When El Salvador’s civil conflict abated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars gained access to the nation’s archives for the first time. Aldo Lauria was the initial investigator to take advantage of the opportunity. For that reason alone this book is a landmark. Lauria’s work is the beginning of what promises to be a long and healthy reevaluation of El Salvador’s past.
Until the appearance of new research like Lauria’s, the history of postcolonial El Salvador had consolidated into a master narrative. The story went something as follows. Liberals enacted a sweeping land privatization in the late nineteenth century that handed communal lands to an emerging coffee elite and turned community members into proletarians. The subsequent distribution, or maldistribution, of wealth mobilized urban and rural labor and eventually resulted in the 1932 rebellion in the western coffee zones. The military suppressed the rebellion and thereafter joined with the...
