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Coffee and Power in El Salvador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Jeffery M. Paige
Jeffery M. Paige*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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The existence of a division between what Italo López Vallecillos has termed the “agro-financial” and “agro-industrial-financial” factions of the Salvadoran elite has become what Enrique Baloyra calls “the consensus of scholarly opinion” on elite politics in El Salvador. As López Vallecillos describes the division, the agro-financial faction “opposes any attempt to transform the rigid framework of land concentration and low salaries in its devotion to the plantation economy that is the basis of its income and profits.” The agro-industrial faction, in contrast, “tries to introduce changes in the economic system … and opts for less authoritarian political forms, within the framework of liberal democracy, representative but restricted and controlled.” Oscillation between these two elite strategies has long characterized Salvadoran politics, and in the 1920s, the temporary dominance of the more liberal faction gave El Salvador the reputation of being the most progressive country in Central America. During times of crisis like the 1930s and the early 1980s, however, the positions of the two factions converged to support the retrograde policies of the more conservative “agro-financial” faction, which have given El Salvador an international reputation for ferocious authoritarianism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , 1993 , pp. 7 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The research for this article was supported by a Fulbright Research Fellowship from the Central American Republics Research Program and by a grant from the National Science Foundation. My work in El Salvador was greatly facilitated by the generous assistance of Joaquín Salaverría of the Archivo General de la Nación and by Victor Lagos and Rubén Pineda of the Consejo Salvadoreño del Café. I am also grateful to the many Salvadoran coffee producers whose hospitality and candor made this research possible and to the anonymous LARR reviewers for their informed and useful comments. None of these individuals or institutions, however, bear any responsibility for the analysis or conclusions reported here. An earlier version was presented to the Latin American Studies Association meetings in Crystal City in April 1991.

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