avoid being suspected of being communist (Flores Macal, 1983: 79).
The new seems to have instituted terror and violence as a
military regime
matter of public policy and ameans of social control. The agrarian law of 1941
gave landowners the right to obtain a judgment against any worker simply by
the worker as a vagrant who refused to accept the conditions of
denouncing
plantation work (Flores Macal, 1983: 79). The dictatorship forcibly recruited
the country to work on the coffee
peasants throughout plantations, instructing
governors in the eastern to organize and dispatch workers in their
departments
jurisdiction to work in the western regions depopulated by the 1932 massacre.

When plantation workers complained about the low wages, lack of pay, or
other onerous conditions, themilitary government had little difficulty deciding
what to do: "There were, it is said, further killings of large numbers of rural
workers in the years following the revolt" (White, 1973: 114 n.).
PEASANTS AND THE GLOBAL MARKET
Between 1932 and 1972, demographic, economic, and political develop

ments in El Salvador were linked, directly or indirectly, to the struggle over
land, and the struggle over land seems to have been causally linked to the
advance of commercial crops. World market prices for agricultural exports,
principally coffee, probably influenced the degree of reform or repression

applied. Lower prices generally meant economic decline accompanied by
political and military repression. Higher prices afforded greater political
space to previously repressed sectors and to the fledgling middle class
(White, 1973: 95-97). Browning's research essentially confirms that com
mercial has encroached on the lands of peasant cultivators
export agriculture
since colonial times and that by the 1950s there was virtually no region in
the country that the private, commercial estate had not pen
export-oriented
etrated (1971: 248). He points to evidence in the 1950s of the potential for
widespread violence in the competition for land between commercial and
subsistence cultivators: "Whatever its size, any property in El Salvador must
be patrolled regularly if it is to be kept free from squatter settlement" (259).
Under these circumstances, with no serious effort at land reform on the
political agenda, one can perhaps see why the military became the primary
actor in Salvadoran politics. In the 1960s, with food imports rising dramat
ically to compensate for declining subsistence production (Browning,
1971: 301) while high coffee prices and industrialization fostered a greater
integration of Salvadoran and foreign capital, U.S. strategic interests in
stemming social revolution coincided with the Salvadoran military's need

to play a broader role inmaintaining domestic social order. Thus the United
States contributed technical expertise, and to
training, equipment, financing
the repression of peasants in the name of counterinsurgency in the cold war
against communism (see LaFeber, 1984: 172-176).

findings demonstrate that the Salvadoran a grow
Browning's peasantry,
ing population with very limited legal access to land, was a destabilizing
element of the agrarian social order?a manifest source of violent, if not
revolutionary, upheaval. His research demonstrates that one

convincingly
consequence of the success of Salvadoran export has been to
agriculture
force dispossessed peasants to settle and claim land "regardless of whether
this contradicted any law" (1971: 298). With one of the world's highest
population growth rates (2.8 percent annually between 1950 and 1961 and
more than 3 percent in the 1960s) (250), the peasantry's "illicit" land acqui
sitions reached acute Indeed, concludes that peasant
proportions. Browning
land takeovers by the early 1960s had on balance reversed the historical
tendency of subsistence agriculture to lose ground to commercial encroach
ment: "The available evidence suggests that the effect of a spiraling popu
lation increase has been to increase the competition for land between the
private estate and the subsistence cultivator at the expense of the former"
(265).
In retrospect, Browning establishes beyond doubt the importance of con
sidering natural population increase in explaining the social breakdown and
conflict that emerged in El Salvador in the 1970s. Increased population
pressure on land certainly exacerbated the social relations between the
agrarian classes and accelerated the rate at which various groups would
form and collide over land disputes. But Browning, in contrast to other
scholars (e.g., James, 1964: 679-680; Anderson, 1971: 203), points to a
more complex understanding of historical change (1971: 257): "It is wrong
to suggest that the essence of the may be as an
problem expressed only
between a amount of land and an number of
equation given increasing
people. It is not simply a matter of a growing number of human beings
seeking a limited amount of land, but rather of an accelerating demand for
land, which is taking place within a context of differing ideas about the
nature of land use and ownership."
Bulmer-Thomas (1987: 275) offers a guarded but optimistic view of the
agro-export model of development. While he acknowledges that the region
had remained on and external market conditions"

"overdependent exports
into the 1980s, he suggests that the export-led development model will
eventually lead "to growth and diversification of the non-export economy."
Interestingly, he also suggests that, largely because of the intransigence of
the traditional agrarian elite, this economic transition has not occurred. The
Central American Common Market (CACM), an institution created in 1961
to foster an to pro
regional integration, ostensibly presented opportunity
mote industrialization and economic diversification in general. While
Bulmer-Thomas sees this effort, in part at least, as a model," too
"hybrid
heavily dependent on
the capital generated by traditional agricultural
exports, his explanation of why the model failed (185) is telling: "Such a
model, if successfully executed, would have ended the economic, social
and political dominance of the landowning oligarchy linked to EXA [agri
cultural exports]. The model was therefore ruled out as politically unrealis
tic by those who shaped the CACM; instead, the CACM was to be grafted
onto the traditional export-led model without challenging the hegemony of
the export agriculturalists."
Bulmer-Thomas's analysis, in general, confirms that the traditional agrar
ian elite has used its linkages to the international economy to distort and
stultify the development of other sectors of the economy. It seems to pursue
this obstructionist course at least until it discovers economic in
advantages
other investments as it did, for example, in the industrialization associated
with the CACM. Bulmer-Thomas did not think that El Salvador in 1987 had
reached the point at which the nonexport economy would a "busi
acquire
ness cycle independent of external conditions" (1987: 185) as had happened
elsewhere in Latin America (in Brazil and Argentina) prior to 1929. The
CACM's industrializing effect in El Salvador, for example, "increased rather
than decreased the dependence of the economy on the external sector in gen
eral and EXA [agricultural exports] in particular" (196).
That industrialization in general and the CACM in particular did little to
relieve the growing unemployment, the vast poverty, and the grossly uneven
distribution of national resources is reinforced every source that consid
by
ers the issue. Flores Macal, for even contends that industrializa
example,
tion could not effectively absorb the peasants and workers that were being
displaced by investment in technology, calculating that underutilization of
the workforce actually increased between 1961 and 1971 (Flores Macal,
1983: 90-91; White, 1973: 227-228). Abandoning import substitution and
the overall "developmentalist" approach of the 1950s,5 El Salvador
embarked on a more to eco
directly "integrationist" strategy?an approach
nomic development that favored foreign investment to boost industrializa
tion and continued to promote agricultural diversification in the export
sector. Unfortunately, the subsequent industrialization seems to have pro

vided too few jobs for the growing numbers of dispossessed peasants and
the Indeed, and were so
unemployed. unemployment underemployment
extreme in the 1950s and 1960s that El Salvador actually exported 300,000
workers to neighboring Honduras. Some scholars even reasoned, contrary
to the more generally accepted view, that El Salvador's main objective in
participating in the CACM was to be able to export its landless peasants and
workers to its neighbors (Webre, 1979: 113). A significant number of
Salvadoran peasants did migrate to Honduras looking for land, and when,
in 1969, war with Honduras broke out over the forced return of these immi
grants, the CACM collapsed and economic conditions in El Salvador pre
dictably worsened. Per capita income dropped 2.5 percent each year
between 1970 and 1974 (LaFeber, 1984: 243). The country was wracked by
60 percent annual inflation in 1973 and 1974 (245). Meanwhile, an esti
mated 40 percent or more of the Salvadoran labor force had no access to
land (Bulmer-Thomas, 1987: 207).
The power differential between the large oligarchic landowners and the
peasants (based on the former's control of the most productive lands and
most likely reinforced by the oligarchy's access to the capital, markets, and
technology of the world economy) seems to have enabled the large
landowners to take of to extend their control over
advantage opportunities
the rural workforce. For example, the planter class subverted the spirit of
the 1965 agricultural minimum wage law, theoretically instituted to elimi

nate the vestiges of a feudal agrarian production system and bring a higher
standard of living to rural workers. Here the progress of social legislation
actually hurt the peasants because of their dependence on traditional
arrangements. Williams (1986: 59) explains how the logic of capitalist rela
tions swiftly eclipsed the traditional practice of allowing permanent work
ers to reside on the hacienda:
In the 1960s permanent residents [colonos] were expelled from the estates in
droves. The trigger mechanism for the expulsion of "colonos" in El Salvador
was the passage of a law in 1965 that extended the minimum wage to per
manent agricultural workers. The underlying pressure to expel the "colonos"
was already present, but after the minimum wage law was passed, the reten
tion of unskilled workers on the land even more absurd from the
appeared
perspective of growers. Why should a grower be expected to continue to pro
vide subsistence parcels, housing, and weekly rations to "colonos" when the
same money wage held for day laborers?
Major multilateral and bilateral banks and lending agencies also pro
moted the agro-export model of development in El Salvador and Central
America. The World Bank, the Central American Bank for Economic
Integration, and the IADB all promoted the development of rural roads and
highways to expand export production (Williams, 1986: 93 and 222-223 n.
27). Loans to cattle ranchers from the IADB, for example, incorporated still
more land into the world markets and evicted still more peasants. Apparently
without concern for the social and economic impact of beef export produc
tion on subsistence cultivators, the Alliance for Progress began promoting
beef exports in 1961 (77). Despite international support for state-sponsored
industrialization and agricultural diversification over the previous 25 years,
in the 1970s El Salvador still depended on three crops (coffee, cotton, and
sugar) for nearly 60 percent of its export earnings. Moreover, coffee contin
ued to dominate, accounting for 42.5 percent of the total value of Salvadoran
exports during the 1970-1974 period (IADB, 1980: 45). Capital investment
in industrial development was also heavily controlled by the coffee-growing
families and others of the traditional agrarian elite. In 1979, for example, the
agrarian elite controlled 84.5 percent of the capital investment in the nation's
industries (Montgomery, 1995: 69).
At the same time, the historical evidence from a vast of sources
array
indicates that the conditions of the international market marginalized
Salvadoran peasants, making many of them poorer and Even
hungrier.
Browning's finding that peasant land takeovers on estates increased
private
in the period 1950-1961 does not refute this conclusion, especially given
that these lands were unused, lands and that the total
largely marginal pro
duction of staple foods fell during the same period (see Browning, 1971:
267-269 and 301; see alsoWhite, 1973: 129).6Durham's (1979) work on the
ecological origins of the 1969 war with Honduras and Williams's (1986)
study of the impact of export agriculture in the region superbly demonstrate
the logic of the international marketplace in El Salvador's agrarian society,
showing precisely how the agrarian elite maximized itsmarket positions and
profits at the expense of the peasants and the natural fertility of the soil.
Williams, moreover, identifies private agro-export as the
enterprise pri
mary agent propelling Salvadoran
agrarian society toward civil strife and
determining the economic, political, and military policies of theUnited States
toward El Salvador (1986: 3). He documents how U.S. policy and domestic
and foreign private enterprise worked hand in hand to promote agricultural
exports at the expense of subsistence and the rural The
agriculture population.
United States gave training in counterinsurgency to the Salvadoran military
and the paramilitary Organizaci?n Democr?tica Nationalista (National
Democratic Organization?ORDEN), which intimidated, terrorized, and
assassinated peasants, workers, and others who helped them (White,
organize
1973: 207; see also Nairn, 1984: 21).
The repression that the United States's military assistance helped facili
tate not only terrorized the rural population but also radicalized the incipient
and worker movements (see Lernoux, 1980: 61-80). At the same
peasant
time, land reform had become an important issue in the 1972 presidential
elections (see Montgomery, 1995: 54;Webre, 1979: 128-129); the failure of
the model of development was clear to more Salvadorans than
agro-export
ever before. By 1971, ten years after theAlliance for Progress had promised
democracy and prosperity, the number of landless families had tripled
(Karush, 1978, cited in LaFeber, 1984: 243). Land reform split the official
state party, the Partido de Conciliaci?n Nacional (National Conciliation
Party?PCN), between the military-led center of the party, which supported
mild agrarian reforms "without demagoguery" {Prensa Gr?fica, September
30 and October 15, 1971), and the traditional agrarian elite on the right,
which spurned the notion.
Conservatives among the agrarian elite had been deserting the PCN
since the founding of the Partido Popular Salvadore?o (Salvadoran Popular
Party?PPS) in 1967 (Webre, 1979: 93). In the intervening years they had
become increasingly suspicious and critical of the S?nchez Hern?ndez gov
ernment. With the passage of the 1970 irrigation and drainage law, a mea
sure that many in the landed oligarchy regarded as an infringement on
private property rights and the first step toward progressive agrarian reform
(Webre, 1979: 144-145), an irreparable split occurred within the ruling
elite. The military-led government hoped that by establishing irrigation dis
tricts it could improve production, including food production, on poorly
exploited land through encouraging more private and state investment in
these districts. It also hoped that the irrigation program would provide more
employment and stem the tide of migration into the cities. Although the
of the law was timid, conservative landown
government's implementation
ers kept up their jeremiads, warning in 1971 that an Assembly plan to legal
ize peasant unions would lead to "absolute anarchy" (Asociaci?n de
Ganaderos de El Salvador, 1971), a thinly veiled allusion to the massacre
of 1932. The conservative split with the S?nchez Hern?ndez government
over reform and other issues became so serious that in 1971 sig
agrarian
nificant elements of the agrarian elite formed another political party, the
Frente Unido Democr?tico Independiente (United Democratic Independent
Front?FUDI) and selected the former ORDEN and National Guard com
mander General Jos? Alberto Medrano as its candidate for the 1972 elec
tions (Mayorga Quiros, 1972: 71-100).
With the breakdown of the military-oligarchy alliance a new stage in
Salvadoran civic and social relations had been reached. In 1971 three left
of-center opposition parties, led by the Christian Democratic Party, formed
the Uni?n Nacional Opositora (National Opposition Union?UNO) to

exploit the weakness of the ruling PCN. The new coalition called for estab
lishing legal limitations on the size of landholdings. Though its land reform
proposal was conservative, it still challenged the military government and
alarmed the traditional agrarian elite. The 1972 elections turned violent and
were aborted when martial law was imposed (Webre, 1979). The regular
election fa?ade established 40 years earlier by the military-oligarchy
alliance crumbled. The agro-export model, having progressively circum
scribed the of the rural masses as more and more

opportunities agrarian
resources became devoted to production for the global markets, were in full
crisis. Two decades of civil war would follow.
CONCLUSION
Historically, capitalist export agriculture has generated periodic social

crises in El Salvador. Liberal theory of the economy and polity seems to have
advanced the interests of an agrarian elite over the interests of the populace in
general. At the beginning of the twentieth century, themodern state, its juridi
cal system, and its modernizing military and police forces were designed to
regiment society behind agro-export production. In the course of the past two
centuries, revolutionary improvements in transportation and telecommunica
tions increased the potential profitability of commercial agriculture, princi

pally coffee. Concomitantly, traditional restraints on land and production were
dissolved by the state and enforced by police and military coercion. Thus "the
political economy systematically starved the poor" (LaFeber, 1984: 243).
In 1932, in the midst of a global economic depression, state military
forces attacked a loosely organized peasantry in themost highly capitalized
zone in the nation. In subsequent decades, as export crop pro
agricultural
duction intensified and diversified somewhat and as population increased,
access to land and food remained problems. At the same time, the military
held the reins of state power, conceding small reforms when coffee prices
were high and applying armed repression whenever it needed to protect
coffee lands. As the population increased and land remained concentrated
in the hands of a relative few, rural and
unemployment, underemployment,
landlessness challenged the traditional polity. As Browning remarks, "Since
the 1930's the appearance of new conditions has caused doubt to be
expressed about the advisability, or indeed the possibility, of adhering
exclusively to an agrarian system that is motivated solely by the pursuit of
commercial from cash crops on for exter
gain produced private plantations
nal markets" (1971: 225).
Thus the commercial producers, processors, and their agents incorporated

more and more resources into the expanding global markets and thus
agrarian
undermined traditional communities and their practices. These agro-export
interests have been the main protagonists in this global drama. They have
molded the character of the Salvadoran state and society more than any other
group, and they did so precisely because of the advantage they gained by pro
commercial crops for markets. Their business acumen in the
ducing export
free market structured social relations, certain forms of resource
legitimizing
exploitation (rent, interest, profits) and outlawing others (squatting, commu

nal holding, untitled occupation). Under the regime of the global market cer
tain forms of competition (for wages and jobs) were fostered and certain
forms of (unionism, mass (see Thompson,
cooperation organizing) repressed
2000: 22-23).
El Salvador's history clearly demonstrates that integration into the
economy is not a force?that its social conse
global always progressive
quences, if left unattended, are and materially unsustainable. With
morally
a few notable such as the 1980s civil war, peasants have histor
exceptions
ically played a secondary role, largely forced to react to the changes driven
economic resisted, rebelled, and ran away, and
by global integration. They
sometimes they acquiesced. Most often, they struggled daily for enough
food to survive while providing the labor that sustained the agrarian elite
and its state When rebelled?when were bold or des
power. peasants they
to pursue another form of production and were
perate enough society?they
often mercilessly crushed.
The history of this small nation also demonstrates the importance of the
state in integrating the nation's resources into world markets. The Salvadoran
state seems to have been, over time, the
systematically arrayed against
Salvadoran With the first viable crop the eco
populace. commercially
nomic base of indigenous Salvadoran culture?communal landholding and
the culture itself came under almost continu

production?and indigenous
ous pressure and, at times, assault. El Salvador's modern national
outright
state has never wavered in its support of commercial agriculture. The result
has been a national There have been moments when

protracted tragedy.
workers, intellectuals, and even peasants the dominance of the
challenged
elite. There have even been moments when pressure won
agrarian popular
concessions and the state defended peasants (see Lauria-Santiago, 1999).
However, over the centuries, the of Salvadoran

progressive integration
resources into the world markets appears to have done little to improve the
lives of most Salvadorans.
There are, however, no immutable schemes in history. Lauria
grand,
Santiago (1979) illustrates this point. His research shows that in the late
Ripton / EXPORTAGRICULTUREAND AGRARIANCRISIS 129
nineteenth century the state assisted many peasants in their efforts to retain
their lands and participate in commercial agriculture. Thus, with sufficient pop
ular pressure or resistance to an unjust or of it is
pattern system relationships,
possible to alter the course its development?to
of its destructive ten
mitigate
dencies and to amplify its constructive ones. Indeed, virtually every peasant
rebellion against the agro-export regime has attempted to accomplish exactly
these ends. Unchecked or unmodified, though, as is evidenced throughout the
formerly colonized regions of the world, the pernicious structural inequities of
the global economy generate and intensify its periodic social crises.
In the decades since the presidential election of 1972, Salvadorans have
experienced a brutal civil war, the most violent in its history, that claimed
75,000 lives. Just as the liberal state was discredited in 1932, the legitimacy
of military-led governance was eventually rejected. The 1992 UN-brokered
peace agreement substantially reduced the military and generally prohib
ited it from playing an internal security role (U.S. Department of State,
2000: 8). Other significant changes also emerged. In the years of the civil
war (1979-1992) and the peace agreement, for example, more than 22 per
cent of total farmland was transferred to landless affect
peasants, perhaps
ing 25 percent of the rural poor (13). This was potentially an important
opportunity to redistribute wealth and invigorate the lives of poor rural
Indeed, a recent of that poverty
people. study agrarian production suggests
and lack of education continue to be tied to landlessness?in other words,
to a history of unchecked commercial production?and that the poor who
have received land have been more successful in navigating the vagaries of
the market economy and the weather. A more equitable distribution of land
and other agrarian resources would significantly improve the lives of
Salvadorans (see Conning, Olinto, and Trigueros 2001). Equitable distribu
tion of land and wealth has yet to be adequately addressed, and its promise
of improved rural livelihoods has been neglected.
Of course, low wages, subsidized imports, and tepid state support of
agrarian reform have further fueled spiraling unemployment and migration
in the past two decades. At the same time, the emigration of millions of
Salvadorans belies the "successes" of this land redistribution, suggesting
that, at least for the neoliberalism continues to labor
peasantry, integrate
and lives into a perilous global market. Currency devaluation, increases in
the value-added tax, and price hikes in public services frustrate efforts to
improve the livelihood of rural people and seem to have reduced the poten
tial positive effect of national economic growth (U.S. Department of State,
2000: 10).While coffee remains an important agricultural export, it is now
exceeded in value by remittances and exports from the maquiladora indus
try. And poverty remains endemic in the countryside.

While neoliberal policies in El Salvador have supplanted the agro-export

model, it is not clear that the new regime is any less dependent on agrarian
resources than earlier ones. Instead of or coffee, El
exporting indigo
Salvador now its peasantry. This appears to be a direct
exports migration
result of an agro-export model of Moreover, flow of
development. today's
remittances masks the injustice and broad failings of free trade in El
Salvador's case. The profound social costs inherent inmigration driven by
poverty are to show up in the increases of terror, crime, and inse
beginning
curity broadly experienced in communities
(Popkin, across the country
2003: 352; Marshall, 2004).7
El Salvador enters the twenty-first century still reeling from the effects of
virtually unregulated agro-export production. Remittances from Salvadorans
who have emigrated obscure the social cost of this strategy. And, with the
liberalizing economic policies since 1992, it seems that the masses of
Salvadorans?poor urban and rural working people alike?are primarily
shouldering the dual burden of civil-war costs and the structural adjustment
demanded by the international financial and economic community.
The relationship between the rural poor and the private and public forces
of globalization is a critical one. With the liberalization of trade and invest
ment in the global economy, coupled with today's stunning advances in
telecommunications and information technology, massive migration from
the countryside to the cities in search of employment is very likely to con

tinue. At the same time, the international migration of labor from former
colonized areas to more developed economies will not only threaten the
jobs of many in the developed nations but also most likely become a desta
bilizing phenomenon internationally. If the essential human cost of inte
grating rural resources into global markets is not calculated and redressed,
it is difficult to see how the evolution of capitalist-driven globalization can
be socially progressive and peaceful.
NOTES
1. The FMLN was established in the early 1980s to provide a unified front and concerted
challenge to the Salvadoran government and its military forces. Joaqu?n Villalobos of the
Ej?rcito Revolucionario Popular (Popular Revolutionary Army?ERP) was one of the leaders
of the FMLN coalition. In 1994, after the elections were lost, Villalobos and his followers left
the FMLN political party and formed the Partido Democr?tico (Democratic Party?PD), which
subsequently supported the ARENA neoliberal agenda (see Guido B?jar, 1994: 24?32).
2. In 1828 the London price for a pound of indigo was 10s.4d; in 1832 it was 5s.5d.
3. The Rural Police and Mounted Police, established by decrees (1884 and 1889, respec
tively) in the western part of the country in response to rebellions, were institutionalized
throughout the country in 1895. A system of village "agricultural judges" was established to
round up day laborers and ensure that they fulfilled their work obligations.
4. Though Colindres's findings have been hotly debated, they provide the most complete
basis for interpreting the origins of the wealthiest Salvadoran families. Among the 63 families
on his list, 21 were traditional Salvadoran elite of the nineteenth century, about half having
established their fortunes prior to the coffee boom, while 38 were families of immigrants, vir
tually all having established themselves during the coffee expansion, and 4 had accumulated
their wealth during the 1950s.
5. In the 1950s, in response to suggestions such as that of the economist Ra?l Prebisch that
the transfer of technology and the possibility of industrial development in poor nations would
be less under the hegemony of the United States than it had been
under the hegemony
of Europe, some poor nations tried to industrialize and expand their domestic consumer base
by investing in manufacturing for domestic markets. The nations that pursued this strategy
focused on manufacturing some of the products they had previously imported from more
industrialized countries.
Theoretically, if the subsequent industrial development used the
nation's own raw materials
itwould allow the poor nation further advantages. This import-sub
stitution strategy acquired a nationalistic character and was often accompanied by restrictions
on foreign investment. Political and business interests in the United States were concerned that
the nationalistic barriers to foreign investment obstructed free trade.
6. Browning (1971: 247) reports that between 1952 and 1962 El Salvador's food imports
doubled. Cotton was expanding in the coastal areas during this period, replacing food crops.
The resultant demand for land pushed rents up 100 percent in some instances. White reports
that peasants "with no access to land for growing maize and other food crops now live with
out work on the margins of roads and in other pockets of public land, in straw huts, waiting
for the next cotton harvest" (1973: 129).
7. The cost of the civil war goes well beyond the estimated physical damage of US$2.2 bil
lion. The human suffering, the death and the crippling, both physical and psychological, and
the forced emigration of approximately 1million Salvadorans must be taken into account as
well, along with the loss in education and training. It seems perverse to assert, as the U.S. State
Department (2000) does, that remittances make up for the losses in education, training, and
even income?in effect, that civil war produces wealth and development via remittances by
emigrants who fled the terror.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Thomas
1971 Matanza: El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Andrade Eekhoff, Katharine
2005 "The untapped riches of remittances?" NACLA Report on the Americas, January/
February.
Asociaci?n de Ganaderos de El Salvador
1971 "A la Asamblea Legislativa sobre la sindicalizaci?n campesina.'1 Prensa Gr?fica,
June 16.
Bailey, John
1850 Central America: Describing Each of the States of Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador,
Nicaragua, and Costa Rica: Their Natural Features, Products, Population, and Remarkable
Capacity for Colonization. London: Trelawney Saunders.
Biekart, Kees
2001 "The double defeat of the revolutionary left in Central America," pp. 181-200 in
J. Demmers, (ed.), Miraculous Metamorphoses: The Neoliberalization of Latin American
Populism. London: Zed Books.
Browning, David
1971 El Salvador: Landscape and Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bulmer-Thomas, Victor
1987 The Political Economy of Central America since 1920. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Association)
2004 "Outrage in El Salvador after Assembly ratifies CAFTA." http://www.cispes.org.
Cardoso, Ciro F. S. and H?ctor P?rez Brignoli
1983 Centroamerica y la econom?a occidental (1520-1930). San Jos?: Editorial de la
Universidad de Costa Rica.
Colindres, Eduardo
1977 Fundamentos econ?micos de la burgues?a salvadore?a. San Salvador: UCA Editores.
Conning, Jonathan, Pedro Olinto, and Alvaro Trigueros

2001 Managing Economic Insecurity in El Salvador: The Role of Asset Ownership
and Labor Market Adjustments. Washington, DC: United States Agency for International
Development.
Consul Duke
1886 Despatches from United States Consuls in San Salvador, El Salvador, 1868-1906.
Washington, DC: National Archives.
Cort?s y Larras, Pedro
1958 Descripci?n geogr?fico-moral de la dioceses de Goathemala. Guatemala: Sociedad
de Geogr?fica e Historia de Guatemala.
Dalton, Roque
1982 Miguel Marmol. Willimantic, CN: Curbstone Press.
Dellios, Hugh
2005 "El Salvador lags despite trade winds: economic woes put Central America's near
ing pact in doubt." Chicago Tribune, March 24.

Durham, William
1979 Scarcity and Survival in Central America: The Ecological Origins of the Soccer War.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Flores Macal, Mario
1983 Origen, desarrollo y crisis de las formas de dominaci?n en El Salvador. San Jos?:
SECASA.
Grieb, Kenneth J.
1971 "The U.S. and the rise of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez." Journal of
Latin American Studies 3: 151-172.
Guido B?jar, Rafael
1994 "Crisis y renovaci?n en la izquierda salvadore?a." Espacios 2: 24-32.
Guti?rrez y Ulloa, Antonio
1962 Estado general de la provincia de San Salvador, Reyno de Guatemala (a?o de 1807).
San Salvador: Direcci?n de Publicaciones.
Hufstader, Chris
2005 "Rural development expert critical of free trade proposals." Oxfam America, http://
www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications/news_updates/archive2003/art6524.html.
IADB (Inter-American Development Bank)

1980 Economic and Social Progress in Latin America, 1979 Report. Washington, DC.
James, Preston E.
1964 Latin America. London.
LaFeber, Walter
1984 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W. W Norton.
Larde y Lar?n, Jorge
1957 El Salvador: Historia de sus pueblos, villas y ciudades. San Salvador: Departamento
Editorial.
Lauria-Santiago, Aldo A.
1999 An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Commu
nities in El Salvador, 1823-1914. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Lernoux, Penny
1980 Cry of the People. Garden City: Doubleday.
Lindo-Fuentes, H?ctor
1990 Weak Foundations: The Economy of El Salvador in the Nineteenth Century.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
L?pez, Lorenzo
1858 Estad?stica general de la Rep?blica del Salvador. San Salvador: Imprenta del
Gobierno.
MacLeod, Murdo J.
1973 Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Marshall, Claire
2004 "Combatting El Salvador's gangs." British Broadcasting Corporation. http://www
.news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/world/americas/3553529.htm.
Martinez, Mariana
2004 "The remittance lifeline." M.A. thesis, Florida International University.
Mayorga Quiros, Roman
1972 "Cr?tica de las ideolog?as econ?mico-sociales en la campa?a presidencial de El
Salvador." Estudios Centroamericanos 27: 71-100.
Menendez, Isidron
1855-1856 Recopilaci?n de las leyes de El Salvador en Centro-Am?rica. Vol. 1.
Guatemala: Imprenta de La Luna.
Menjivar, Rafael
1980 Acumulaci?n originaria y desarrollo del capitalismo en El Salvador. Costa Rica:
Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana.
Miyares, Ines M. et al.
2003 "The interrupted circle: Truncated transnationalism and the Salvadoran experience."
Journal of Latin American Geography 2(1): 74-86.
Montgomery, Tommie Sue
1982 Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution. Boulder: Westview Press.
1995 Revolution inEl Salvador: From Civil Strife to Civil Peace. Boulder: Westview Press.
Mulhall, Michael G.
1883 The Dictionary of Statistics. London: George Routledge and Sons.
MIF (Multilateral Investment Fund)
2005 Sending Money Fund: Remittances as a Development Tool in Latin America and the
Caribbean. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.
Nairn, Allan
1984 "Behind the death squads." The Progressive, May, 20-29.
Otis, Fesenden Nott
1861 Illustrated History of the Panama Railroad. New York: Harper.
P?rez Sainz, Juan Pablo
2000 "Labour market transformations in Latin America during the 90s: some analytical
remarks." Paper prepared for the Social Science Research Council Conference "Latin
American Labor a Decade after Reform," San Jos?.
Popkin, Eric
2003 "Transnational migration and development in postwar peripheral states: an exami
nation of Guatemalan and Salvadoran state linkages with their migrant populations in
Los Angeles." Current Sociology 51: 347-374.
Ratha, Dilip
2003 "Workers' remittances: an important and stable source of external development
finance." in Global Development Finance 2003. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Replogle, Jill
2004 "Hunger on the rise in Central America," The Lancet 363: 2056-2057.
Rep?blica de El Salvador
1860 C?digo civil de la Rep?blica de El Salvador en Centro-Ame rie a. New York: Imprenta
de Eduardo O. Jenkins.
Ripton, John
n.d. "Voices from the violence: autobiographical accounts of Salvadorans in the United
States." MS.
Robinson, William I.
2004 "The new right and the end of national liberation." NACLA Report on the Americas
37: 15-20.
Rodr?guez, Juan Manuel
1824 Seminario pol?tico mercantil de San Salvador. San Salvador.
Rubio S?nchez, Manuel
1976 Historia del a?il orxiquilite en Centro America. San Salvador: Ministerio de Educaci?n.
Taylor, J. Edward
2001 "Microeconomics of globalization: evidence from Mexico, China, El Salvador, and
the Galapagos Islands,"in Report to the Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office of
the World Bank. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Thompson, Dorothy (ed.)

2000 The Essential E. P. Thompson. New York: New Press.
Torres, Abelardo
1961 Tierras y colonizaci?n (El Salvador). San Salvador: Instituto de Estudios
Econ?micos, Universidad de El Salvador.
U.S. Department of State
2000 Background Notes: El Salvador. Washington, DC.
Webre, Stephen
1979 Jose Napoleon Duarte and the Christian Democratic Party in Salvadoran Politics,
1960-1972. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
White, Alastair
1973 El Salvador. New York: Praeger.
Williams, Robert G.
1986 Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Wilson, Everett Alan

1968 "The crisis of national integration in El Salvador." Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
World Bank Group
2005 "World Bank assistance strategy projects US$485 to El Salvador over four years," in
El Salvador Country Assistance Strategy. Washington, DC.
Wortman, Miles
1982 Government and Society in Central America, 1689-1840. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Ripton-Export Ag and Crisis in El Salvador

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Ripton-Export Ag and Crisis in El Salvador

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Export Agriculture and Agrarian Crisis: Salvadoran Peasants and the Global Market

Author(s): John Ripton

Salvadoran Peasants and the Global Market

Integration of El Salvador's agrarian resources into the global economy

global economy is as much a political project as it is an economic one.

Keywords: El Salvador, global economy, agrarian crisis, peasants, remittances

A brief description of one young Salvadoran peasant's struggle to survive

While this remarkable individual escaped from these conditions in the

tice, it can also be a sword for the small who sud

denly finds that his product has no value."

unregulated globalization. Since the civil-war period, economic plans

International migration of rural workers is the newest way of incorporating El

More surprising, however, is the breathtaking speed with which neoliber

foreign policy). With billions of dollars in economic, military, and technical

opposition to the current economic regime would likely have engendered

remittances in an effort to maintain political stability (see Popkin, 2003:

produced protest and rebellion from Seattle to Santiago.

ditioned by the country's relationship to the world economy.

Access to world markets has enabled of Salvadoran

remnant" of their former condition or state, sees more

Browning, 1971: 78-138). These circumstances reflect the general insecu

compelled Indians to produce for European markets. In 1737 the crown's

an active agency for the of its agro-export economy, at times

ruthlessly repressing the peasants.

One of the most authoritative sources on El Salvador's development in

less suffers from an essential shortcoming of liberal theory in general and

market was the of the It could never

willing to invest in education might have improved conditions for themajor

dependency theorists, who argue that dependent economies such as El

LIBERALISM, COFFEE, AND PEASANTS

Liberalism was midwife to the birth of the Salvadoran republic. The

in industrializing Europe that lent force to them. Propelled by the industrial

from was a new rationale. Salvadoran lib

In the old system class differences

it would contribute to the welfare of the Indians, Bailey's observations can

benefit of their inhabitants [my emphasis], in grain or in other articles for

nineteenth century drew to a close and coffee exports three

Santiago's sources apparently do not address. First, as measured by agri

oligarchy used the liberalism of the market to dispossess the majority of

the most decisive set of factors in the coffee encroach

In contrast [to indigo], commercial coffee farming, introduced rapidly and on

railways, local ports, and the introduction of regular steamship service.

minting (see Lindo-Fuentes, 1990: 159-175), as well as through the credit

Despite occasional efforts to diversify in the nineteenth century, El

Lauria-Santiago's research (1999: 174-175) describes a Salvadoran

of the market to and many appear uncon

and economic stages groups of peasants may exert

tinct economic and political advantages. By the turn of the twentieth

THE COFFEE REGIME

The massacre thousands of rebellious peasants in 1932 (see

trade grew to unprecedented levels, from an estimated $US7 billion in 1880

port facilities, for example, while contributing significantly to the commer

ful managerial instrument in the hands of commercial interests. In El

At some however, as the world

imposed on the rest of the nation (Anderson, 1971: 129).

nities where international market forces were not blunted or diminished by

to it seems to have so radicalized social

Despite the massive bloodshed and political repression of peasants and

jurisdiction to work in the western regions depopulated by the 1932 massacre.

PEASANTS AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

Between 1932 and 1972, demographic, economic, and political develop

principally coffee, probably influenced the degree of reform or repression

stemming social revolution coincided with the Salvadoran military's need

against communism (see LaFeber, 1984: 172-176).