Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

A single event, known as La Matanza, or the Massacre, defined modern Salvadoran history. On January 22, 1932, agricultural laborers in the western part of the country, armed with machetes and hoes, staged an insurrection against the nation’s coffee-growing elite, which had been subjugating the rural poor for decades. In the late 1870s, much of the arable land in El Salvador had been in public hands. It belonged to individual communities whose population depended on it for their survival. The rise in global coffee prices, together with the need for an exploitable labor force, prompted the government to seize and privatize these holdings. There was too much money to be made, so it began auctioning off the plots to the wealthy owners of large plantation-style estates known as fincas. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were dispossessed, then forced to work for nothing on land that used to belong to them.