Coffee becomes the last of El Salvador's…
1888 CE to 1899 CE
Coffee becomes the last of El Salvador's great monoculture export commodities.
Its widespread cultivation had begun in the mid-nineteenth century as the world demand for indigo dried up.
The huge profits that it yields serves as a further impetus for the process whereby land becomes concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy.
Although legend and radical propaganda have quantified the oligarchy at the level of fourteen families, a figure of several hundred families lies much closer to the truth.
A succession of presidents, nominally both conservative and liberal, throughout the last half of the nineteenth century supports the seizure of land from individual smallholders and communal owners.