Page 18 - Marlie Burton Roche : Landscape and Bread
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richness’ was well on its way           based economy of El Salvador and in 1932 peasants and workers,
              to becoming one of America’s            who were being forced to work at starvation wages, armed

              worst civic and environmental           themselves with machetes and sticks and rose up in rebellion
              catastrophes. Privatization of          against the plantation owners. The fledgling Communist party,

              land was proclaimed by law              which was not originally involved in planning the revolt, tried to
              and the oligarchy, the “fourteen  help by channeling the mass uprising towards the formation of

              families”, came to own all the          a more progressive state. At this point, the oligarchy, led by the
              best land which they turned             Melendez-Quinones families, had the option of implementing

              into plantations to grow coffee         economic and democratic reforms. Instead they chose genocide.
              as a cash crop for export to            The peasant uprising lasted for only a few days.  Defeat came

              foreign markets. Communal               even without intervention of U.S marines who waited on ships
              property was outlawed, and              just outside the port of Acajutla in case the government troops

              landlords were authorized               required support in their slaughter. In less than a month more
              to expropriate the peasant’s            than 30,000 Salvadoran peasants, including women and children,

              lands, condemning them to a             were assassinated in cold blood by the army and by paramilitary
              life of servitude. The society          groups that had been organized and paid for by the coffee

              became one of ‘haves’ and               barons.  Farabundo Martí, Secretary General of the Salvadoran
              ‘have-nots’. This situation             Communist Party, was captured and executed. El Salvador

              was exacerbated by the U.S.             became a military dictatorship. Militarism was institutionalized
              adoption of an aggressive               by the armed forces while the business stratum, the oligarchy,

              counterrevolutionary                    expanded and diversified the plantation system and export
              foreign policy aimed                    economics, adding sugar and cotton to the cash-crop enterprizes.

              towards turning the Central             More and more peasants were driven off their land as foreign
              American region into the                trade and banking became privatized. U.S. investors moved in and

              United States’ “backyard”, a            the gape between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ widened.
              zone they aspired to control

              economically, politically, and            Wage earners were paid less than a dollar a day and vast
              militarily. As stated in the            numbers of Salvadorans were living at or below subsistence level.

              Monroe Doctrine, U.S. policy            The estates of the very rich, less than 2% of the population, were
              was to be, “Central America             encircled by high walls and well separated from the barrancas,

              for the North Americans.” All           the gullies or ravines, where the poor were crowded together
              the root causes for the future          by the thousands in shacks of cardboard and surrounded by

              conflicts in twentieth century          garbage. There was no healthcare available for the poor and very
              El Salvador were in place.              little food. More and more people descended into a situation of

                                                      unemployment and impoverishment and became vulnerable to
                The worldwide depression              extreme exploitation. By the late 1970s somewhere around 60%

              in 1929 shattered the coffee            of rural families were either landless or were living on inadequate







              14     MARLIE BURTON-ROCHE      LANDSCAPE & BREAD
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