Politics in the Americas

How has the smallest country in Central America served the world during the whole 20th century? Coffee. There is a short story on how this came to be.

When capital first flowed in the country, it was because the world wanted indigo as a coloring agent. The Spanish learned from the indigenous people about this product, then decided to create factories to exploit the indigo-producing plant for making a refined product for export. The 18th century was the beginning time period for this project's inception. Synthetic coloring was a technological novelty which then replaced the need for the natural coloring agent, and so the Spanish in control of the international market were shit-out-of-luck. The middle of the 19th century arrives and they choose to offer coffee as a substitute for creating wealth in the world-market. For whom was this wealth created? For a very small few. Distribution of this wealth being so asymmetrical that it becomes the reason for political unrest and social discontent.

I invite anyone to report what percentage of GDP consists from coffee exports. Don't be surprised that remittances from the U.S. make up the bulk. Still, you can't overlook coffee because it will be one of the top three ingredients of GDP. I'm no economist, nor have I ever studied it formally, but it is safe to say that GDP measures the wealth produced in a country. Just having some sense of what generates Salvadoran GDP doesn't give a complete measure of wealth produced in the country since it looks at a snapshot of a limited amount of time, i.e. a year for most discussions of the metric. In the larger scheme of things, it's coffee that has produced more wealth than remittances.

All developed countries want it. And if a country is developing in conformity to the direction of the developed, then discover a new pattern of coffee consumption to highlight their newly found direction. El Salvador serves to help them all keep their image of this progress forward. Then again, what is moving forward, really?