COFFEELANDOne Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite DrugBy Augustine SedgewickIn 1889, 18-year-old James Hill disembarked in El Salvador to sell textiles from Manchester, England, and wound up bringing the industrial mentality of his native city to coffee cultivation in his adopted country. At the heart of “Coffeeland” is a balance sheet demonstrating that the costs of an economy devoted to the monoculture of coffee decidedly outweighed the benefits. Seasonal employment, low wages, food scarcity and the booms and busts of the international coffee market drove them ever deeper into poverty. As popular discontent grew, the “Fourteen Families” who controlled El Salvador’s export coffee industry demanded more and more political control to protect their businesses — and the economy of a nation where coffee made up 90 percent of its exports. For decades, that government brutally repressed all opposition, until a civil war partly financed through kidnappings like Jaime Hill’s finally exploded in the 1980s.

Source: International New York Times April 07, 2020 09:00 UTC