The agricultural history of the Republic of El Salvador
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- Problems of Land Redistribution: The Case
of Segundo Montes
- By Karen Kieffer, SHARE Foundation, 12 September
1995. Issue of rural land settlement and ownership since
the Peace Accords.
- Agricultural crisis and reactivation
plans
- Processo, 29 January 1997. There is also
historic evidence that the agricultural sector and the
majority of rural residents have lived in an almost
permanent state of crisis. Conflicts such as the campesino
rebellion of 1932, the land reform of the 1980's, and
then the postwar Land Transfer Program are solid evidence
of still-unresolved structural problems in the
agricultural sector.
- Victory for farmers and cooperatives!
Assembly forgives agrarian debt, but president threatens
veto
- El Salvador Watch, November 1997. After a
years-long struggle for survival, the agricultural sector
is on the verge of freedom from its crushing debt
burden. In a dramatic battle spearheaded by the FMLN, El
Salvador's National Assembly approved the
Special
Law for the Extinction of Debts and the Reactivation of
the Agricultural Sector.
- Globalization takes toll on
agriculture
- El Salvador Watch, November 1997. The ARENA
government's imposition of the neoliberal economic
model designed in Washington has taken a devastating toll
on agricultural communities. At the insistence of the
World Bank, many governments are re-orienting their
economies to exclusively benefit big business. One aspect
of this is the promotion of policies that encourage the
opening of agricultural markets in developing countries to
competition from agro-businesses in the North.
- Destruction of a way of life
- El Salvador Watch, November 1997. Rural El
Salvador was pummeled by the most intensive and prolonged
aerial bombardment in the history of the Western
hemisphere in an attempt to drive out guerrillas of the
FMLN and their sympathizers. This brought farming to an
end.
- Salvadoran Banks Trying to Thwart Land
Reform Efforts; PC (USA)-aided agricultural cooperative is
threatened
- A missionary letter from Julie and Robert Dinsmore,
Mission co-workers in El Salvador, 11 February 2000. The
Salvadoran oligarchy, perhaps now more firmly in control
of El Salvador than ever, under the banner of
globalization, blocked PC(USA)-aided agricultural
cooperative—from milling organic sugar cane. Owning
the most powerful banks, it has systematically repossessed
the land parceled out to cooperatives during the land
reform.