El Salvador Coffee Caper

By George Russell

The middle-aged businessman, a scion of one of El Salvador's oldest families, was impatient. He had been waiting a day and a half for his plantation foreman to report the results of a highly sensitive negotiation. Finally, the telephone rang with the news. The foreman had got in touch with El Salvador's Marxist-led guerrillas to discuss wages for the migrant farm laborers whom the cafetalero needed during the 2 1/2-month coffee harvest. The guerrillas' demand on behalf of the workers: about $4 for each 100 lbs. of coffee beans picked, plus food and medical care. The rebels also wanted a slice of the harvest action: a "tip" of about $5 for each 500 lbs. of beans. The alternative to a settlement was a return to the kind of armed harassment of the harvest that has been commonplace in El Salvador in past years.

Nonetheless, the businessman balked. "We can't afford that," he told the foreman. "The best we can do is give the guerrillas $2.50." After two more days of secretive telephone calls, a deal was finally struck. The grower would pay his laborers $3.63 per 100 lbs.; the workers would bring their own lunch. The guerrillas, members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), would receive $500 for the entire harvest. In return, the grower would have the services of all the workers he needed for the lengthy harvest season, and coffee trucks would roll unmolested from his plantations to processing and storage mills.

Similar under-the-table transactions have been taking place in recent weeks all over central and eastern El Salvador as the harvest of the country's biggest cash crop got under way. Despite the bitter enmity between Salvadoran landowners and the Liberation Front, the coffee harvest is a time when the two sides find good use for each other. This year the interdependence appears to be greater than ever. Says a lawyer in the central department of Usulutan: "Everybody is making deals with the guerrillas." The reason, he explains, is that "the guerrillas are stronger. Their presence is being accepted. The situation in El Salvador has moved from a strictly military war to a more mature political battle."

Indeed, it is the damage done by El Salvador's five-year civil war that has produced the strange bedfellows. Traditionally, coffee has provided more than 50% of the country's export revenues. It still does, but since 1980 income from coffee has shrunk, from more than $615 million to $403 million. This year bountiful rains promise a slight reversal of the trend. At current world prices, the Salvadoran coffee harvest could bring in as much as $410 million in desperately needed foreign exchange. Because roughly 25% of the crop is grown in areas contested or controlled by the guerrillas, more and more landowners have come to see the virtue of cooperating with their enemies, whose right to represent local workers may be debatable, but whose destructive capability is not. The government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte, currently preparing for another round of peace talks with the rebels, seems to be ignoring the strange arrangement. The government's reckoning appears to be that a successful coffee harvest is in the greater national interest.

For the guerrillas, the partnership with Salvadoran laborers offers more than a windfall profit from economic blackmail. There is no evidence that the Liberation Front charges workers a fee for its bargaining "services," but involving themselves in the wage negotiations adds to the rebels' political weight. Last November the rebels began distributing leaflets in one of their mountainous northern strongholds, Chalatenango department, urging local peasants who travel south for the coffee harvest to band together for negotiating purposes. At about the same time, a full-page advertisement appeared in a newspaper in the capital, San Salvador, putting forth wage and working demands. The advertisement was signed by two mysterious organizations previously unknown in Salvadoran labor circles, the National Association of Campesinos and the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives. The ad campaign appeared at a time when El Salvador's National Assembly was setting minimum wages for coffee pickers of $3.62 per 100 lbs. of beans. The original guerrilla target was 40% higher, a fact widely touted in F.M.L.N. propaganda broadcasts over the clandestine radio stations Radio Venceremos and Radio Farabundo Marti.

Significantly, many Salvadoran coffee growers seem less resentful of the rebels' role in labor negotiations than of government export and foreign- exchange taxes, because these levies are higher. Even in a country as bitterly divided as El Salvador, political enmity can take a back seat to economic self-interest.

With reporting by Tom Johnson/San Salvador