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El Salvador THE COFFEE REPUBLIC
The Oligarchy and the Liberal State
Coffee would become the last of the great monoculture export
commodities in El Salvador. Its widespread cultivation began in
the mid-nineteenth century as the world demand for indigo dried
up. The huge profits that it yielded served as a further impetus
for the process whereby land became concentrated in the hands of
an oligarchy. Although legend and radical propaganda have
quantified the oligarchy at the level of fourteen families, a
figure of several hundred families lies much closer to the truth.
A succession of presidents, nominally both conservative and
liberal, throughout the last half of the nineteenth century
supported the seizure of land from individual smallholders and
communal owners.
Despite the continued participation of conservatives,
however, the period of the establishment of the codfee republic
(roughly 1871 to 1927) is described commonly as the era of the
liberal state in El Salvador. The church was not as powerful in
El Salvador as in other Latin American states at the time;
therefore, the economic aspects of liberalism--an adherence to
the principles of free-market capitalism--dominated the conduct
of the state. Anticlericalism was a distinctly secondary theme,
expressed primarily through social legislation (such as the
establishment of secular marriage and education) rather than
though the kind of direct action, e.g., repression and
expropriation, taken against the church in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Mexico.
Despite some differences over the degree of emphasis of
political versus economic issues, Salvadoran liberals generally
agreed on the promotion of coffee as the predominant cash crop,
on the development of infrastructure (railroads and port
facilities) primarily in support of the coffee trade, on the
elimination of communal landholdings to facilitate further coffee
production, on the passage of antivagrancy laws to ensure that
displaced campesinos and other rural residents provided
sufficient labor for the coffee fincas (plantations), and
on the suppression of rural discontent.
The coffee industry grew inexorably in El Salvador, after a
somewhat tentative start in the mid-1800s. Between 1880 and 1914,
the value of coffee exports rose by more than 1,100 percent.
Although the coffee industry itself was not taxed by the
government, tremendous revenue was raised indirectly through
import duties on goods imported with the foreign currencies that
coffee sales earned (goods intended for the consumption of the
small coffee-producing elite). From 1870 to 1914, an average of
58.7 percent of government revenue derived from this source. Even
if the coffee elite did not run the government directly (and many
scholars argue that they did), the elite certainly provided the
bulk of the government's financial support. This support, coupled
with the humbler and more mundane mechanisms of corruption,
ensured the coffee growers of overwhelming influence within the
government and the military.
The priorities of the coffee industry dictated a shift in the
mission of the embryonic Salvadoran armed forces from external
defense of the national territory to the maintenance of internal
order. The creation of the National Guard (Guardia Nacional--GN)
in 1912 epitomizes this change
(see The Security Forces
, ch. 5).
The duties of the GN differed from those of the National Police
(Policia Nacional--PN), mainly in that GN personnel were
specifically responsible for providing security on the coffee
fincas. Most fincas enjoyed the services of their
own GN units posted on the grounds; regional GN commanders
routinely were compensated by the finca owners to ensure
the continued loyalty of the guardsmen.
Suppression of rural dissent was subtle and
institutionalized; campesinos generally accepted the status quo
because of the implied threat of retaliation from the GN or other
military units. One exception to this pattern was Aquino's
rebellion. Although it predated the coffee boom, its
reverberations were felt throughout Salvadoran society for
decades.
Aquino was a laborer on an indigo hacienda in the region of
Los Nonualcos in the central part of the country. He led a brief
but violent uprising in 1833. The Indian participants aimed to
end their impressment into the army and effect the return of
tribute paid to the government under false pretenses after 1811,
when tribute requirements were discontinued by the Spanish
parliament (but payments were still collected by the local
authorities). In the initial uprising, several thousand rebels,
mainly Indians, successfully captured several army posts between
Santiago Nonualco and San Vicente, where Aquino's forces won a
battle against government troops only to be defeated the next day
by reinforcements mustered during the rebels' march. Had Aquino
chosen to proceed directly to San Salvador after his early
victories, the capital would have been largely undefended. As it
was, the defeat at San Vicente effectively ended the rebellion,
reestablished governmental control over the rural areas, led to
Aquino's capture and execution some months later, and deterred
any comparable act of violent dissent for approximately 100
years.
From the time of its declaration of independence from Spain
as a part of the United Provinces of Central America, El Salvador
was governed under a succession of constitutions. A number of
these documents were produced during the era of the liberal
state. The constitution of 1871 attempted to increase the power
of the legislature relative to that of the president; it
specified a two-year term for the chief executive with no
immediate reelection. The constitutions of 1872 and 1880 were
drafted as little more than legal circumventions of that two-year
restriction. The constitution of 1885 never went into effect
because the body that drafted it, the National Assembly, was
dissolved four days after its adoption. The last constitution of
the liberal era, the constitution of 1886, was the longest lived
of all Salvadoran charters, governing the country until 1939 and
serving as the basis of a post-World War II document as well
(see
The Constitutions of El Salvador, 1824-1962
, ch. 4).
The men who served as presidents of the liberal state in El
Salvador came to power through a limited array of means. Santiago
Gonzalez, who assumed the office in 1871, apparently sought to
establish a personalist dictatorship. He never successfully
consolidated his rule, however, and was defeated by Andres Valle
in the elections of 1876. Valle fell victim to one of the chronic
afflictions of Salvadoran political history--intervention from
Guatemala. He was replaced less than a year after his election by
Rafael Zaldivar, who was more to the liking of the Guatemalan
dictator Justo Rufino Barrios. Zaldivar proved exceptionally
durable; he was twice elected president after his initial violent
installation, serving as the country's leader from 1876 until his
overthrow in 1885 by forces led by Francisco Menendez, who was
ousted and executed by his army commander, General Carlos Erzeta,
in 1890. Erzeta is the only president during the period of the
liberal state who is reputed to have made some effort to improve
the lot of the lower classes by attempting to enforce an
agricultural minimum wage, though the evidence for even this
small gesture is sketchy.
Another confrontation with Guatemala contributed to the
downfall of Erzeta, who was ousted in 1894 by Rafael Gutierrez;
he, in turn, was replaced four years later in a bloodless coup
led by General Tomas Regalado. His term took El Salvador rather
uneventfully into the twentieth century. Regalado's peaceful
transfer of power in 1903 to his handpicked successor, Pedro Jose
Escalon, ushered in a period of comparative stability that
extended until the depression-provoked upheaval of 1931-32. The
only exception to this pattern of peaceful succession was the
assassination of President Manuel Enrique Araujo in 1913. Araujo
was reputed to have held somewhat reformist views toward some of
the policies of the liberal state, in particular the notion of
financing development through foreign loans. His assassination
may have sprung from this sort of policy dispute, although the
full motive has never been established satisfactorily.
Araujo's death ushered in a brief period of modified dynastic
rule, whereby President Carlos Melendez named his brother Jorge
as his successor; Jorge in turn tapped his brother-in-law,
Alfonso Quinonez Molina, to succeed him. The Melendez and
Quinonez clans were two of the most powerful among the ranks of
the Salvadoran oligarchy.
Throughout the period of the liberal state in El Salvador,
the preeminent position of the oligarchy was never threatened by
the actions of the government. Some have attributed this to the
pervasive influence of the organization that has been described
as the "invisible government" of the country, the Coffee Growers
Association (Asociacion Cafetalera). The direct (in the case of
the Melendez-Quinonez minidynasty) and indirect connections of
the presidents of the period with the country's powerful families
undoubtedly came into play as well. Generally speaking, however,
the system continued to function without adjustment because it
worked well from the perspective of the small percentage of
Salvadorans who benefited from it, namely the economic elite,
upper-echelon government officials, and the military High
Command.
Although society in general appeared to be static under the
liberal state, the same truly cannot be said for the Salvadoran
oligarchy. The introduction of coffee production in itself
changed the composition of that group, as the new coffee barons
joined the ranks of the old plantation owners (who in many cases
were slow to recognize the potential of coffee and lost some
wealth and standing by delaying their switch from indigo
production). New blood also was introduced into the oligarchy by
way of foreign immigration. These immigrants, who would
eventually come to constitute the bulk of the Salvadoran merchant
class, frequently married into the landowning oligarchic
families, further diversifying the composition of the elite
stratum of society
(see The Upper Sector
, ch. 2).
Another process worthy of note during this period despite its
lack of tangible results was the ongoing series of unification
efforts by the Central American states. El Salvador was a prime
mover in most of these attempts to reestablish an isthmian
federation. In 1872 El Salvador signed a pact of union with
Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica, but the union was never
implemented. In 1876 a congress of all five Central American
states failed to achieve agreement on federation. A provisional
pact signed by the five states in 1889 technically created the
"Republic of Central America"; that effort too never was
realized. Undaunted, the governments of El Salvador, Honduras,
and Nicaragua formed the "Greater Republic of Central America"
(República Mayor de Centroamerica) via the Pact of Amapala
(1895). Although Guatemala and Costa Rica considered joining the
Greater Republic (which was rechristened "the United States of
Central America" when its constitution went into effect in 1898),
neither country joined. This union, which had planned to
establish its capital city at Amapala on the Golfo de Fonseca,
did not survive Regalado's seizure of power in El Salvador in
1898. Although the Central American spirit seemed willing, the
commitment was weak. The notion of unification was another
manifestation of the idealistic liberal ethos, and it proved
durable and quite resistant to political realities.
Data as of November 1988
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