El Salvador THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY
Metro Center shopping mall, a modern retail center in San Salvador
In the late 1980s, El Salvador was experiencing severe
internal stress as a result of an ongoing insurgency, a severely
debilitated economy, and persistent socioeconomic inequalities.
Despite reform efforts begun under the post-1979 civilianmilitary junta governments, the country's longstanding division
between rich and poor still represented a challenge to Salvadoran
leaders and to the society as a whole.
The sharp contrast between those with great wealth and those
living in extreme poverty had characterized Salvadoran society
for more than a century and had roots in its colonial past
(see Spanish Conquest and Colonization
, ch. 1). When El Salvador
became an independent republic in the early nineteenth century,
this pattern did not change. Wealthy landowners, members of only
a very few families, organized the national government to secure
their positions and continued to dominate Salvadoran national
life. Rural peasants and workers provided for their own
subsistence needs and labored for the elite. Indeed, as the
century progressed, this pattern was sharpened by the successful
introduction of coffee as an export cash crop. As the landed
elite, along with more recently arrived European banking and
financial families interested in coffee, began to realize the
wealth potential of this crop, they increased the size of their
estates.
They did so by absorbing into their private holdings public
lands (forests) and the communal lands of municipios (the
Salvadoran equivalent of counties) and Indian communities, lands
formerly cultivated in small subsistence plots by mestizo and
Indian peasants. The government officially decreed these common
lands out of existence in favor of private property ownership in
1881. Those dispossessed of their subsistence lands became
permanent or seasonal laborers working for extremely low wages on
coffee estates, which were labor-intensive enterprises. To
protect their lands and their prosperity, the coffee elite formed
a strong economic and political oligarchy. The army and the
National Guard (Guardia Nacional--GN) were employed to control
the unrest and occasional open rebellions among the many now
landless and poorly paid laborers.
When coffee prices fell during the Great Depression of the
1930s, laborers' wages were reduced still further, and since much
subsistence land had been converted to private coffee cultivation
and the production of staple crops had declined accordingly,
living conditions worsened
(see Economic Crisis and Repression
, ch. 1). Unemployment rose too, as many coffee growers decided not
to harvest their crops. In addition, many small landowners,
unable to survive the low coffee prices, lost their lands to
those who were wealthier, and landownership became even more
concentrated.
In the decades following the depression, export agriculture
became somewhat diversified as cotton and, to a lesser extent,
sugar also became important plantation cash crops, and some of
the elite began to argue for industrial development. The upper
class in general, however, strongly resisted any significant
changes in the basic social, economic, and political order. After
a rural uprising in 1932 and the brutal reprisals later referred
to as la matanza (the massacre), in which about 30,000
were killed by troops, the dominance of the elite was preserved
and defended by the Salvadoran military
(see Economic Crisis and Repression
, ch. 1).
Data as of November 1988
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