Coffee becomes the last of El Salvador's…

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.