The Violent North: Guatemala and El Salvador, Independence to 1980
This paper examines the development of the State in Guatemala and El Salvador
from Independence through the early 1980s. The two nations’ are marked by broad
similarities and often subtle but important differences, particularly in elite accumulation
strategies, levels of organization, and bargaining power vis-à-vis the military, popular
sectors, and international players.
The two nations’ history share marked similarities. Both nations were dominated
through most of the post-Independence period by small elites whose wealth was based in
exploitative coffee production. Experiences with popular uprising in El Salvador in 1932
and with democratic opening in Guatemala from 1944-1954 left elites and sectors of the
military in both nations determined to block State control by popular forces. State
attempts to weaken or diversify elites through development strategies in the decades
following WWII were largely unsuccessful. In both nations the small size, political
ineptitude, internal divisions made elite-backed political parties difficult to construct and
electorally uncompetitive. Unable to compete democratically, elites ceded State control to
the respective militaries. Through most of the 20th century, military leaders struggled to
establish stable and broadly legitimate bases for rule under pressure from multiple and
conflicting forces. Popular and middle class opposition movements demanding political
inclusion and broad economic change surged and subsided. The military rulers who
presided over both nations for most of the 20th century have frequently be treated by
analysts as pawns of the oligarchy. However, the reality is more complex. Caught
between powerful and intransigent agrarian oligarchies and discontented masses, leaders
in both nations swung between reformist and repressive strategies in the search for
legitimacy and stability. Spasms of repression served the dual function of containing
opposition forces and justifying military rule to economic elites; until the 1980s,
Guatemala and El Salvador were widely regarded as two of the most repressive
authoritarian states in Latin America (see, for example, Bulmer-Thomas 1987, Dunkerley
1988, Williams 1994, Brockett 1998). Rulers were also influenced by shifting ideological
winds and vulnerable to international pressure, whether economic or political. As nearby,
small, price-taking nations overwhelmingly producing for the US market, both El
Salvador and Guatemala are particularly vulnerable to American influence in what it has
long perceived as its “backyard”. Hence an analysis of state development in these two
nations must consider elite accumulation strategies, organization, and political goals as
well of those of other powerful political players, especially the military, the United
States, and, at times, popular opposition groups. 1
In both Guatemala and El Salvador, the dominance of labor-repressive agriculture
and elites’ unwillingness to countenance any redistributive threats created the conditions
for violent opposition movements. In El Salvador, opposition coalesced into a powerful
guerrilla movement and a 12-year civil war. In Guatemala, guerrilla activity surged and
subsided repeatedly over the course of several decades but was contained by ferocious
military repression. Guerrilla armies in both nations disbanded after signing peace
accords in the 1990s. Both sets of accords mandated significant political and social
reforms. Yet only El Salvador emerged from the post-war period with a substantially
democratized state, dramatically altered elite structure, and significantly weakened
military. In Guatemala, the military has retained control over significant authoritarian
enclaves, the political party universe remains fragmented, unstable, and unrepresentative,
and the agro-export based economic elite has maintained enormous economic and
political power.
Several keys to understanding these divergent outcomes emerge through
comparative study of State development and elite-State relations at critical junctures in
history. This history of State development is divided into four key periods: the Liberal
coffee republics (1870-1930), the democratic opportunities after the Great Depression
(1930-1940s), the developmental military state (1940s-1960s), and the descent into chaos
of the 1970s. Several key points of divergence emerge from this analysis and help to
explain the enduring weakness of the Guatemalan State, even relative to the Salvadoran,
in particular ethno-racial divisions, elite attitudes and level of organization, and the early
and enduring weight of foreign capital in the Guatemalan economy. Guatemala even
today does not constitute a nation, divided as the population is into nearly equal parts
Ladino and indigenous. At least partially due to this racial division, the Guatemalan
landed elite has long been particularly racist and seigniorial.
The Coffee Republics: 1870s-1930
In 1823, the Republic of Central America gained independence from Spain. In
1838, squabbles among regional elites led to the breakup of the Republic into the five
current states of Central America. Like the other nations of the region, the new
governments of El Salvador and Guatemala adopted constitutional systems based, at least
formally, on the United States' political model. In the early Republican period, however,
Central American elites struggled to establish bases for legitimate rule. As Torres Rivas
(2010) points out, Central America lacked strong independence movements and war was
a result, rather than a cause, of the Spanish withdrawal. The course of State development
in the Republican period was fitful, confused, and frequently violent. Chaos was
especially severe in El Salvador, where the presidency changed hands 42 times between
1841 and 1861. In Guatemala, a series of military caudillos dominated the presidency
well into the 20th century: Rafael Carrera (1844-1848, 1851-1865), Justo Rufino Barrios
(1873-1885), Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920), and Jorge Ubico (1931-1944). While
caudillo rule provided greater stability, ultimately executive power “invaded judicial
functions, weakening the functional structure of the state” (Torres-Rivas 38, n 3).
In the 1850s, coffee was introduced to Central America and by the 1870s began to
outstrip the older export crops of indigo and cochineal. By the early 20th century, coffee
dominated both economies, although production strategies differed in the two nations in
significant ways. In Guatemala, coffee producers resurrected Colonial forced labor
practices and came to rely heavily on state support for securing labor. Coffee production
in El Salvador was more capitalistic from the start, creating a more independent elite.
Furthermore, unlike the elites of neighboring republics, El Salvador’s coffee elite did not
compete for state influence with foreign-owned banana or mining enclaves, as foreign
investment in the nation has historically been quite low (Menjívar 1980). In El Salvador
coffee producers ruled absolutely--from 1913 to 1923 the presidency cycled among
members of the coffee elite--while the existence of a substantial foreign enclave in
Guatemala weakened the coffee elite’s control over the State.
Coffee marked both nations’ incorporation into the global economy as primaryproduct dependent, mono-crop economies at the whim of foreign markets and subject to
cyclical price fluctuations causing chronic instability. Concurrent to the rise of coffee
production, both El Salvador and Guatemala, along with the rest of the Central American
republics, witnessed the triumph of Liberal movements favoring free trade and agroexport expansion. El Salvador experienced Central America’s swiftest and most thorough
Liberal revolution. Under President Rafael Zaldívar (1876-83) the state pursued policies
Mahoney (2001) characterizes as “radical liberalism”—a rapid and brutal restructuring of
land in favor of coffee production on large estates, which created an enduring, deeply
polarized rural class structure. Thee reforms privatized a quarter of the nation’s land
(Lindo Fuentes 1990) and created the most extreme land inequalities of any of the Central
American nations (Weeks 1985). Coffee represented roughly 90 percent (and never less
than 75 percent) of Salvadoran exports between 1900 and the early 1940s (CIA 1997:2).
In Guatemala, the Liberal coffee revolution was led by General Barrios (1892-1898), who
undertook similar reforms, including weakening indigenous rights to communal land,
expropriating church property, selling public lands, and creating the basic infrastructure
of commercial agriculture. By 1890, more than half of the coffee trees in Guatemala were
found on large estates (Williams 1994:64); during the 20th century, the concentration of
coffee-producing land in Guatemala exceeded any other nation in the region (Paige
1998). By 1914, coffee accounted for 85.2 percent of Guatemalan exports (Smith
1986:6). Through the Liberal reforms in both nations, coffee-producing lands were
concentrated into large estates at the expense of peasant and indigenous landholdings and
the "basic patterns of property ownership, land tenure, labor relations, and social classes
were formed that have been extended and modified during the twentieth century"
(Williams 1994:9).
Guatemala entered the post-colonial period with a significantly larger and more
organized indigenous population, comprising roughly half of the total population. As the
Guatemalan indigenous population was well organized and productive, the Spanish
conquerors generally left their communities intact and imposed the colonial structure on
top of the existing indigenous organization. Through the Colonial and Republican
periods, the largely illiterate, isolated indigenous rural majority had little relation with the
state beyond decrees designed to control its labor. In Guatemala during both the Colonial
and Republican periods, the indigenous population was despised and excluded from both
a vision of nation and the exercise of citizenship. Yet the fragmentation of the indigenous
population into some 22 ethnic groups, the cultural and linguistic divide and mutual
distrust between Ladino and Mayan peasants, and the traditional closed corporate
structure of Mayan communities all mitigated against sustained and effective rural
challenges the state through much of the nation’s history. In El Salvador, colonial
administrators dismantled indigenous communities to make way for hacienda agriculture.
Hence the smaller and less organized indigenous Salvadoran population began to
intermix with poor Spaniards during the Colonial period and in the wake of a 1932
uprising, the category indigenous largely disappeared from the Salvadoran political
landscape (Solórzano Fonseca 1982, Tilley 2005).
In both nations, coffee lands gradually concentrated in the hands of a small
economic elite comprised of a number of interconnected family groups, mostly of
Spanish origin. 2 European immigrants, mostly English and German, brought technical
know-how and capital to develop coffee processing. In El Salvador, successful
immigrants were largely incorporated into the largely criollo-descended elite through
intermarriage (see Colindres 1978, Casaús Arzú 1992). In Guatemala, by contrast,
European immigrants were not welcomed as readily by the elite; while some successful
immigrant families were integrated into elite criollo families through marriage (see Stone
1990, Casaús Arzu 2007), the Protestant and Jewish German community remained
socially and economically distinct (Handy 1984, Cambranes 1988). German immigrants
owned the largest and most productive coffee estates and dominated processing and
export until their businesses were confiscated by the state during World War II
(Dunkerley 1988, McCreery 1994). Similarly, the small manufacturing sector was almost
entirely dominated by European and American immigrants (Dosal 1995).
The biggest challenge facing Central America's early coffee producers was
securing access to sufficient--and sufficiently cheap--seasonal labor. Disease and
repression had decimated the native population and thus the region as a whole was
characterized by low population density; the population of Central America at
independence probably did not exceed 1.25 million, a third of which was found in
Guatemala (Dunkerley 1998:4). Coffee producers, with the support of the state, evolved
distinct systems in the two nations for the procurement of the seasonal labor forces
demanded by coffee production. In Guatemala most of the quality coffee land
expropriated during the Liberal period was either unused or in Church hands, hence the
indigenous population maintained a significant land base (Menjívar 1980). Because they
maintained their communal lands, the planter aristocracy presumed that the indigenous
lacked the "civilized tastes" that would draw them into the cash economy; consequently,
Guatemalan coffee growers and their allies in the State deemed coercive labor
procurement measures necessary (Cambranes 1991, McCreery 1994). During the harvest
period indigenous peasants were brought to the coffee estates through well-developed
systems of updated repartimiento, forced recruitment, and debt peonage, enforced by the
Guatemalan military. Through independence and well into the 20th century, indigenous
labor in Guatemala remained essentially enslaved, while the planters’ reliance on the
military for their supply of labor left them far more dependent on the state than the elites
of other nations of the region (Handy 1984, Yasser 1997).
In contrast to Guatemala, where indigenous populations lived primarily in
highland areas too cold for coffee cultivation, in El Salvador in the 1860s some twothirds of the land suitable for coffee was held municipalities or indigenous communities
(Williams 1994:56). The expansion of coffee production in El Salvador thus involved the
forcible expropriation of common lands by the state. In 1865, the Salvadoran government
decreed that two-thirds of communal lands had to be planted in coffee or would revert to
the state. In 1881, all remaining indigenous common lands were subdivided with the
argument that communal land was "contrary to political and social principles on which
the Republic was established" (cited in Montgomery 1995:30). The newly landless
peasants were forced onto coffee estates by necessity and by harsh vagrancy laws. So
ferocious was the dismantling of communal lands in El Salvador that coffee labor could
be hired year-round at abysmally low wages and market relations dominated coffee
production very early on.
The concentration of Guatemala’s large expanses of quality coffee-growing land
into vast estates, the semi-servile indigenous labor force, and weak capitalistic impulses
among much of the planter elite discouraged intensive land use and the introduction of
modern technology. Guatemalan coffee producers have long been among the least
efficient in the region. Despite controlling double the land area and three times as many
resident laborers, Guatemalan coffee production barely surpassed that of El Salvador
(Paige 1997:67-68). Due to the early predominance of market relations and to the limited
land base, coffee production in El Salvador was far more land-intensive and productive
than in neighboring Guatemala; Salvadoran coffee growers are second only to Costa Rica
in productivity (Paige 1987). In Costa Rica, however, the coffee elite is centered in the
processing and export phases, while in El Salvador the elite controlled all phases from
growing to export. Guatemalan coffee production is distinct in that most large growers
maintain their own beneficios; in the 1940s, there were over 4,243 beneficios in
Guatemala compared to 207 in El Salvador (Paige 1997:79). Hence, only the Salvadoran
coffee elite was characterized by a distinct division between agrarian and agro-industrial
factions.
In El Salvador, coffee ruled unopposed well into the 20th century. In Guatemala,
however, coffee interests competed with a substantial foreign-owned banana sector.
Banana production began under Cabrera, who invited the US-based United Fruit
Company (UFCo) to develop Caribbean coastal lands in exchange for major investments
in railroads. From the outset, banana plantations in Guatemala, as elsewhere in the
region, formed an enclave economy, run by foreign capital and largely disconnected from
the rest of the national economy (Bulmer-Thomas 1987, Brockett 1988). UFCo
controlled the industry from production to marketing, including the both the bananagrowing estates and the infrastructure for export, such as railroads and ports through its
subsidiary, International Railroads of Central America (IRCA). Located in the sparsely
inhabited coastal region, the banana plantations controlled vast tracts of land but had little
impact on broader land or labor markets (Brockett 1988). Even the comparatively wellpaid workforce on the banana plantations was isolated by ties to company stores. Taxexemptions granted by the state and monopolistic control over infrastructure further
limited the developmental impact of the banana sector (Brockett 1988, Torres Rivas
1993).
UFCo, IRCA, and American Electric Bond and Share, which held monopoly
privileges over electrical facilities, gained enormous power over the Guatemalan
economy and operated as “states within a state” and controlled as much as 40 percent of
the Guatemalan economy until the 1940s (Jonas 1991:19). Despite occasional differences
on issues like railroad pricing, relations between foreign capital and the Guatemalan elite
were generally non-conflictive during the Liberal period and their interests converged on
suppressing wages and maintaining political exclusion (Jonas 1991). However, the early
presence of the significant American capital in Guatemala invited earlier and more
intense American involvement in Guatemalan politics than in neighboring El Salvador
(see Brockett 1988) and significantly weakened the coffee elite’s political power.
As analysts of Central American history have noted, the coffee economy and the
State developed in concert (see especially Torres Rivas 1993, Mahoney 2001). State
support was vital to spread of coffee production in both nations and the first banks
emerged in the 1880s along with the coffee boom, serving mainly to ensure steady credit
supplies to the elite coffee families who owned them. With both the State and the banking
system built around coffee, there was little incentive or structural room for economic
diversification. Distorted internal terms of trade, lack of infrastructure, a shortage of
energy sources, and a captured banking sector discouraged investment in other areas
outside of export agriculture (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). There was also little incentive or
room for the state to expand or develop greater capacity and both States remained small.
Government revenues depended almost entirely on indirect taxes on the coffee trade and
consumption taxes disproportionately affecting the poor, as oligarchs in both nations
refused to countenance direct taxes. The bulk of state spending went to the development
of military forces, which were focused on internal repression rather than national defense.
As price-takers in the international coffee trade, both States were “inwardly strong and
despotic, outwardly dependent and weak” (Torres Rivas 2010:58).
Depression and Discontent: 1930s-1944
The Great Depression ended the heyday of the coffee republic. Coffee prices,
already sliding in the 1920s, plummeted with the US stock market crash of 1929 and did
not recover until the 1940s. The depression led to reduced state activity, a sharp increase
in unemployment, and rising unrest in both countries. In El Salvador, such a large
number of growers defaulted on loans that three domestic banks became the nominal
owners of three-quarters of the nation’s land (Paige 1998:107). Wages for coffee workers
fell steadily, as did overall labor demand; farm wages in El Salvador dropped from 50-70
centavos a day to around 15 in the early 1930s (Dunkerley 1988: 93). The desperation of
the rural and urban poor led to rural uprisings, labor strikes, and a rise in support for the
Communist Party. In the wake of the crash, military caudillos came to power across the
region; as Bulmer-Thomas (1987:49) describes, the military states emerged because the
narrowly based liberal oligarchic states were unable to cope with growing popular
opposition. The end of direct oligarchic rule initiated a new phase of military rule with
elite backing in both nations, an arrangement Baylora (1983) terms reactionary
despotism. In El Salvador, the paroxysms of the 1930s led to the rise of one of Latin
America’s longest periods of military rule and to a peasant uprising that scarred the
nation for decades to come.
The first of Central America’s depression-era caudillos, Guatemala’s General
Jorge Ubico Castañeda is widely considered one of the most brutal dictators in the
region’s history. Ubico used his position to consolidate control over all of the branches of
government and to systematically undermine the organization of Guatemalan civil
society, even banning the Chamber of Commerce and the Asociación General de
Agricultores (AGA), a loose confederation of powerful coffee growers formed in the
1920s. Military penetration of rural Guatemala deepened with the enactment of vagrancy
and corvée laws and the creation of a full-time rural police. Under US pressure, in 1945
Ubico expropriated the businesses of the powerful German community, bringing large
tracts of coffee land under state control and effectively breaking the power of the German
faction of the elite (Dunkerley 1988).
The Salvadoran coffee elite organized when their direct control over the state was
threatened. Pio Romero Bosque (1927-1931), the last of the elite Melendez-Quiñonez
dynasty that had controlled the presidency since 1913, unexpectedly allowed open
elections, In 1931 Arturo Araujo was elected with widespread popular support. Although
Araujo came from an oligarchic family, his reformist ideas threatened elite enough that
they formed the Sociedad de Defensa del Café (later renamed the Asociación Cafetelera
de El Salvador, popularly known as the Cafetelera) in 1929 to coordinate the production
and export of coffee without government oversight (Cardenál 2002). President Araujo
was overthrown in a elite-supported coup a mere ten months into his presidency. The
coup leaders placed his vice-president, General Maximiliano Martínez, into the
presidency, beginning a 50 year period of military rule--the longest uninterrupted military
rule in Latin America.
On January 22, 1932, less than two months after Araujo’s ouster, peasant and
indigenous rebels united under the leadership of Farabundo Martí, the radical son of a
landlord with tie to the Communist Party, and launched an attack on landlords and local
authorities in several departments. The disorganized rebellion had little impact beyond
the assassination of a few hated landlords, however, the uprising tapped into deep roots of
fear of indigenous hordes among the Ladino and European elites (Paige 1998). Assisted
by masses of civilian vigilantes, Martínez immediately unleashed a wave of repression
without precedent. In the space of a few months between 10,000 and 30,000 Salvadorans
were killed, most in just a few days, in what became known simply as "la matanza”. The
pogrom was extreme enough to affect demographics in the nation for several generations
(Dunkerley 1988). The matanza also had a very dramatic effect on the nation's political
future; Paige (1997:103) calls the matanza the "defining event in modern Salvadoran
political history." The fear of another rural uprising cemented the oligarchy’s pact with
the military, under which the coffee elite exchanged direct control of the state for rural
security. As Ripton (2006) argues, “from 1932 onward, the fear of communism or of
being labeled ‘communist’ became a central tenet of a pragmatic national security policy
that enabled the military and its conservative supporters to renew repression, fix
elections, and reassert their dominance whenever their interests were threatened.” In its
wake, all signs of rural trade unionization and peasant protest disappeared for decades.
Because Martínez' troops targeted the indigenous, most markers of indigenous identity,
including clothing, religious symbols, and even language, disappeared from the
Salvadoran countryside.
Both Ubico and Martinez were able to leverage elites fear of popular unrest to
expand the State and enhance military prerogatives. As Stanley (1996) demonstrates, this
was particularly true in El Salvador, where Martinez was able to use the fear of another
1932 to bully elites into accepting military rule and expanded State economic power,
including a Central Bank and Mortgage Bank. Both Ubico and Martinez gradually
alienated this support through increasingly despotic, corrupt, and personalistic
policymaking. In the 1940s, both leaders came under direct challenge from powerful
opposition movements, spearheaded by the small but growing urban middle classes, with
powerful allies in sectors of the military and economic elites. The personalism of both
Ubico and Martinez turned important sectors of both the elite and military against them,
fatally undermining both leaders by 1944. The Great Depression and rural uprising had
convinced segments of the military and some of the elite of the fragility of the coffee
economy. Many junior military officers, concerned with declining institutional legitimacy
and moved by international ideological currents favoring social reform and economic
diversification began to agitate for political and economic reform. In Guatemala, the
opposition movement succeeded in ushering in an unprecedented ten-year period of
democracy and reform. In El Salvador, a similar transition to democracy was forestalled
by a military coup and the rise of an institutionalist military strategy.
The Guatemalan Spring: 1944-1954
In 1944, amidst widespread popular protest and a massive general strike, Ubico's
chosen successor was overthrown by junior officers. The leaders of the so-called
“October Revolution” organized the freest elections in Guatemala’s history. The winner
was a moderate philosophy professor, Juan Jose Arévalo, who ran as the candidate for a
coalition of leftist parties known as the Partido Acción Revolucionaria (PAR) and
received 85 percent of the popular vote. The social bases of the PAR were predominantly
urban, most importantly the petty bourgeoisie, intellectuals, public employees, the urban
working class, and professionals. Modeling himself on Roosevelt, Arévalo undertook a
series of mild social and political reforms, such as expanded suffrage, a minimum wage,
and attempts to outlaw labor coercion. The majority of the reforms impacted only urban
areas and conditions for the rural indigenous majority remained unchanged.
Although violent opposition to these reforms among hard-line finqueros and some
senior military officers led to as many as 32 unsuccessful coup attempts during his
presidency (Black 1984:13), the initial reaction to Arévalo by the majority of the elite
was less hostile. Indeed, in the early years of the revolution, much of the elite maintained
a skeptical but generally cooperative relationship with Arévalo and some elites
participated directly in the revolutionary government. However, as Yasser (1997) argues,
the decades of dictatorship had left the oligarchy politically inexperienced and
disorganized. Unable to compete successfully in an electoral arena, elites gradually
turned against the regime. Similarly, the initial American reaction to the October
Revolution was neutral or favorable and American investment in Guatemala grew
significantly under Arévalo (Jonas 1991). However, conflicts between the State and
UFCo and growing American concern about communist influence soured the relationship
by the late 1940s.
The withdrawal of elite and American support pushed the revolution farther left
under Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a military captain and Arévalo’s
Defense Minister. Seeking to expand the social bases of the revolution, Arbenz began to
extend reform to rural areas. In 1952, Arbenz attempted to abolish labor subscription and
began an agrarian reform which granted land to over 100,000 peasants. The new political
environment and state outreach in rural areas associated with the reform spurred rural
organizing (Handy 1984). Threatened with the loss of control over their labor force and a
portion of their lands, the agrarian elite united in opposition to Arbenz. The re-formed
AGA launched escalating public attacks against the government and private investment
dropped to nothing (Dosal 1988:356). As discussed below, efforts under Arévalo and
Arbenz to diversify the economy had helped create some new economic elites,
particularly in cotton and industry. However, these sectors joined the coffee elite in
opposition to Arbenz (Torres Rivas 1969). A significant segment of the military, fearful
of its diminished power in rural areas and responsive to the oligarchy’s hysterical
depictions of a growing communist menace, also turned against the revolution (Handy
1984, Yasser 1997). When Arbenz announced that the reform would involve the
expropriation of some the United Fruit Company’s lands, the US mobilized against the
regime. 3 In June 1954, a group of 150 mercenaries and expatriates under the leadership of
the fugitive Colonel Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala from Honduras with the military,
financial, and organizational support of the American CIA and supported by US aerial
bombardment. The invasion, dubbed “Operation Success”, precipitated a coup by
Arbenz’ high command and with American support Armas ascended to the presidency.
With the overthrow of Arbenz, "Guatemalan political life…returned to the dark
ages" (Bulmer-Thomas 1987:107). In the months following Castillo Armas' victory, some
17,000 people were arrested and over 1,000 labor leaders and politicians were exiled
(Garst 1984). All political parties except Castillo's Movimiento Nacional Democrático
(later renamed the Movimiento de Liberación Nacionál (MLN)), which was supported by
the hard-line agrarian right, were banned. The agrarian reform was immediately
rescinded and confiscated lands were returned to both the state and private owners.
Hundreds of unions were banned and the progressive labor legislation of the
Arbenz/Arévalo period was tossed out. During Armas’ tenure, the US poured tens of
millions of dollars in donations into Guatemala and essentially directed economic
planning, which centered on providing a propitious environment for foreign investors
(Jonas 1991). Despite close ties to the US, many militares resented American
involvement in the counter-revolution and nationalistic, anti-gringo tendencies within the
military emerged periodically over the following decades.
In the wake of Operation Success, Guatemalan president Castillo Armas’
personalistic and erratic rule generated increasing opposition from the oligarchy and
within the military. In 1957, he was shot and killed by an army guard. The decision by his
successor, General Manuel Ydígoras Fuentes (1958-1963), to allow US troops to train for
the Bay of Pigs invasion on Guatemalan soil prompted a coup attempt in 1960 by junior
officers, launched in the name of "social justice, a just distribution of national wealth"
and opposition to the "imperialist gringos" (Schirmer 1998:15). The coup was suppressed
and many of its leaders court-martialed, but several escaped and formed a nascent
guerrilla movement. Guerrilla agitation and rural unrest coalesced into an armed uprising
in 1962. This first phase of guerrilla warfare was crushed by a counterinsurgency
program financed and directed by the US (Jonas 2000); American military aid
exceeded $500 per soldier by 1965 (Handy 1984:156). Between 1963 and 1969, as many
as 30,000 people were murdered by the Guatemalan regime and thousands more
disappeared or were sent into exile. With US guidance, members of the coffee elite
formed death squads to assassinate or “disappear” any perceived threats. The squads,
while nominally civilian, in fact served as an “integral part of the official security forces”
(Jonas 1991:6).
Guatemala’s “ten years of spring” laid the bases for armed opposition and for
political control by the military by expanding and consolidating the Armed Forces. The
1945 constitution established the Army's independence from the executive; attempting to
depoliticize the military, Arévalo established the Consejo Superior de Defensa Nacional,
a body with greater power than the defense minister. In the post-Arbenz period, the
Armed Forces turned this power toward the goals of reversing the revolution and battling
“communism.” Anti-communism became the central concern of the Guatemalan elite as
well, for whom the primary lesson of the previous ten years was that democracy led to
radicalism and land reform. Like the Salvadoran uprising of 1932, the Arbenz/Arevalo
period would hereafter serve the Guatemalan military as a threat to leverage greater
bargaining room vis-à-vis the economic elite. Not all of the changes during the
Revolutionary period could be reversed, however. Hundreds of thousands of peasants had
been mobilized and politicized by outreach efforts during the agrarian reform. Economic
policies aimed at diversifying the economy contributed to a substantial broadening of
Guatemala’s export portfolio. Import-substitution industrialization policies continued into
the post-Revolutionary period, although the emphasis of these policies mutated from
economic nationalism to attracting foreign capital (Jonas 1991).
Institutional Military Rule
In El Salvador, a similar democratic opening was cut short. Facing a broad-based
opposition movement spearheaded by an increasingly powerful class of State technocrats
with allies in both the urban middle class and modernizing segments of the elite,
Martinez renounced the presidency in 1944. His successor announced plans to hold
elections, and a flurry of political organization resulted in the creation of seven new
political parties. When a leftist and vocally anti-military party emerged as the likely
winner, conservative officers, in alliance with hard-right elites, overthrew the government
and cancelled elections. The new leaders cited the example of the 1932 uprising to justify
the coup, citing the dangers of “anarchic ferment” (Caceres 1979:42). Junior officers and
their civilian allies retook control in a 1948 coup, the so-called “October Revolution”.
However, this second coup did not open a path civilian rule. Instead, the coup marked the
rise of a self-consciously modernizing and determinedly institutional military cadre,
willing to make small concessions to urban popular sectors and increasingly technocratic
in orientation. After some internal power struggles, the post-coup leadership outlined a
path of paternalistic military rule. The new regime promised to diversify the Salvadoran
economy and spread the benefits of economic growth while maintaining military control
through controlled elections dominated by a military party.
In 1949, the Salvadoran military formed the Partido Revolucionario de
Unificación Democrática (PRUD). The “Prudista” governments of Oscar Osorio (19501956) and Jose Maria Lemus (1956-1960) employed the rhetoric of reform, allowed
limited and controlled unionization, and accepted some political competition. However,
the impact of the reforms was minimal in urban areas and no serious attempts to improve
rural conditions were made; oligarchic control in the countryside remained unchallenged.
The economic stresses in the late 1950s led to rising unrest, to which the regime
responded with violent repression. A short-lived reformist civilian/military junta replaced
Lemus after a coup by junior officers in 1960, but was overthrown with US support
within four months. The PRUD was replaced with a new military party, the Partido de
Conciliación Nacional (PCN), which completely dominated Salvadoran politics until the
1980s through its control over state resources, the selective banning and repression of
opposition political parties, and, when needed, voter fraud.
Even as the military consolidated its control over the State, the coffee elite
retained enormous power, particularly over economic policy. Private sector organizations
were granted formal representation in government; from the 1930s to the 1960s,
Cafetalera members were regularly given posts in the ministries of Agriculture, Treasury,
and Foreign Affairs and private sector interests gained control over the newly-formed
Central Bank and Banco Hipotecario. The production and export of coffee was placed in
the hands of the Compañia Salvadoreña de Cafe, beyond the purview of the Ministry of
Agriculture (White, 1973). Furthermore, coffee elites maintained strong informal ties
with military officers, an important channel of power (Johnson 1993).
The Salvadoran path of “controlled reform” under military rule inspired imitators
in Guatemala. Under President Colonel Peralta Azurdia (1963-66), the Guatemalan
military moved toward institutional rule along the Salvadoran model. The Guatemalan
political system solidified into a façade democracy of military presidents known locally
as "electos pero mandatos" (Schirmer 1998). In line with the Alliance for Progress
strategy, Guatemala’s military leaders sought to enhance the stability and legitimacy of
the state through controlled democracy and limited reform. Peralta oversaw a new
constitution that laid the bases for carefully controlled electoral competition and created
the Partido Institucional Democrático (PID) to field military candidates for office. The
PID, however, failed to achieve real dominance as a political party and most elections
involved shifting coalitions among the fragmented, unstable parties of the right. Parties of
the left were banned and even center-left parties, including the staunchly anti-communist
Democracia Cristiana Guatemalteca (DCG), were blocked from competing in elections.
The successive military regimes promised broad-based economic development in
a context of order and fervent anti-communism. Both used the decades of control to
expand State power, enhance military prerogatives, and claim control over some areas
traditionally left to the oligarchy. The developmentalist state meant that the military now
had important economic resources to negotiate with the elite, including credit, licenses,
and concessions, as discussed below. Sporadic guerrilla activity in rural areas served as
justification for a particularly rapacious and ferocious military machinery in Guatemala,
where the post-WWII period witnessed “a positive and systematic arbitration of public
affairs by the military” (Dunkerley 1988:445). In the 1960s the Guatemalan military
created its own bank, bought farms, and established small industrial plants. The Instituto
de Previsión Militar, the military's pension and investment fund, became an independent
source of capital for military investments and through the Cooperación Financiera
Nacional the military directly captured international investment capital, which often came
into Guatemala on favorable terms in exchange for bribes to well-placed military officers.
Military entrepreneurialism and corruption allowed many officers to amass wealth
enough to rival agrarian elites.
The Salvadoran military was far less entrepreneurial, but the elite did cede
political space to a growing State. The “developmentalist” strategy led to sharp increases
in public sector investment in the 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in roads, dams, and
electricity. By the early 1950s, roughly one-third of total investment in El Salvador came
from the public sphere (Bulmer-Thomas 1987:123). The Ministry of Agriculture and
Ranching and the Compañia Salvadoreña de Café were headed for the first time by
members of the military, rather than the coffee elite (White 1973, Andino 1979).
In both nations, however, the legitimacy sought by military parties proved elusive.
Agricultural elites maintained enough influence to block any reforms that threatened to
weaken their control over land and rural labor. Unable or unwilling to implement
structural reforms, the regimes struggled to control periodic waves of popular unrest. The
oligarchy’s refusal to agree to fiscal reform left the state dependent on indirect taxes and
led to fiscal crisis and burgeoning external debt in the 1970s (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). In
response to middle sector demands and US pressure 4, the Salvadoran military moved
half-heartedly toward a corporatist model in the 1960s, attempting to form alliances with
key unions while repressing others, and offered policies to minimize urban unrest,
including a minimum wage law, 40-hour workweek, social security, and subsidies for
education, healthcare, and training. 5 After 1960, the regime allowed greater space for
moderate opposition political parties and a somewhat greater role for the weak
Legislative Assembly. While none of these policies threatened oligarchic control in rural
areas, these moves unnerved the elite (White 1973). Elite intransigence blocked the
modernizing military regimes from implementing substantive tax reforms or the mild
agrarian reform pushed by American advisors (Stanley 1996). More progressive forces
within each nation’s military hoped to weaken agrarian elites through economic
diversification, a central State concern in both nations in the mid-20th century.
Economic Diversification: 1950s-1960s
The 1950s and 60s witnessed significant diversification of production across
Central America spurred by the disruption of global trade during World War II, the
recommendations of United Nation’s Economic Commission on Latin America
(CEPAL), and the formation of the Central American Common Market (CACM). Across
the region, agro-exports grew more diverse as cotton, cattle, and sugar production
expanded in response to favorable international circumstances. 6 The military rulers in
both nations were heavily influenced by the developmentalist ideology of CEPAL and
began to promote import substitution industrialization through tax breaks for certain
industries, Central Banks loans, and the creation of new public bodies. The formation of
the CACM in 1960 spurred industrialization across the region, albeit unevenly. This
diversification was achieved with extensive state support, both direct in the form of credit
from state banks, and indirect in the form of targeted infrastructure projects, exchange
rate manipulation, and tariff policies (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). In Guatemala, foreign-particularly US--investment increased dramatically. Diversification spurred rapid
urbanization and the gradual expansion of urban middle sectors while intensifying rural
poverty and the proletarianization of the agricultural labor force. The post-War period
also witnessed the expansion of the State which began to undermine political stability and
test the oligarchy-military accord.
From the late 1940s to the late 1970s, the land area devoted to cotton increased
over 2000 percent in Guatemala and 600 percent in El Salvador (Theilen 1989:119).
Unlike coffee, a significant portion of both the cotton and sugar crops were dedicated to
the internal market for domestic consumption or as industrial inputs. Cotton production
provided a strong impetus toward export diversification, in particular the export of fibers
and seeds, as an input for textiles, and by spurring production of the chemical fertilizers
and insecticides the crop required. Guatemalan sugar acreage expanded 419 percent
(Brockett 1988:45). Cattle ranching also expanded and meat comprised 6 percent of
agricultural exports by 1973 (Handy 1984:199). Sugar was less important in El Salvador,
comprising only 4.5 percent of extra-regional exports in 1970 (Bulmer-Thomas
1987:188). None of the new crops expanded at the expense of coffee, as land under
coffee cultivation continued to spread in response to high international prices (BulmerThomas 1987).
In both nations the coffee elite used its political and economic power, particularly
control over the banking sector, to capture the benefits of agricultural diversification. The
new crops worsened land concentration. Cotton production was even more concentrated
than coffee--a mere 3.7 percent of Guatemalan cotton farms controlled 80.3 percent of
the land (Brockett 1988:71). By the 1970s, 32 private exporting houses handled 65
percent of Guatemala’s coffee and 47 families controlled some 70 percent of cotton
production (with nearly half in the hands of just 15 families). Ten sugar mills processed
84 percent of sugar (Dunkerley 1988:464); the two largest mills alone handled two-thirds
(Le Bot 1995:75). According to Dosal (1995:5), some 50 Guatemalan families "control
the coffee, sugar, and cotton industries, export houses, banks, industries, automobile
dealerships, hotels, insurance agencies, and construction firms.”
While definitive statistics are scarce, the available information on elite ownership
patterns in El Salvador paints a similar picture of economic injustice (see, for example,
Colindres 1977, Sevilla 1985, Sebastián 1986, Arias 1988, Montoya 1997 and Cardenál
2002). The Salvadoran oligarchy numbered some 114 families by the 1980s
(Montgomery 1995:69). In 1960, only six countries in the world (one of which was
Guatemala) had higher GINI coefficients in land ownership than El Salvador. Some 0.72
percent of estates controlled over 40 percent of the El Salvador's arable land, including
virtually all of the most productive land (Sebastián 1986:32); the coffee growing sector
had a GINI coefficient of .87. Coffee processing was even more extreme: fifteen families
processed four-fifths of the nation’s coffee crop in 1980 (Paige 1993), while the ten
largest firms handled 75.85 percent of coffee exports (Colindres 1976:471). Furthermore,
these lists overlap--the majority of coffee exporters were also processors. Most major
cotton and sugar producers came from the same oligarchic families as coffee producers
and bank owners. Before 1979, 12 of the 14 largest cotton producing families and nine of
the 10 largest sugar growers in El Salvador were also among the 26 largest coffee
producers (Paige 1997:23). Three large plants monopolized cotton ginning (Torres Rivas
1989:27). The state-created cotton cooperative, COPAL, which held a monopoly over the
ginning and exportation, was entirely dominated by large producers (Thielen 1989).
Diversification also failed to create an independent industrial elite. With the spur
of CACM, industry’s contribution to GDP in Guatemala rose from 10 percent in 1950 to
14 percent in 1970 (Jonas 1991:47). Industry grew slightly faster in El Salvador, from 9.5
to reaching 19.2 percent of GDP in 1971, up from 9.5 percent in 1942. In both nations,
industrial growth was limited and distorted by the continued dominance of agricultural
elites. Tariff and monetary policy favored the agricultural sector and any reforms that
might threaten agro-exports were ruled out. As elsewhere in Central America, most of the
new industries were final touch, capital intensive and dependent on foreign capital and/or
imported inputs (see Burke 1976, Sevilla 1984, Weeks 1985).
In Guatemala, the agro-elite did not aggressively pursue opportunities in industry
(preferring to dedicate their enormous profits to luxury consumption) hence
industrialization relied heavily on foreign investment. Foreign investment in Central
America doubled over the course of the 1960s, from $388 million in 1959 to $755 million
in 1969 (Marti 1994:95) with Guatemala capturing nearly half (cited in Le Bot 1995:43,
n.8). By 1968, 86 percent of investment in Guatemalan industry came from US
companies or their subsidiaries (Jonas 1991:49) and most large firms were controlled by
foreign capital (Black 1984:27). The few Guatemalan industrialists maintained strong ties
to agro-export and industrialization did not create a significant independent elite faction.
Without any serious attempt to enlarge the domestic market, which would have required
land reform, the industrial sector remained small and never surpassed 16 percent of GDP.
Industrial production, particularly that by American firms, was capital-intensive and
failed to generate significant employment (Jonas 1991). American firms repatriated
profits and most industries were heavily reliant on imported intermediary goods, hence
balance of payments deteriorated.
While the economy grew more diverse, elite demands on the State remained
largely static. The Guatemalan agro-export elite lost none of its interest in the superexploitation of the rural population. The foreign-dominated industrial sector was not
geared toward the internal market and was primarily concerned with suppressing wages
and unionization. Hence, the American business community united with the Guatemalan
elite to block popular threats to military rule and mild proposals for tax, land, or labor
reform. AMCHAM joined CACIF in labeling all such proposals “communist” and
encouraging violent repression of union activity (Black 1984). Elite opposition to fiscal
reform left Guatemala with one of the least equitable tax structures in the world and led
to recurrent fiscal crises through the post-war period.
Unlike their Guatemalan peers, the Salvadoran coffee elite moved aggressively to
capitalize on new markets. The coffee aristocracy continued to control access to export
channels and, more importantly, to credit, 7 which allowed a small number of families to
monopolize the new markets. Until 1979, four of the largest banks (Salvadoreño,
Comercio, Agrícola Comercial, and Capitalizador) were controlled by members of the
agro-export sector (Cardenál 2002). As in Guatemala, industrialization was limited and
distorted by the State’s preferential treatment of the agro-export sector (Bulmer-Thomas
1987, Menjívar 1988). Unlike Guatemala, however, the Salvadoran industry was largely
a in the hands of nationals. Although El Salvador experienced a substantial increase in
foreign direct investment, which rose 49 percent between 1959 and 1969 (Cardenál
2002:64), the nation’s share of FDI was quite low relative to other nations of the region.
Furthermore most the investment came in association with the agro-export elite (Gordon
1989). Foreign capital did not emerge as a politically powerful, independent pressure
group as in Guatemala. The leaders of the industrial sector were predominantly members
of the agro-export oligarchy, including ten of the dozen largest investors (Sevilla 1984).
According to Montgomery's (1995:69) calculations, by the 1980s the Salvadoran
oligarchy controlled 84.5 percent of capital investment. The 114 oligarchic families
controlled (that is, held more than 50 percent of stock) of some 57 percent of all
sociedades anónimas, including 100 percent of very large corporations (those that control
more than five million colons or roughly $570,000) (Sevilla 1984:179). The sector was
also extremely concentrated: by the 1980s, some 97 percent of El Salvador's
manufacturing businesses qualified as micro or small, yet a handful of large firms
completely dominated the sector and the GINI coefficient in manufacturing was a striking
0.91 (Sevilla 1984:167). In Torres Rivas’ words, the Salvadoran coffee elite became a
“three-footed beast”, with a foot in export agriculture, one in industry, and one in finance
(cited in Paige 1997:82). By the late 1970s, 19 families, owners of the nation’s largest
beneficios, owned or co-owned 13 of the nation’s largest 20 industrial firms and
dominated 6 of the largest banks (Pelupessy 1987: 73).
In El Salvador those elites whose interests remained solely in coffee growing
progressively lost influence to the diversified agro-industrial/industrial/financial core. In
1961, Salvadoran coffee processors and exporters created a new organization, the
Asociación de Beneficiadores y Exportadores de Café (ABECAFE), to represent their
interests. ABECAFE quickly eclipsed the Cafetalera, which represented the few
oligarchic families engaged solely in coffee growing. By the 1970s, ABECAFE
represented the country's largest 42 processors, responsible for 60 percent of all coffee
processing and 80 percent of coffee exports (Johnson 1998:124). In the small commerce
sector a number of Palestinian immigrant families grew increasingly wealthy. By the late
1970s, these families owned some three quarters of assets in the commerce sector and a
third of service and construction sectors, though these sectors remained quite small
(Dunkerley 1988:345). Through the 1970s Salvadoran oligarchy dismissively referred to
the Palestinians as “Los Turcos” and made no attempt to integrate them into elite family
networks (see Garcia Guevara 2007). The Turcos remained outside of the leadership of
the major private sector organizations, which were dominated by agro-exporters, but did
gain a foothold in the relatively weak Cámara de Comercio e Industria de El Salvador
(CCIE).
Tensions within the elite produced by diversification were mitigated through the
creation of new peak business associations in both nations. In 1957, Guatemalan
producers formed the Comité Coordinadora de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales,
Industriales, y Financieras (CACIF) as a pressure group (entidad de choque) with a sixmonth presidency that rotates among the presidents of the affiliates, the Chambers of
Tourism, Construction, Commerce, Finance, Industry, Agriculture, and the Sugar
Association. AGA remained outside CACIF, relative to which it steadily lost influence.
Alongside CACIF, the American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM), formed in 1961
to represent US business owners in Guatemala, became a powerful voice in Guatemalan
politics. In El Salvador the now-diversified elite formed a peak business organization, the
Asociación Nacional de la Empresa Privada (ANEP) in 1966. Within a few years, ANEP
had established veto power over the military's candidates for presidential elections
(Johnson 1998). ANEP was given three positions in the leadership of the Central Bank,
which De Sebastián (1986) maintains gave the private sector more control over the Bank
than the government. In 1960s and '70s, members of the expanding Asociación
Salvadoreña de Industriales (ASI) headed the Ministries of Economy and Planning.
Progressive forces in both countries hoped that economic diversification would
weaken the agricultural elite and create a powerful industrial sector. Industrial elites, it
was hoped, would favor the land and labor reforms needed to create a strong internal
market and might eventually serve as the political counterweight to the conservative
agro-export elite. However the limited and distorted nature of diversification dashed these
hopes. In both nations, the small elite retained or enhanced its power and lost none of its
interest in cheap land and labor and the repression of dissent. However, the economic
restructuring of the mid-20th century had dramatic effects on the composition and living
conditions of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran masses.
Rural Impoverishment and Urban Opposition: 1950s-1960s
In both nations, the industrial workforce expanded as did the urban middle class,
although both remained small in absolute terms. The effects on rural populations,
however, were devastating. The expansion of the new agro-export crops came largely at
the expense of peasant smallholdings, greatly increasing rural landlessness and insecurity.
Because ranching requires minimal labor and both cotton and sugar production is highly
mechanized, the new exports did little to expand permanent rural employment. Coffee
producers worsened unemployment by reducing their permanent colono workforce.
In Guatemala, the expansion of cotton in the Pacific lowlands and of cattle
ranching in the Peten and land grabs along the Northern Transversal Strip (see below)
displaced indigenous communities, deprived the landless of an important agricultural
frontier, and worsened Guatemala’s historic land concentration. According to the 1979
agricultural census, some 1,360 properties larger than 450 hectares comprised two-thirds
of the nation's agricultural land (Le Bot 1995:49). On the other end of the scale, some
417,000 minifundios made up 80 percent of farms but took up less than ten percent of
farmland--generally the worst quality land (ibid). By the late 1970s, 90 percent of the
highland population lacked sufficient land to meet basic needs (Dunkerley 1988:473).
According to a 1982 USAID study, Guatemala had the highest GINI coefficient of land
inequality in Latin America (Hough, et. al. 1982:2). By 1965 some 60 percent of the
economically active rural population in Guatemala relied on seasonal migration to the
coasts (Brockett 1988:86) and Guatemala’s migratory labor force was the largest in the
world as a percentage of population (Paige 1997:361). The World Bank estimated that by
the early 1970s rural unemployment stood at 42 percent of the workforce (cited in
Brockett 1988:85).
In El Salvador in the period 1946-1971, the share of total income going to the
bottom 60 percent of the population dropped from 32.2 to 19.8 percent (CEPAL cited in
Dunkerley 1988:178). The percentage of rural dwellers without access to land
skyrocketed from 21 percent in 1961 to 41 percent in 1975 to a shocking 60 percent in
1980 (Brockett 1988:44-45). Uniquely in the region, the expansion of cotton in El
Salvador closed the nation’s last fertile agricultural frontier (Thielen 1989). Furthermore,
the expansion of seasonal employment wrought by the diversification of agriculture was
unable to keep pace with population growth (Torres Rivas 1989), and the incomes of
Salvadoran landless agricultural workers were the lowest in the region (Bulmer-Thomas
1987:162). The expansion of export agriculture came at the expense of domestic use
agriculture, which declined sharply in the 1950s and 60s (Thielen 1989), necessitating
heavy reliance on imported foodstuffs (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). A brief war with
Honduras in 1969 resulted in the expulsion of over 100,000 land-starved Salvadorans
from Honduran territory, worsening rural insecurity.
In both nations, rural immiseration and modest industrialization fueled rapid
urbanization. Guatemala’s urban population expanded from 25 percent in 1950 to 40
percent in 1980 (Brockett 1988:84); over the same period, the Salvadoran urban
population grew from 18 percent to 44 percent (Dunkerley 1988:172). In both nations,
the industrial sector failed to absorb excess labor; at the height of industrialization in the
1960s urban job growth was half the rate of urban population growth (ibid). By 1975
industrial workers comprised only 11.5 percent of the workforce in Guatemala, and most
worked for small, artisanal enterprises (Dunkerley 1988:207). The Salvadoran industrial
sector was slightly larger, employing 20.9 percent of the workforce in 1971, up from 11.4
percent in 1951 (Griffith and Gates 2004:72).
The failure to spread the benefits of economic growth and the growing
desperation of rural dwellers generated increasing anger and frustration. As the limits of
this type of developmentalism became apparent in the 1970s, pressures on the
Guatemalan and Salvadoran regimes began to build from all sides, with explosive
consequences.
Drift toward Civil War: 1970s
The Salvadoran-Honduran “Soccer war” of 1969 led to Honduras’ withdrawal
from, and the subsequent collapse of, the CACM. Efforts to revive regional integration
were defeated by economic elites, who were unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to
deepen industrialization (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). The end of the CACM and the 1973 oil
crisis squeezed industrial profits and led to even greater concentration of firms in the
sector (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). While high agro-export prices kept the economies
growing for the first half of the decade, real wages for workers began to fall. In El
Salvador, real wages fell 22 percent from 1970 to 1978 (Bulmer-Thomas 1987:219), per
capita income declined each year from 1970-1974, and inflation reached 60 percent by
1974 (Ripton 2006:245). In the late 70s, international prices for key crops began to fall.
After 1977, coffee prices begin to slide and between 1978 and 1981 terms of trade for the
region declined nearly 30 percent (Bulmer-Thomas 1987:239).GDP growth slowed
significantly after 1978 before turning negative in 1981 (Dunkerley 1988:212).
Stagnation and the evident failures of both the Guatemalan and Salvadoran
military regimes’ economic policies led to growing popular unrest and alienated elite
support. Arana, Laugerud, and Lucas García came to power through coalitions with
individual landowners and business associates, rather than with the broad support of the
military high command, signaling a significant weakening of the institutional coherence
of the Armed Forces. The three Guatemalan military regimes of the 1970s were marked
by increasing corruption and declining legitimacy. As the economy began to stagnate and
then contract, popular mobilization, strikes, and protests surged. The military responded
to the growing unrest with ferocious repression, severely damaging its international
reputation. Under Presidents Arana Osorio (1970-74), Laugerud García (1974-78), and
Lucas García (1978-82), both state expenditure and corruption reached unprecedented
levels. The 1970s regimes presided over a significant expansion of the public sector and
attempts at statist development policies including price controls, centralized planning,
and the nationalization of strategic industries. Under Arana--popular with agricultural
elite for breaking the back of the insurgency--these policies for the most part did not hurt
agrarian elites and their relationship with the regime was generally cooperative
(McCleary 1999). Under Laugerud and Lucas García, however, corruption, clientelism,
and military entrepreneurialism strained the military/oligarchy relationship and alienated
many junior officers. Business interests 8 helped the Guatemalan military exercise some
independence from its other traditional sponsor, the US. Some backroom maneuvering
aside, the Carter administration stopped providing aid to the Guatemalan military in 1977
as the regime refused to accede to human rights provisions attached to the aid. Massive
public infrastructure projects, including roads, hydroelectric plants, and ports undertaken
by the Laugerud and Lucas regimes were undermined by blatant corruption.
The economic elite grew increasingly resentful of the military’s entrepreneurial
endeavors, as well as incidences of military involvement in crimes against them. These
deals were seen by elites as only one part of a generalized corruption that had reached
overwhelming levels by 1982, a situation which contributed greatly to the elite’s embrace
of the military’s withdrawal from power four years later. Capital flight reached
unprecedented levels and long-term investment began to fall. In 1974, the military relied
on blatant fraud to ensure Laugerud’s election, as the Social and Christian Democratic
candidate, General Efrain Rios Montt, was the probable true winner. By 1978, the regime
had lost any semblance of popular legitimacy. Though a mere 15 percent of the electorate
bother to vote in the 1978 elections (Jonas 1991), the military again resorted to fraud to
ensure Lucas García’s victory.
Denied political power and facing a falling wages and rising inflation, the urban
middle and popular sectors grew increasingly restive. Strikes and protests after 1973
drew support from industrial workers, public employees, impoverished shantytown
dwellers, and middle-class faculty and university students. Popular mobilization surged in
the wake of a massive earthquake 1976 that killed 25,000 people and left 1.25 million
homeless (Jonas 1991:95). With a strike at a Coca-Cola plant in 1976, the radical Comité
Nacional de Unidad Sindical (CNUS) emerged as the leader of a newly-energized labor
movement. Unions representing the proletarianized agricultural workers on the banana,
sugar, and cotton plantations also expanded and became increasingly active. Between
1975 and 1978, the unionized portion of the workforce increased from 1.6 to 10 percent
(Dunkerley 1991:149). A 1978 strike by public sector workers involved 85,000 people,
many of whom were members of the middle class (ibid). Even more threatening to the
regime was the resurgence of rural opposition. By 1972, the rural guerrilla movement had
resurfaced; the military responded with a counterinsurgency campaign so brutal that it
drove many indigenous into guerrilla hands. In the wake of the 1978 daylight massacre of
over 100 Kekchi Indians in Panzos, indigenous support for the guerilla movement surged.
By the early 1980s, the guerilla forces numbered some 7,500, supported by a half a
million peasants (Perera 1993:10). In 1978, a clandestine umbrella organization, the
Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC), formed and began to ally with the guerrilla forces.
Indigenous support for the guerrillas signaled a major shift in the countryside, results of
the land dispossession and semi-proletarianization of the rural labor force as well as the
penetration and radicalization of indigenous communities by outside organizers over
previous 30 years. By 1980, the guerillas operated in half the national territory and in
1982 the varied forces united under the umbrella of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional
Guatemalteca (URNG).
Rising unrest damaged the already battered economy. Between 1976 and 1981,
foreign capital investment in Guatemala fell over 90 percent (Handy 1984:202). Tourism,
the second largest source of foreign exchange, also began a steady decline after 1979
(Handy 1984). Due to declining revenue and capital flight, foreign reserves fell from
$744 million to $363 million between 1979 and 1981 (Dunkerley 1988:488) and the
budget deficit reached $362 million by 1980 (Handy 1984:202). By the 1980s, economic
conditions for most Guatemalans were desperate. Open unemployment stood at 28
percent (Dunkerley 1988:210) and 70 percent of the population was unable to meet basic
needs (CEH 2006:19). Guatemalans had a life expectancy of 56, 18 percent school
attendance at secondary age, and a 56 percent literacy rate, all the lowest in region
(Dunkerley 1988:214). Guatemala also had the lowest ratio of taxation to GDP of any
Central American republic and the state’s expenditure on education was less than half as
great as the next lowest country, El Salvador (Dunkerley 1988:210).
By early 1980s, the deep divisions between the Guatemalan military and
economic elites over counter-insurgency strategy and economic management came to a
head. By 1983, the URNG had been effectively neutralized; hence the counterinsurgency
state lacked a raison d’etat. A growing sector of the military questioned the tenability of
continued rule, as declining revenues coupled with a lack of access to international credit
called into question the state’s ability to operate (McCleary 1999). When Lucas García's
unpopular Minister of Defense, General Angel Aníbal Guevara, won the 1982 elections,
the reformist segments of the military began to mobilize. It was widely recognized at the
time that Guevara won through fraud, making the 1982 elections the third patently
fraudulent election in a row. Before Guevara could take power, Lucas García was
overthrown by the reformists and replaced with a military junta led by Rios Montt. The
coup was supported by the economic elite and by the US government, which was
searching for a path to restoring military aid. Rios Montt launched a spectacularly viscous
counter-insurgency campaign that essentially defeated the guerrilla forces within 2 years
and decapitated urban popular organizations. By 1983, military campaigns left 100140,000 dead, another 40,000 “disappeared”, created over a million refugees, and
destroyed 440 indigenous villages (Yasser 1997:226). In August 1983, Rios Montt was
replaced by his Defense Minister, Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores and the military began
a gradual retreat from public administration in preparation for a transfer to civilian rule in
1986. In 1986, Christian Democratic candidate Vinicio Cerezo became the first civilian
president in 15 years.
In El Salvador, too, the 1970s witnessed economic stress, declining government
legitimacy, and increasingly organized and radical popular opposition. The military state
responded with both attempts at reform, which infuriated elites, and with ramped up
repression, which damaged the military’s international reputation. Elites’ continued
unwillingness to countenance significant concessions to the opposition winnowed the
military’s options down to repression. Strikes and protests escalated through the late
1960s, as a number of radical and vocal popular organizations emerged.# The expanding
urban proletariat and the small but growing middle class began to support the newlypermitted opposition political parties, the most important of which was the moderate
Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC), founded in 1960. PDC president Jose Napoleon
Duarte became the popular mayor of San Salvador in 1964, serving for three consecutive
terms. In the 1972 presidential elections, Duarte’s victory at the polls was thwarted by
blatant electoral fraud in favor of the military candidate. A wave a repression followed
and Duarte was arrested, severely beaten and exiled to Venezuela.
In the wake of the 1972 electoral fraud, much of the popular movement gave up
on an electoral path to power and began to push for revolutionary change. Labor, peasant,
professional, and student groups united in 1974 under the banner of the Frente de Acción
Nacional Unificada (FAPU) and, in 1975 broke again to join the Bloque Popular
Revolucionario (BPR), allied to the small but growing guerrilla forces. In the
countryside, the increasing immiseration, the proletarianization of the rural workforce,
and the spread of radical Christian Base Communities fueled unrest and agitation. In the
face of growing pressure for land reform, the military began to seriously consider land
reform, holding seminars on the issue in 1973 (Browning 1983). In 1975, President
Molina launched a relatively minor attempt at land reform, a move that received tepid
support from some industrialists (Menjívar 1980). However, a vitriolic public campaign
spearheaded by the agro elite and coordinated through ANEP stopped the proposal in its
tracks. Once again, elite intransigence prevented the military from responding to popular
demands and the political situation deteriorated steadily over the decade. Antigovernment protests in the capital in 1975 and 1977 were met by open fire.
In 1977, the agro-export faction of the oligarchy helped manufacture the openly
fraudulent election of hard-right General Carlos Humberto Romero, who responded to
protests with ramped-up repression. A hard-right faction among the agro-elite--primarily
coffee, sugar and cotton growers--organized and funded death squads targeting presumed
leftists (Montgomery 1995). The 1977 Law for the Defense and Guarantee of Public
Order removed nearly all legal restrictions on violence against civilians. Both ANEP and
ABECAFE were vocal supporters of violent counterinsurgency tactics (Dunkerley 1988).
By 1979, there were hundreds of victims of political violence a month (Dunkerley
1988:378). Catholic priests were a frequent target of repression and murder, which
severely injured the regime’s international reputation.
This second fraudulent election and Romero’s strategy of repression over reform
convinced the middle class opposition, as well as reformist junior military officers, that
the electoral route to civilian rule was hopeless. Peasant, student groups and more radical
unions begin to coordinate protests and the urban labor movement grew increasingly
radical and began to make inroads with increasingly proletarianized peasantry and to
align with student radicals. Repression and electoral fraud helped push these popular
movements into alignment with the small extant guerrilla forces (Wood 2000). In the
wake of the Nicaraguan revolution, the US government began to push for structural
change and for Romero to step down. Because of the leftist influence on the uprisings, El
Salvador became a major focus in the American Cold War containment policy. In
October 1979, a group of junior officers calling themselves Juventud Militar led a coup to
overthrow Romero and begin a transition to civilian rule. The coup had support from the
PDC and other parties of the left, many members of the Catholic clergy, workers as well
as young officers and state technocrats (Johnson 1993). The move was also clearly
supported by the United States, which had concluded that reform and limited democracy
were the only way to avert revolution.
The 1979 coup marked a sharp rupture in the 50-year-old military/oligarchy
alliance. The more radical members of the new civilian/military junta were quickly
marginalized and eventually pushed out of power and military repression escalated to
unprecedented and atrocious levels in the early 1980s. Alongside repression, however,
the junta instituted sweeping reforms--including a US-designed land reform and the
nationalization of the banking and export sectors--infuriating most of the economic elite.
The hard-right began to move money out of the country while ramping up their support
for the now-ubiquitous death squads. Between 1977 and 1984, capital flight reached
between $300 and $700 million (Pelupessy and Uggen 1991). Although information on
the inner workings of the oligarchy is hard to verify, several analysts suggest that the
coup was supported by some key members of the private sector, particularly from the
commerce and industrial sectors (Gordon 1980, Menjívar 1980). As described above,
however, El Salvador’s industrial elite shared ownership and blood ties with the agroexport elite and did not comprise a powerful or even distinct faction of the oligarchy,
while the commerce sector remained small and politically marginal. The tenor of ANEP’s
public campaigns in the weeks and months leading up to the coup suggests that the bulk
of the oligarchy continued to favor repression over reform. The revolution in Nicaragua,
however, had convinced key segments of the Armed Forces that a purely military
response to the growing unrest could provoke a guerrilla victory that would destroy the
institution.
After the coup, the Salvadoran military was dependent on its new sponsor, the
United States, for whom thwarting revolution in El Salvador had become a major
concern. The post-coup regimes were obliged to follow the American counterinsurgency
strategy, which included a transition to civilian rule under PDC leadership in 1984.
During the first half of the decade, the public face of the oligarchy, ANEP, remained
united against the junta and PDC governments. However, the combination of the junta
reforms, a brutal ten-year civil war fought primarily in the countryside, and collapsing
cotton and coffee prices in the 1980s altered the bases of oligarchic economic
accumulation. By the end of the decade, agro-exports had lost their central role in the
Salvadoran economy and the relatively few agro-elite families that had not diversified in
the post-war period disappeared from the economic and political map. However, the
reforms did not hurt most coffee processors or exporters while the economic impacts on
the elite of the nationalization of the banking sector were minimal. Hence, most of the
Salvadoran elite maintained its enormous wealth and unity. Remittance streams from the
million-plus Salvadorans who fled the country during the war led to booms in commerce
and construction, elevating a number of the “Turcos” families into the ranks of the
nation’s wealthiest and gaining them powerful role in the ANEP. By the latter half of the
1980s, the Salvadoran elite reorganized economically and politically to regain its
dominance over the economy and to reclaim direct state control through its support for a
new political party, the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA), which would go on
to dominate Salvadoran politics for almost two decades.
Conclusion
Guatemala and El Salvador emerged from colonial rule without coherent
dominant elites, functional State apparatuses, or (particularly in racially divided
Guatemala) an inclusive conception of Nation. In El Salvador, the immediate postIndependence period was marked by chaos; in Guatemala, order came in the form of
military dictatorships. As coffee rose to dominate both economies, coffee growers
coalesced into powerful elites whose narrow interests would dominate politics in both
nations for decades. To maintain their control over vast expanses of land and cheap labor
in the face of growing opposition, elites in both nations turned to military rulers.
Traumatic experiences with popular discontent in El Salvador in 1931 and Guatemala
from 1944-1954 sealed the elite pact with military forces.
Successive military governments in the two nations were able to leverage the
threat of popular, particularly rural, unrest to in power and expand institutional
prerogatives. The recurrence of armed opposition from the 1960s on helped the
Guatemalan military amass enormous power and wealth. Military regimes in both nations
failed to establish broad legitimacy, however; this failure led to recurrent crises and at
times violent divisions even within the Armed Forces. The strategies for rule vacillated
between attempts to weaken the agro-elite and calm popular discontent through selective
concessions and periods of ferocious repression. Rural unrest, particularly problematic in
Guatemala where growers relied on forced labor tactics, was largely contained until the
1970s through outright oppression. Urban opposition, especially among the middle class,
organized labor, and university students, proved more challenging, as these groups had
greater connections to media, international pressure groups, and occasionally more
moderate elites. Military rulers tended to respond to urban unrest with mild reforms and
periodic political openings.
In El Salvador in the late 1970s, the FMLN was able to unite rural and urban
opposition into a broad armed movement. Neither limited reform nor repression could
silence the revolt and the nation descended into civil war. By 1979, key segments of the
Salvadoran military understood that the strategies of the last half-century were now
ineffective and that the institution’s pact with elites left them vulnerable to a revolution
that would destroy the institution itself. The post-coup reforms, particularly the land
reform long blocked by elites, helped create the conditions for a radically modified
economy and economic elite. Power within the economic elite moved away from planters
dependent on labor-repressive agriculture toward financial, industrial, and commercial
elites. By the 1990s, these changes made electoral democracy possible in El Salvador.
In Guatemala, united urban and rural popular groups proved more problematic,
give the ethno-linguist divide between the largely indigenous rural and largely mestizo
urban populations. The URNG never captured significant urban support; as a result the
violence in Guatemala did not reach the level of civil war. Although the military
withdrew from direct control, significant authoritarian enclaves remained. Unbroken by
land reform and civil war, Guatemala’s conservative planter elite retained enormous
power and the elite was unable to unite behind a political party. As a result, Guatemala
continues to struggle with a fragmented and unstable party universe and a dangerously
powerful military.
Endnotes
1
Such an analysis is complicated by the recognition that the categories oligarchy and
military (to say nothing of popular sectors or masses) are far from unitary actors. Elites
may be divided by differing bases of accumulation, ethnic and religious affiliations,
regional loyalties, even family or personal networks. The Guatemalan and Salvadoran
militaries are divided into several discrete forces, with differing recruitment
demographics, physical locations, roles, and status and are often split along generational
and class lines. Members of the Salvadoran National Guard--concentrated in rural areas,
marked by both stronger institutional and personal ties to powerful landowners, and paid
up to three times as much as regular soldiers--may have very different interests and
concerns than Army members (Stanley 1996:48). As the history presented here
highlights, such divisions can dramatically influence political outcomes.
2
As Paige (1997:26) points out for Central America as a whole, "The absence of
effective markets for securities, capital and credit, and the lack of a stable legal
environment for business have made family ties the best guarantee of contractual
compliance and therefore the sine qua non of business success." At least until the 1980s,
furthermore, "the absence of any effective parliamentary institutions, mass parties, or
even associational interest groups has left families as the only institution through which
political power can be acquired" (1997:26-27). As Casaús Arzu (1992) points out,
endogamous marriages among the elite serve the dual function of conserving or
enhancing familial wealth and maintaining racial purity. The Guatemalan elite is
particularly racially self-identified and confronting the so-called “indigenous problem” is
a powerful underlying theme in elite identity.
3
The United Fruit Company was extremely well connected to the Eisenhower
administration in Washington. The company counted among its stockholders John Foster
Dulles, President Eisenhower's Secretary of State, Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA and
Henry Cabot Lodge, US Ambassador to the United Nations. See especially Immerman
(1982), Schlesinger and Kinzer (1982), and Dosal (1993).
4
Compared to other Central American nations, El Salvador had been relatively free of
American interventionism until the 1960s. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution,
however, American interest and involvement increased dramatically. As in the rest of the
region, Alliance strategies in El Salvador combined reformism with counter-insurgency
military training in order to undermine radical movements. In 1968, with the assistance of
the US Green Berets the military formed the Democratic Nationalist Organization
(ORDEN) to gather intelligence in rural areas and repress any left-wing organizing, in
which capacity the force was frequently accused of gross violations of human rights.
ORDEN’s reach was both wide and deep; at its peak in the 1970s, the organization
included more than a million Salvadorans, or roughly one-fifth of the nation’s population.
5
The impact of these reforms should not be overstated. The social security program, for
example, covered a mere 5 percent of the labor force and minimum wage laws did not
cover agricultural workers (Bulmer-Thomas 1987:170).
6
While cotton had been planted in Central America during the Colonial period,
production remained limited until the Suez Crisis of 1956. Sugar production boomed
after the repartitioning of the Cuban sugar quota following the Cuban revolution, while
the growth in the cattle industry responded to the burgeoning demands of the American
fast-food industry.
7
For example, Burke (1976) found that 90 percent of agricultural sector credit from 1961
to 1971 went to the four largest agro-export crops (coffee, cotton, sugar, and cattle) and
large producers captured almost the entirety. Even at the height of industrialization, in the
1960s, the agricultural sector actually increased the percentage of credit it captured
(Baylora 1982).
8
The discovery of oil in the north and east of the country in early 1970s along with rising
cattle and mineral prices led to a land grab along the 3,500 square mile Franja
Transversal del Norte (FTN). By 1980, four members of Laugerud and Lucas Garcia
regimes owned some 385,000 acres in the FTN and some 60% of property of Alta
Verapaz was in military hands by 1983 (Dunkerley 1988:467). By 1981, the Guatemalan
military controlled an estimated active capital of $119.2 million, including a publishing
house, cement works, a television channel, sweatshops, fish farms, import-export houses
and credit institutions (Schirmer 1998:19). By 1985, the Banco del Ejército was the
seventh largest in the nation and the military had gained effective control over the
national airline, AVIATECA, the national airport, the phone company, the state
electricity corporation, two armaments factories and the nation’s major ports (Dunkerley
1988).
Sources
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. New York: Verso 1983.
Arias, Salvador. Los subsistemas de agroexportación de El Salvador: El café, el algodón
y el azúcar. San Salvador: UCA Editores 1988.
Barry, Tom. Roots of Rebellion: Land Hunger in Central America. Cambridge: South
End Press 1987.
Baylora, Enrique A. "Reactionary Despotism in Central America," Journal of Latin
American Studies. 15: 295-319, November 1983.
Black, George. Garrison Guatemala. New York: Monthly Review Press 1984.
Brockett, Charles D. Land, Power, and Poverty: Agrarian Transformation and Political
Conflict in Central America. 2nd. Ed., Boulder: Westview Press 1988.
Bulmer-Thomas, Victor. The Political Economy of Central America since 1920.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987.
Cáceres Prendes, Jorge Rafael. “”Consideraciones sobre el discurso político de la
revolución de 1948 en El Salvador,” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos. 5:33-52,
1979.
__________________________“La revolución salvadoreña de 1948: un estudio sobre el
transformismo,” in Jorge Cáceres, Rafael Guido Vejar and Rafael Menjívar, eds., El
Salvador: una historia sin lecciones. Costa Rica: FLACSO 1988.
Cambranes, Julio Castellanos. Coffee and Peasants in Guatemala: The Origins of the
Modern Plantation Economy in Guatemala, 1853-1897. South Woodstock: CIRMA
1985.
Cardenál Izquierdo, Ana Sofia. “La democracia y la tierra: Cambio político en El
Salvador”.Monografías 187, Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas 2002.
Casaús Arzú, Marta Elena. "La metamorfosis de las oligarquías centroamericanas,"
Revista Mexicana de Sociología. 3:69-105, 1992.
_____________________. Guatemala: Linaje y racismo. Guatemala: F&G Editores
2007.
Central Intelligence Agency CIA. “El Salvador” CIA Fact Book. electronic publication.
1997.
Ching, Erik, “Patronage and Politics under General Maximiliano Martínez, 1931-1939”
in Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Leigh Binford, eds. Landscapes of Struggle: Politics,
Society, and Community in El Salvador. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2004.
Colindres, Eduardo. Fundamentos económicos de la burguesía salvadoreña. San
Salvador: UCA Editores 1977.
Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH). Guatemala: Causas y orígenes del
enfrentamiento armado interno. Guatemala: F&G Editores 2000.
Dosal, Paul. “The Political Economy of Guatemalan Industrialization, 1871-1948: The
Career of Carlos P.Novella,” The Hispanic American Historical Review. 68(2):321-358,
1988.
_________. Power in Transition: The Rise of Guatemala’s Industrial Oligarchy, 18711994. Westport: Praeger 1995.
Dunkerley, James. Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America.
New York: Verso 1988.
______________. “Guatemala Since 1930,” ch 4 in Leslie Bethell, ed, Central America
Since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991.
Garcia Guevara, Aldo Vladimir. Military Justice and Social Control: El Salvador, 19311960. Unpublished PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2007.
Giusto, Vicente Jorge and Rolando Iuliano. “Aportes para una historia socio-económica
de El Salvador: Desde la colonia hasta la crisis del mercado común centroamericano,”
Revista de Historia de América, 108:5-71,1989.
Gordon, Sara. Crisis política y guerra en El Salvador. México: Siglo XXI, 1989.
Griffith, Kati and Leslie Gates, “Colonels and Industrial Workers in El Salvador, 19441972: Seeking Societal Support through Gendered Labor Reforms,” in Lauria-Santiago
and Binford, 2004.
Guido Vejar, Rafael. El ascenso del militarismo en El Salvador. San Salvador: UCA
1980
Handy, Jim. The Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala. Boston: South End Press
1984.
_________. “National Policy, Agrarian Reform, and the Corporate Community during
the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944-1954,” Comparative Studies in Society and History,
30(4):698-724, 1988.
Hough, Richard, John Kelly, Steve Miller, Russell DeRossier, Fred L. Mann and Mitchell
Seligson. Land and Labor in Guatemala: An Assessment. Washington D.C.: USAID
1982.
Immerman, Richard. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin:
University of Texas Press 1982.
Johnson, Kenneth. Between Revolution and Democracy: Business Elites and the State in
El Salvador in the 1980s. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Tulane University, 1993.
Jonas, Susanne. Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemala’s Peace Process. Boulder:
Westview 2000.
Lauria-Santiago, Aldo A. An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the
Politics and Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823-1914. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press 1999.
LeBot, Yvon. La guerra en tierras mayas: comunidad, violencia y modernidad en
Guatemala 1970-1992.México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
Lindo-Fuentes, Héctor. Weak Foundations: The Economy of El Salvador in the
Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press 1990.
Mahoney, James, “Radical, Reformist and Aborted Liberalism: Origins of National
Regimes in Central America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 33:221-256, 2001.
Marti, Werner Johannes. The Private Sector, the State, and Economic Development: The
Guatemalan Experience. Unpublished PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at
Austin 1994.
McCleary, Rachel M. Dictating Democracy: Guatemala and the End of Violent
Revolution. Gainsville: University Press of Florida 1999.
McClintock, Michael. State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala. London: Zed
Press 1985.
McCreery, David. Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press
1994.
Menívar, Rafael. Accumulación originaria y desarrollo del capitalismo en El Salvador.
Costa Rica: Educa, 1980.
_____________. "El Salvador: The Smallest Link," Contemporary Marxism. 1:19-28,
1980.
_____________. “Crisis del desarrollismo,” in Cáceres, Guido Vejar and Menjívar.
1988.
Montoya, Aquiles. "La concentración en la indústria manufacturera salvadoreña," ECA.
Septiembre: 598-783 1988.
______________. "La concentración de la actividad económica en El Salvador," ECA.
54(607-608):429-457, 1999.
Montgomery, Tommie Sue. Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution, 2nd
edition. Boulder: Westview 1995.
Muller, Edward N., Mitchell Seligson, and Hung-Der Fu, “Land Inequality and Political
Violence,” American Political Science Review. 83 (2), 1989.
Paige, Jeffery M. Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central
America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1997.
Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkeley: University of
California Press 1993.
Ripton, John, “Export Agriculture and Agrarian Crisis: Salvadoran Peasants and the
Global Market Author(s),” Latin American Perspectives, 33(6):101-135, 2006.
Schlesinger, Stephen and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American
Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press 1982.
Schirmer, Jennifer. A Violence Called Democracy: The Guatemalan Military Project.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1998.
de Sebastián, Luis. "Consideraciones político-económicas sobre la oligarquía en El
Salvador" ch. 3 in El Salvador, estado oligárquico y desarrollo económico-social, 19451979. México: Centro de Investigación y Acción Social 1986.
Sevilla, Manuel. "Visión global sobre la concentración económica en El Salvador,"
Boletín de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales. VII(3) Mayo-Junio 1984.
____________. La concentración económica en El Salvador. Managua: CRIES 1985.
Taracena Arriola, Arturo. Etnicidad, estado y nación en Guatemala, 1808-1944. Antigua:
CIRMA 2002.
Solórzano Fonseca, Juan Carlos. “Pueblos de Indios y explotación en la Guatemala y El
Salvador coloniales,” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos. 8:125-133, 1982.
Stanley, William. The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and
Civil War in El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1996.
Thielen, Frans. “Estudio comparativo del sector algodonero de Nicaragua y El Salvador,”
Wim Pelupessy, ed. La economía agroexportadora en Centroamérica: crecimiento y
adversidad. San Jose: FLACSO 1989.
Tilley, Virginia. Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2005.
Torres Rivas Edelberto. El Estado en Guatemala: orden con progreso?. Guatemala:
PNUD 2010.
___________________. History and Society in Central America. Austin: University of
Texas Press 1993.
___________________. "Perspectivas de la economía agroexportadora en
Centroamérica," ch. 1 in Wim Pelupessy, ed. 1989.
___________________. "Problems of Democracy and Counter-Revolution in
Guatemala," ch. 7 in Wolf Grabendorff, Heinrich-W. Krumwiede, and Jorg Todt, eds.
Political Change in Central America: Internal and External Dimensions. Boulder:
Westview Press 1984.
Weaver, Frederick Stirton. Inside the Volcano: The History and Political Economy of
Central America. Boulder: Westview Press 1994.
Weeks, John. The Economies of Central America. New York: Holmes and Meier 1985.
White, Alastair. El Salvador. New York: Praeger Publishers 1973.
Williams, Robert G. Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press 1986.
________________. States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National
Governments in Central America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1994.
Winson, Anthony. “Class Structure and Agrarian Transition in Central America,” Latin
American Perspectives 5(4), 1978.
Wood, Elisabeth Jean. Forging Democracy From Below: Insurgent Transitions in South
Africa and El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000.
Yasser, Deborah J. Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and
Guatemala, 1870s-1950s. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997.