Coffee production in El Salvador
[2] Since 2000, the industry has been greatly affected by increased competition from other countries on the world market, whose cheaper coffee beans have caused prices to plummet.
[2] Unlike those of Guatemala and Costa Rica, the Salvadoran coffee industry developed largely without the benefit of external technical and financial help.
[2] In the decades prior to the civil conflict of the 1980s, export earnings from coffee allowed growers to expand production, finance the development of a cotton industry, and establish a light manufacturing sector.
[2] After 1979, however, government policies, guerrilla attacks, and natural disasters reduced investment, impeding the coffee industry's growth.
A succession of presidents, nominally both conservative and liberal, throughout the last half of the 19th century supported the seizure of land from individual smallholders and communal owners.
[5] Despite the continued participation of conservatives, however, the period of the establishment of the coffee republic (roughly 1871 to 1927) is described commonly as the era of the liberal state in El Salvador.
Anti-clericalism was a distinctly secondary theme, expressed primarily through social legislation (such as the establishment of secular marriage and education) rather than through the kind of direct action, e.g., repression and expropriation, taken against the church in 19th- and early 20th-century Mexico.
This support, coupled with the humbler and more mundane mechanisms of corruption, ensured the coffee growers of overwhelming influence within the government and the military.
[5] The priorities of the coffee industry dictated a shift in the mission of the embryonic Salvadoran armed forces from external defense of the national territory to the maintenance of internal order.
Suppression of rural dissent was subtle and institutionalized; campesinos generally accepted the status quo because of the implied threat of retaliation from the GN or other military units.
[5] The direct (in the case of the Melendez-Quinonez mini-dynasty) and indirect connections of the presidents of the period with the country's powerful families undoubtedly came into play as well.
Generally speaking, however, the system continued to function without adjustment because it worked well from the perspective of the small percentage of Salvadorans who benefited from it, namely the economic elite, upper-echelon government officials, and the military High Command.
These immigrants, who would eventually come to constitute the bulk of the Salvadoran merchant class, frequently married into the landowning oligarchic families, further diversifying the composition of the elite stratum of society.
Another process worthy of note during this period despite its lack of tangible results was the ongoing series of unification efforts by the Central American states.
Undaunted, the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua formed the "Greater Republic of Central America" (República Mayor de Centroamerica) via the Pact of Amapala (1895).
This union, which had planned to establish its capital city at Amapala on the Golfo de Fonseca, did not survive Tomas Regalado's seizure of power in El Salvador in 1898.
The Ciudad Barrios Cooperative, for instance, operating in the Cacahuatique mountains of eastern El Salvador since the late 1970s, was producing approximately 8.5 million pounds of coffee annually until 2003.
