The Coffee Oligarchy: How El Salvador Became Homicidal
Originally Published: 10 September 2020
Coffee created an oligarchy in El Salvador, which fuelled a massacre, leading the nation on the footpath to endless violence.
"We were all born half-dead in 1932"
- from a poem by Roque Dalton
History is buried with chain reactions. A single event so powerful that it spurs into an unstoppable flurry of trauma that shakes a nation. For El Salvador, that event was the 'La Mantaza' ('The Massacre') of 1932.
Photographs published in April 2020 of imprisoned gang members in El Salvador, wearing only their underwear, pressed together in a horrific formation, shocked the world. The pictures were symbolic of the nightmare El Salvador's continues to live. Until recently, El Salvador was considered one of the world’s deadliest countries. Little is known about the country's history as it has the misfortune of being trapped under the umbrella of 'the other.' Being part of Latin America, El Salvador's personal history is rarely put under the magnifying glass because on the surface there appears little to explore. Drug trafficking, gang violence, homicides are simply accepted as the normal in these kinds of places. But how did El Salvador become ‘these kinds of places’- how did El Salvador become part of 'the other'?
As Historian Augustine Sedgewick notes in his book 'Coffeeland', "The state was built on killing and coffee."
THE COFFEE OLIGARCHY
Our tale begins with the creation of the coffee oligarchy. This isn't an Orwellian-inspired reference. Coffee had allowed the formation of an elite- who despite referring to themselves as liberals wanting democracy- had so much power economically and politically that they were a textbook example of an oligarchy.
In ‘Coffeeland’, Sedgewick follows the story of James Hill, who would later go on to become part of the original coffee elite. James Hill grew up in the smoke of the Industrial Revolution, amongst the world's first proletariat in Manchester. Hill envisioned a better life for himself. He arranged for Spanish classes and at age 18, he was off to El Salvador in 1889 to work as a textile salesman. Hill married a Salvadoran woman and inherited her family's coffee plantations. Hill's idea to plant coffee beans near an active volcano in the town of Santa Ana was ridiculed. While Hill saw the economic potential of coffee, his vision was not widely shared. However, coffee eventually became a major cash crop in El Salvador. By planting some coffee beans, Hills helped to create what eventually became a giant beanstalk: a Coffee Republic.
The problem however was, only Hills and a few other families consumed the golden goose at the top.
"The 60-year period between 1871 and 1932 saw the consolidation of lands from indigenous peasants to the coffee oligarchy," write Rogelio Sáenz and Maria Cristina Morales in their book 'Latinos in the United States: Diversity and Change.' The so-called Liberal Reforms of 1881 and 1882, had stripped virtually half of El Salvador's population of their lands. Coffee helped create a wide social disparity, whereby the indigenous people had no choice but to work on coffee plantations for survival. Hill exploiting the situation, adopted capitalist methods used by Manchester men to straighten out their workforce. While 'The Truck Shop system'- described by an article from The Guardian as a method- "by which cotton workers were paid in tokens that could only be exchanged for food at the factory shop, had long been banned in Britain", Hill had nothing stopping him in El Salvador. Using hunger as an incentive for work, Hill paid his workers two meals a day, consisting of- as Sedgewick writes- "two tortillas a man per meal, with as many black beans, or frijoles, piled on top as the recipient can contrive to balance."
El Salvador had tasted Manchester capitalism but it would soon taste the second flavour brewing inside the factory chimneys.
BREWING COMMUNISM
Friedrich Engels was born in Berlin, Germany. His father owned a textile business. In his teenage years, Engels had already begun to criticise class, religion and society in articles published in magazines and periodicals. Despite writing under a pen name to hide his identity, his parents knew their son was behind the notorious ink. Hoping to inject some capitalist spirit, they banished Engels to Manchester. The privilege of historical reflection allows us to appreciate how this had the opposite effect of what his parents wished for.
Observing the mistreatment of workers and abhorrent conditions of labour, Engels would go on to author, in 1845, 'The Condition of the Working Class in England'. Just three years later, Engels co-authored, with Karl Marx, 'The Communist Manifesto'. This changed the course of world history.
The city of Manchester brewed two diametrically opposed exports: the archetypes of which James Hill and Friedrich Engels blatantly embodied. On the 24th of October 1929, 12.9 million shares were traded on the stock market. "Black Thursday" as it became known, cascaded into the Wall Street crash, marking the start of the Great Depression. The ripple effect hit El Salvador but even before that, the coffee economy was already suffering. Between 1928-31, the coffee export price in El Salvador dropped by 54 per cent. In response to their dwindling profits, the elite took more and more land from the peasants and also cut their wages in half. For years the peasants had endured the living conditions imposed on them by the coffee oligarchy. The Great Depression brought them to their knees, a tiptoe away from complete starvation.
Arturo Araujo was elected president during El Salvador's 1931 elections. Araujo was a candidate of El Salvador’s Labour Party, inspired by the British Labour Party. This was arguably the first free election in the country's history. However, a military coup installed Maximiliano Hernández Martínez - vice president at the time - as president in December 1931. He led the country into a military dictatorship. From this point on, a succession of military governments would control the country, notably through the plight of El Salvador Civil War.
A distain for Martínez's regime and the economic downpour finally brought to El Salvador, the second export from Manchester.
Hill may have built his coffee empire upon the bricks of capitalism but he was not oblivious to the prospect that the hands that lay those bricks, would one day seek to knock it down. In his book 'Coffee and Power', historian Jeffery M. Paige quotes James Hill commenting upon the agrarian crisis, "Bolshevism? It's drifting in. the working people hold meetings on Sundays and get very excited. They say, "We dig the hoes for the trees, we clean the weeds, we prune the trees, we pick the coffee. Who earns the money then? We do.' Yes there will be trouble one of these days." Trouble. How euphemism mocks history.
LA MANTAZA (THE MASSACRE)
In January 1932, Agustín Farabundo Martí - the head of the Salvadoran Communist Party - led a peasant uprising. General Martínez responded with a bloodbath. As M. Paige mentions in his book, "The initial revolt took the lives of at most twenty to thirty civilians, most in pitched battles with the rebels. Responsible estimates of the dead in the mantaza range from eight to ten to more than twenty-five thousand. If the higher estimates of the numbers dead are to be accepted, the casualties amounted to more than two percent of the total Salvadoran population."
The victims of the massacre were targeted for their identity- Indian identity. According to Sedgewick, "The racist origins of the coffee economy, founded on the privatization of communal lands and the eradication of "backward" ways of life, resurfaced in the collapse of "Indian" and "communist" into synonymous death sentences." The indigenous people had to hide their identity to protect their life. Ironically, General Martínez was of Indian heritage himself. Sedgewick writes, "It has often been a point of speculation among historians that General Martínez's Theosophical beliefs empowered the genocide he commanded, that his belief in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls led him to conclude that it was a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, since a man would return to earth in a new body."
Miguel Mármol- another communist revolutionary, also helped plan the revolt. He was the sole survivor of a firing squad during the massacre. Describing the experience, Mármol said, "The firing squad shot seven times…The fourth shot got me in the chest, and the seventh got me in the head. I fell. But minutes later I was still alive. The blood was in my mouth and made me want to cough. But I had to suppress the cough to appear dead."
The massacre is a permanent stain on El Salvadoran history. In his book, M. Paige mentions, "One army driver lost his mind for more than two years after being forced to drive his truck over the machine gunned bodies of the dead and dying."
RE-WRITING THE MEMORY
The memory of the 'La Mantaza' ('The Massacre') has a complicated, seemingly unresolved place in Salvadoran history. In ‘Coffee and Power’, M. Paige writes, "In El Salvador public documentations and even newspapers from the period of the 1932 insurrection disappeared from libraries and archives, and an official story of Communist savagery was substituted for the actual history of the massacre carried out by the troops under the command of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez." The narrative was reconstructed to make the army appear heroic, fighting against the 'savage' and ‘radicalised’ peasants. M. Paige also says, "Investigators working in the area in the 1970s still found an extreme reluctance to acknowledge the revolt and its aftermath."
An article by The Washington Post sheds light on the incident from the point of view of the coffee oligarchy. The article says, "No one has told their story, these wealthy Salvadorans complain, least of all the American press, mired in the rhetoric of geopolitics and stunned by the tortured corpses and hungry children of this conflict. But to listen to them speak is it see El Salvador through the other end of the telescope. Whether or not their story tells the whole truth, it does add another dimension of human suffering to the tragedy of El Salvador."
A HOMICIDAL NATION
As M. Paige phrases it in his book, "the whole political labyrinth of El Savador can be explained only in reference to the traumatic experience of the uprising and the mantanza." Indeed, after the massacre, El Salvador found itself stuck in what seemed like an inescapable cycle of military regimes. The massacre had demonstrated the superior power of the Salvadoran government's army over the peasants. Yet the struggle would resurface. El Salvador's civil war (1980-1992) saw a violent face-off between El Salvador's government- militarily funded by the U.S.- and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNL). The latter group named themselves after their slain comrade - Farabundo Martí- who was executed by a firing squad during the 1932 massacre.
El Salvador still has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The grim photographs of the stacked up gang prisoners are not just snapshots but a breathing reality of life in El Salvador today.
The tale of El Salvador adds a completely different meaning to that question coffee addicts avoid at all costs: can coffee kill you?