La tierra sin indios no vale nada. The land without Indians is worthless. This was the attitude of the Spanish colonials from the earliest days, shaping the long tradition of struggle and suffering of the native populations, and later of the mestizo campesino, the rural peasant of El Salvador. Immediately on taking possession of Central America, the Spanish crown, supported by the sword (military) and the cross (the church), began a process of land acquisition and oppression, leaving wounds that still affect the majority of Salvadorans.

To encourage colonization, the Spanish king gave large blocks of land to Spanish settlers. The settlers had dreams of immediate wealth and little stomach for the hard work of developing the land for production. For this reason the colonials said they wouldn't accept the land without also receiving enough natives to work the land. This process of giving land along with indentured indigenous people to work the land was called La encomienda.

La Encomienda -- land and indentured workers

La Encomienda guaranteed that the best and richest of the land would remain in the hands of the few, and that a whole culture of poor, landless peasants would emerge over the centuries. And in El Salvador the impact of La encomienda still lasts.

Here, in the most densely populated country in Central America, the bulk of the population lives a rural, agricultural life. Eighty percent of the cultivatable land is in the hands of 2 percent of the people, the oligarchy, the coffee growers, the so-called 14 Families (in reality, more like 100). Even in the 21st century, El Salvador functions like a medieval fiefdom: an old landed oligarchy, supported by a strong military, chaplained by a conservative, hierarchical Roman Catholic Church, still living on the coffee haciendas and ruling the large latifundios. For over 500 years little has changed.

The coastal, Pacific plains of El Salvador are fertile and rich. Most of the large-production crops are grown there: cotton (which used to be king), sugar cane, fruits of all kind, maguay, from whose fibers ropes are made, and añil from which comes a valuable purple dye.

In the early 1930s a peasant insurrection, led by a child of the oligarchy, Farabundo Martí, nearly overthrew the military government supported by the oligarchy. In revenge, General and President Maximiliano Martínez slaughtered over 30,000 native Salvadorans and peasants in less than three months. At the heart of the rebellion was the issue of the just distribution of land. In this repression, Martínez had the support of the oligarchy, the church -- and the U.S.

From that time onward, even today, the poor, if they have land, live and work their small milpas (parcels of land) in the highlands, the steep, rocky and lifeless soils of Chalatenango, Las Cabañas and Morazán. Meanwhile, the landed families produce products for export, not for feeding the people: coffee, cotton, cane (e.g., rum), and sometimes fruit and vegetables for local and foreign consumption. The campesinos do the best that can be done, raising corn and beans on the dry hillsides, often losing even what little land they have traditionally worked (without holding legal title) when the larger landowners for whom they previously worked in serf-like conditions expropriate it (with government support).

Base communities and organizing

The 1960s and 1970s were times of growing threat. Union organizers, Catholic workers and Christian base communities organized rural communities and agricultural cooperatives to, at first, improve the living conditions of the campesinos and then to redress the government for failures to protect these workers' limited rights.

When the oligarchy awoke to this activity, they began a campaign of severe oppression toward the campesinos and organized workers. Governments fell if they showed the least interest in responding to the needs of the poor. In 1977 President (General) Arturo Armando Molina issued a land reform proclamation, which (under pressure) never left the page it was printed on. By January 10, 1981, after three years of back-and-forth fighting between the government and several opposition groups, the first FMLN (a coalition of six or seven of these groups) armed offensive changed civil unrest to civil war. In 1984, under the leadership of moderate President Nepolian Duarte, a very progressive land reform legislation was passed. Hopes were soon dashed, brutally in many places, when signals were sent to the land-owners that neither the military nor the courts would enforce the agrarian reforms. In the tensions that followed, the war escalated.

As in the beginning, so now. The landed oligarchy demanded low-paid, passive and submissive workers for the land. La tierra sin indios no vale nada was still a reality of the early 1980s.

The Peace Accords -- land to combatants

After the Peace Accords of 1992, two remarkable things happened. The first was that the accords required land distribution to all of the decommissioned fighters, both members of the Salvadoran military and of the FMLN, the revolutionaries. This was done in 1993, with parcels taken from the holdings of the oligarchy sufficient for subsistence farming.

The other thing that happened was that the old landed families, for the time at least, had little concern for the land that remained in their control. They had discovered the international money markets, neo-liberal economics, the privatization of government services, and were financially doing quite well through the banks they owned and the foreign investments they made. The rich landowners produced no cotton for export in the years 1995-1999. In addition, because of the free-tariff trading between Guatemala and El Salvador, merchants found it was cheaper to import Guatemalan fruits and vegetables (and often meat) than it was to pay the new, inexperienced, El Salvadoran farmers to produce them. Good land lay barren and there was no government to provide technical and financial support to help the new farmers change the situation.

During the years of 1996-1999, many of the newly landed ex-combatants began selling their land, feeling that the money would be worth more than the continued struggle to stay afloat as small farmers. Little by little the land (purchased cheaply) returned to the original owners, legally and publicly. These people are now, once again, beginning to produce crops for export.

In the mountains, where the land is less productive, the campesino have been able to retain the land. With the help of U.S. aid, some of this newly acquired land is being surveyed and registered to protect the small farmers. But still, the land is very difficult to cultivate: It is like trying to farm in rocky northern New England, without the promise of rain.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, strong organizations and popular education strengthened the hand of small rural communities. Cooperative endeavors abounded. There is little of that now -- most were destroyed during the final years of the war. Through heroic efforts some new agricultural cooperatives have been formed among the poor, despite quiet opposition by the government and conservative church leaders. But they are minimal, with little economic support. The war has also changed the culture, especially among the campesinos. This group is far more individualistic and disheartened that it was in the early war years. Community organizations and Christian base communities, the energy and life of the poor in the 1960s and 1970s, have mostly disappeared. Some are trying to reemerge, but with much difficulty.

Except for the developing service and financial economic sectors, El Salvador remains basically an agricultural country, the vast percentage of people depending heavily on the land and its produce. Recent governmental proposals for agricultural reform are focused primarily on the large producers of export crops. Little has changed over the generations. The few see their ownership of the land as their right and privilege, while the many eke out their living on the gleanings left over. As always, land reform -- justice in the use and production of the earth's resources -- is an urgent issue of stewardship and of equity.

Anglican Church response

The Anglican Church of El Salvador's response, as it has been since the 1980s, has been to provide a voice for those without voice, a community that has struggled to provide assistance, training and community organization for the rural campesino. In the 1980s, the Salvadoran Anglican Church, with the help of the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief (now called Episcopal Development and Relief), operated an agriculture training school, El Maizal, in the region of La Libertad, until it was closed down because of the intensity of the war. The church was also instrumental in founding CREDHO, an organization, now autonomous, for the training and organizing of rural cooperatives.

During the war years humanitarian money flowed from the U.S. and Europe to support efforts like these. Sadly, little of that support continues. The focus is on the globalized economy, not on micro interests such as rural cooperative farming.

In El Salvador, a country with more than 5 million inhabitants living together on a small parcel of land the size of West Virginia, people continue to live poorly on the land or, fleeing to the cities, even poorer in urban barrios populares. The Maya, the ancient native people of the area now comprising Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, believed and practiced that the land and its fruits belonged to all the people. Now the land, for centuries distributed as royal patronage among the rich, remains the property of the few, the land and forests ravished by greed, a sore that erupts in civil war century after century.

Richard Bower is a member of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company's board of directors (ECPC publishes The Witness).