CENTRAL AMERICAN POLITICS AND ECONOMY 267
1838 also was dominated by a struggle between
liberals and conservatives. Their responsibility for
inviting William Walker to assist them, followed by
Walker’s attempt to establish his personal empire
in Central America, so discredited the liberals that
the conservatives were able to rule Nicaragua with
very little opposition for more than three decades
(1857–1893).
Although coffee was grown commercially as
early as 1848, the principal economic activities in
Nicaragua until about 1870 were cattle ranching
and subsistence agriculture. Indigenous commu-
nities still owned much land, there existed a class
of independent small farmers who lived on public
land, and peonage was rare. On the Atlantic coast,
however, the autonomous Kingdom of Mosquitia,
controlled by the British since 1678, was inhabited
by traditional Miskitos, Sumus, and Afro-creoles,
who labored at low wages on thriving British- and
U.S.-owned banana plantations, timber lands, gold
mines, and commercial port facilities. But the sud-
den growth of the world market for coffee created
a nationalist demand by some members of the Ni-
caraguan elite for land suitable for coffee growing
and for a supply of cheap labor.
Beginning in 1877 a series of laws required
these villages to sell their communal lands and ef-
fectively drove the indigenous and mestizo peas-
ants off their land, gradually transforming them
into a class of dependent peons or sharecroppers.
The passage of vagrancy laws and laws permitting
the conscription of native peoples for agricultural
and public labor also ensured the supply of cheap
labor needed by the coffee growers. These laws pro-
voked a major indigenous revolt, the War of the
Comuneros (1881), which ended in defeat for the
indígenas and was followed by a ferocious repres-
sion that took fi ve thousand lives.
The new class, made up of coffee planters, was
impatient with the traditional ways of the conser-
vative cattle raisers who had held power in Nica-
ragua since 1857. In 1893 the planters staged a
revolt that brought the liberal José Santos Zelaya
to the presidency. A modernizer, Zelaya ruled for
the next seventeen years as dictator-president. He
undertook to provide the infrastructure needed by
the new economic order through the construction
of roads, railroads, port facilities, and telegraphic
communications. He reorganized the military, sep-
arated church and state, and promoted public edu-
cation. Like other Latin American liberal leaders of
his time, he believed that foreign investment was
necessary for rapid economic progress and granted
large concessions to foreign capitalists, especially
U.S. fi rms. By 1909, North Americans controlled
much of the production of coffee, gold, lumber, and
bananas—the principal sources of Nicaragua’s
wealth.EL SALVADOR, 1876–1911
By the mid-nineteenth century, El Salvador had
already passed through two economic cycles. The
fi rst was dominated by cacao, the prosperity of
which collapsed in the seventeenth century; the
second by indigo, which entered a sharp decline in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, fi rst as a
result of competition from other producing areas
and then as a result of the development of syn-
thetic dyes. The search for a new export crop led
to the enthronement of coffee. Coffee cultivation
began at about the time of independence, but it did
not expand rapidly until the 1860s. As elsewhere
in Central America, the rise of coffee was marked
by expropriation and usurpation of native lands—
carried out in the name of private property and
material progress—because most of the land best
suited to coffee cultivation was held by indigenous
communities.
Unlike indigo, which was planted and har-
vested every year, coffee trees did not produce
for three years. Producers, therefore, had to have
capital or credit, and the people with capital or
access to credit were the hacendados who had
prospered from the growing of indigo. To help
these hacendados in their search for land and la-
bor, a government decree of 1856 declared that
if two-thirds of a pueblo’s communal lands were
not planted in coffee, ownership would pass into
the hands of the state. Later, the liberal president
and military strongman, Rafael Zaldívar, directly
attacked native landholdings with passage of an
1881 law that ordered all communal lands to be
divided among the co-owners (which opened the