ABSTRACT
The power struggles in El Salvador, in Guatemala, and during the 1970s in Nicaragua have revealed the extraordinary obsolescence of those social orders, characterized by brutal, restrictive rule by oligarchs in coalition with military officers. The hundred years between 1880 and 1980 will go down in Guatemalan and Salvadoran history as the century of the oligarchs. The beans produced fabulous profits and provided a new opportunity for the oligarchs to participate in the world economy. Concerns regarding crop diversification disappeared for another fifty years. Those oligarchs whose fortunes originated in commerce and industry were, at best, producing or distributing minor consumer goods such as foodstuffs, soft drinks, soap, or crude hardware. The patriarchs of the generation of oligarchs were a tough, dynamic, rapacious bunch. The immediate offspring of this first generation of coffee oligarchs was generally a spoiled and shiftless lot, content to go off to Europe for educations and extended holidays.
