Export Agriculture and Agrarian Crisis

Abstract

Integration of El Salvador's agrarian resources into the global economy has contributed to periodic agrarian crises, including the 1932 massacre of 10,000 peasants and the civil war of the 1980s, in which 75,000 perished. The formation of the state, the emergence of an oligarchy, the role of the military, and the poverty of the peasants are shaped by commercial agricultural production for the global market. Recent neoliberal and “free-trade” policies are a neglected part of this history. Whereas coffee exports dominated the Salvadoran economy throughout much of the twentieth century, emigration of rural people is now the nation's main export, and there are significant problems with remittances as a development strategy. Liberal theory generally fails to recognize that integrating resources of a poor country into the global economy is as much a political project as it is an economic one.