Is your coffee building Trump’s wall? Part 2: El Savage

James Harper

Hey there, I want to say that this episode is part of a series.

If you haven't heard part one, I recommend you check that out before you listen to this.

Álvaro Castro

This country, I told you before that I call it El Savage.

It sounds funny but it's a savage country when you have so much inequality.

James Harper

I'm back in the room with Álvaro, our economist.

In the last episode, we explored how El Salvador went from this sleepy agrarian country to become a coffee producing powerhouse.

The profits from coffee flowed to a handful of very wealthy families.

And along the way, indigenous Salvadorans lost their ancestral land.

And then over 10,000 were murdered in 72 hours.

Álvaro Castro

And I think the worst thing is that they are seen with...

I'm gonna look for the translation because I'm not sure.

In Espanol?

Desprecio?

That's like hate.

James Harper

Yeah, yeah, that's the word.

I checked it again later.

Desprecio is actually more like content.

Either way, after the massacre, many indigenous Salvadorans survive but they disappear.

Remember those three groups of people from the 1850s?

We had the wealthy class, the indigenous people and the mestizos.

Mestizo translates to half-blood.

Well, after the 1932 massacre, indigenous Salvadorans integrate with the mestizos.

Fun fact, our economist Alvador is mestizo himself.

Álvaro Castro

Mestizo people like me, I am sure I have a lot of Indian and a lot of Spaniard and some black mixed in, you know?

James Harper

By the 1970s, this tiny rectangle of a country produces a quarter of the world's coffee.

And working on the coffee plantations are mestizos, with indigenous Salvadorans hiding amongst them.

These coffee plantations are very profitable.

And the profits are flowing to the handful of wealthy families that own them.

Álvaro Castro

It's all the profits in excess.

James Harper

Alvador puts himself into the shoes of the wealthy families to illustrate how the coffee profits help them establish themselves in other parts of the economy.

Álvaro Castro

So all these surpluses come in, you have so much money, you put it back into farms, and you also put your money in cotton, you put the money in sugar, and then you go like, hey, we don't have plastics here, we should make them.

Okay, so you have the money?

Yeah, sure.

James Harper

There you go.

As the wealthy families heavily invest in different industries, the military government more often than not prioritises their needs.

So we need a public policy for it.

Álvaro Castro

Ah, let's call those bastards.

And they call the militaries, I mean, the guys in government.

So we need this.

And we're going to do this.

Okay.

And here's your $5 so you can be happy.

James Harper

But the wealthy families now have a problem.

They have gone too far.

And in this episode, we explore what happens when a society becomes this unequal.

We'll explore why Alvador nicknames this country El Savage.

More seeds of today's immigration crisis are sown here.

And it all relates to the coffees that our parents drank, and where in El Salvador, their money ended up.

I'm James Harper, and this is Filter Stories.

The untold stories hidden in your cup of coffee.

So during the 50s, the 60s and 70s, the military government is mostly looking after the needs of the wealthy families.

But in the 60s, the US wakes up to the fact that El Salvador is breeding communism in its backyard.

And so under pressure from the US government, El Salvador starts grappling with land reform, agrarian reform, sharing these lucrative coffee lands more equally amongst its people.

And different military governments make attempts at agrarian reform.

Álvaro Castro

For example.

James Harper

And all the while, many of the profits from El Salvador's lucrative coffee exports are not reaching their mestizo plantation workers.

Álvaro Castro

sympathy.

But that was it.

And he was in charge of feeding the patron's dogs.

And he fed the dogs prime meat that they brought from San Salvador.

He didn't have any meat for his children.

When his children died because of illness, he didn't have any access to medicine or to anything that could have prevented it.

So I don't want to say that this happened in every single farm because it wouldn't be fair.

But I will say it was the norm to exploit people.

James Harper

I wanted a firsthand account for what plantation conditions were like for mestizo workers.

And I found a farm that was willing to talk to me.

Now, I have terrible memories of my trip to this farm because I was hopping between local chicken buses.

I got lost.

It was really hot.

I was feeling sick, weak, because I was badly sunburned a few days before, which brought on a case of shingles.

And to top it all off, these chicken buses blast their bass music loud.

Anyway, after what feels like an eternity, I'm off the bus.

And I get into a car with this man, Israel.

Israel Marquez

I'm the president and legal representative of the San Carlos 2 cooperative.

James Harper

Israel is the president of this very large cooperative, San Carlos 2.

And I asked him what was it like working in the plantation, back when it was owned by one of the wealthy families.

Israel tells me the workers would have their machetes checked and if they weren't sharp, they'd be just tossed away.

Now, if someone walked in the field without authorization, the farm's guards would beat them up.

And if that trespasser was drunk, they would tie them up and leave them in a water tank.

This was common practice in 1970s El Salvador.

The idea is, if they fell asleep while drunk and they drowned, that's their own fault.

Israel Marquez

And these abuses went beyond the farm's walls too.

James Harper

Israel says people complained they were being mistreated by the wealthy landowners, by the police, and especially the National Guard.

By the late 70s, El Salvador descends into full civil war.

Almost 50 years after the 1932 indigenous massacre, poor Salvadorans still felt that nothing had changed and the situation could only be improved through violence.

Now, there are two sides to this war.

There are the left-wing guerrilla armies.

They are mostly mestizo Salvadorans.

They're inspired by communism and receive some weapons from Cuba and Russia.

They fight the government's army.

This army is backed by the USA who gives them up to $2 million a day.

I want to give a flavour of what it was like back in the civil war.

Now every middle-aged Salvadoran has a story to share.

For example, I met this man in my hostel.

One morning in my hostel, I got chatting to Manuel and he told me the story from the 1970s when the left-wing guerrillas came to his town.

The left-wing guerrillas set up barricades at the major road leading into his town and they began to recruit the townspeople to fight the government army that was on its way.

Manuel Jesus Lopez

When we heard that the army was on the way to the barricade, we ran home.

As we were running back into the house, I noticed one of our schoolmates, a beautiful, simple girl that nobody knew, nobody suspected that she was involved in this and she pulled a from between her thighs.

She was like, you guys need to join, you need to fight, join the cause and fight for the people.

Sadly, we found out later that day that that was her last stand.

She died on the spot where we saw her.

James Harper

The government wants to bring the civil war to an end and in the early 80s, it tries again to do agrarian reform.

They're hoping that by taking away lucrative agricultural land from the wealthy families and giving it to peasants, there'll be less popular support for the civil war.

And this time, it actually happens.

Mauricio Escalon

There were like a thousand hectares, one thousand four hundred and ninety manzanas.

James Harper

This is Mauricio Escalon from the last episode, the man who has a great-great-great-great-grandfather, Pedro José.

His mother's side is one of the wealthy families that lost land.

Mauricio Escalon

Now, let me connect some dots for you.

James Harper

A few minutes ago, we spoke to Israel of the San Carlos Doth Cooperative, the man who listed all the abuses on the farms, such as putting drunk people into tanks of water.

That farm is the same farm that used to belong to Mauricio's mother's family.

Now, Mauricio says that Israel has the facts wrong about his mother's farm.

He says the workers had better food and housing than the norm, and the workers were sad when the farm was taken away by the government.

Mauricio Escalon

And I remember, I was little, I remember I saw my mom crying.

James Harper

Yeah.

Here's Mauricio talking about the day his mother lost that big, big farm.

Mauricio Escalon

My mom, she went out from the house, we lived here in Santana, and she went out of the house and went to San Salvador to my grandfather's house.

Yeah, that was the owner of the farm.

James Harper

Mauricio's grandfather tries to console his daughters about the loss of their farm.

Mauricio Escalon

And she and my aunts were crying about the farm and everything.

And he told them, look, when you came to this world, you were nude.

Yeah.

You didn't have nothing naked.

You didn't have anything under your arm.

Yeah.

So there's no problem.

Yeah.

We had good times, but it's not the of the world.

Yeah.

James Harper

So now by law, Mauricio's mother's side could keep a couple of hundred hectares of this farm, but they had to give the majority away.

Mauricio Escalon

However, his mother's family, they were involved in politics because there was something that didn't smell good about those military dictatorships that were in the media.

James Harper

And that El Salvador is in a civil war.

Okay.

And it's this power grab by the left-wing guerrillas against a military government clinging on to power.

The last thing either side wants is for one of the wealthy families getting involved in politics as well.

Mauricio Escalon

Yeah.

They didn't want that this family keep that farm.

Why not?

Remember, having that is kind of power of economic power.

Yeah.

James Harper

And the military government and the guerrillas had guns.

Mauricio Escalon

And they said they were threatening to one of my uncles.

If they keep the land, they're going to kill him.

And they started, for example, we have a shoot in our grandfather's house.

There was a car shooting the house and everything.

And so they decided to give it away.

James Harper

As in give away the couple of hundred hectares they were legally allowed to keep.

Mauricio Escalon

And they went to leave to Mexico for a while after that shooting.

James Harper

Now, this land redistribution is taking place across El Salvador.

Álvaro Castro

What happened?

That it was a total mess.

And I'm sure you've heard a couple of stories.

This is our economist, Alvaro, again.

You know, my father-in-law, he used to say that the agrarian reform was armed assault.

Because back then, a lot of the landowners used to leave in the middle of the night.

Their own farm.

So what happened was that you will have the military just showing up in your farm and just letting you know that your farm had been expropriated by the government and that you were to grab your personal belongings.

I mean, your wallet, that was it, and leave.

James Harper

The details of El Salvador's land reform gets really messy.

In some cases, the wealthy families give up the land voluntarily.

In other cases, the government forces them to give it up.

Afterwards, some of this land is turned into cooperatives where the peasants run the farm communally.

But in other cases, the peasants end up owning the little plots of land instead.

For the rest of this episode, we're going to focus on the San Carlos Dos Cooperative, the farm that Mauricio's mother's family used to own.

The story of this farm during the 80s sheds a light on what was happening both during the Civil War and why El Salvador's coffee production fell off a cliff.

This is Israel again, the president of the San Carlos Dos Cooperative.

He tells me that once Mauricio's mother's family left, the foremen who used to work for them turned around and taught the cooperative members how to work their land.

But as they're trying to keep this coffee farmer afloat, the Civil War is raging around them.

Israel Marquez

And they're walking this dangerous tightrope.

James Harper

If the government forces discovered that one of the families was supporting the guerrillas, they were murdered.

And if the guerrillas discovered that one of the family members was supporting the government forces, they were murdered.

And people ask themselves, what can we do?

This cooperative is also stuck in a difficult financial position.

The guerrillas demand war taxes.

Because the government army is receiving up to $2 million a day from the USA.

Israel Marquez

The guerrillas have to find some money from somewhere.

The farm had to pay for the guerrillas' uniforms, their boots, their watches.

Meanwhile, the cooperative leaders are tortured and murdered by both sides.

James Harper

And then, in the middle of 1985, government forces invade the farm outright.

But the guerrillas fight back and take back control.

But the fighting leaves this mess.

They burn the fields, the warehouses, the vehicles.

The mill is destroyed, along with the dryers and the patios.

I asked Israel, how many people died?

He says he doesn't know, but it's more than 100 people.

The dead include the guerrillas, old people and children.

Families.

Now, let's connect some dots to immigration.

In the face of these hardships, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans get out of the country.

Before the 1970s, there were fewer than 20,000 documented Salvadorans in the USA.

But by the end of the 80s, these 20,000 jump to over 200,000.

And these are the documented ones.

Unofficially, I saw estimates that 1 million Salvadorans fled to the USA.

Now, this wave of immigration is not the same wave that the Trump administration is worried about.

But they are both connected.

Through coffee.

And we'll explore this in the next episode.

The civil war officially ended in 1992.

Here are a couple of statistics.

About 75,000 people died.

The majority civilians.

And the majority killed by US-funded government forces.

Coffee production fell off a cliff.

From 4.5 million bags in the mid-70s to just over 2.5 million by the early 90s.

One fifth of El Salvador's land had been redistributed.

And a tenth of the population received some benefit from the agrarian reform.

Unknowingly, our parents and grandparents are connected to this.

Because when they drank their coffees, their coffee doves flowed into the hands of a small number of wealthy families in El Salvador.

It was a system that didn't allow poor Salvadorans to progress upwards economically.

This is the tension that fuelled the 1932 indigenous massacre in Izalco.

It's the same tension that created the civil war in the 80s and that giant wave of migration.

But we can put all of this behind us now.

Because by the early 90s, the land that produced the grano de oro, the golden bean, this land was now more equally distributed, albeit imperfectly.

So Salvadorans could now get back to producing lots of coffee and making a much wider pool of people richer.

But that's not what happened.

And in the next episode, we'll discover how El Salvador went from producing two and a half million bags of coffee in the early 90s to just 700,000.

And we'll explore how we, as in you and me right now, are connected to that.

Thank you for listening.

I want to give a shout out to Mauricio Escalon for offering so much of his family history, even though it's not particularly flattering in a certain context.

And if you're wondering, he did approve all the things that I mentioned in this episode.

This is part of my editorial process, where I let those who are included in a prominent way a chance to hear the episode before it's aired.

Now, before I go, I have a listener survey that's live right now, and I'd love you to tell me what you like about the show.

I'm planning to make some quite big changes to the show next year, and I don't want to change something that you already love.

So follow the link in the episode description and tell me what you don't want me to change about further stories, or indeed tell me what you want me to change.

This episode was sound mixed by Dom Edgley, a Berlin-based sound professional.

You can find him at domedgleysound.com.

And the Filter Stories logo was created by Headquarters, a branding and packaging design team.

Find more of their work at headquarters.studio. Thanks so much.

Until next time.