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C hapter 5 The Network of the State Meléndez-Quiñónez, 1913–1926 On the eve of the presidential election of 1898, General Tomás Regalado overthrew President Rafael Gutiérrez in a quickly executed coup d’état. To participants and onlookers alike, the coup seemed a routine exercise. The insurgent was a one-time ally of the president who had grown impatient with Gutiérrez’s refusal to relinquish power and his plans to rig the forthcoming election to remain in office. Over the preceding five decades, the nation had witnessed countless such events, so many that the process seemed normal and the names of the participants hardly memorable. There was no indication that this one was any different. But unbeknownst to everyone, the coup of 1898 would be the last time a sitting president was cast out of office in a violent overthrow by a rival until December 1931. The coup of 1898 holds real and symbolic importance as a forecast of the coming change in the functioning of politics in El Salvador. At the turn of the twentieth century, El Salvador was in the midst of a centralization of political authority and a manifold increase in the powers of the national government. As in the rest of Latin America, this process of centralization was fueled by the onset of the industrial revolution in Europe and the United States and the consequent increase in demand for primary materials produced by Latin American nations. In the case of El Salvador, coffee was the sole product competitive on the international 173 174 Authoritarian El Salvador market. It brought unprecedented amounts of wealth, which gave the country both the means and the motivation to increase the size and powers of the state. Prospective coffee growers needed new public services, such as banks to provide investment capital, roads and railroads to deliver their crops to port, and security forces to protect private property and enforce vagrancy laws. Planters also needed a safe climate for investment— incessant warfare and political instability did not encourage business ventures. These initiatives were beyond the scope of the individual growers and the local governments over which they presided; they were endeavors of national proportions, which only a government of equal extent could undertake. It is tempting to assume that the centralization of the state necessitated the demise of patronage and clientelism. How could the state “institutionalize ,” as Robert Williams describes the process of state growth, if political bosses continued to hold sway in the municipalities and serve their respective networks rather than the central government?1 Richard Graham engaged this dilemma in his study of nineteenth-century Brazilian politics. He contends that patron-client relations are not necessarily “superseded by the inevitable triumph of an impersonal and universalistic ‘rational’ bureaucracy.” Instead, the Brazilian state “advanced the interests of the propertied principally by reproducing and maintaining the patronclient system itself.”2 A similar process was at work in El Salvador. The growth of central authority in El Salvador reinforced patron-­ client relations. The national government became the supreme patronage network and subsumed the factionalism of the individual networks. Local bosses retained their clients and monopolized voting in the municipalities, but now they did so on behalf of the state and whoever happened to be presiding over it. This process of centralization was prolonged and uneven . It lasted roughly four decades between the mid-1880s and the mid1920s , the period in which coffee became the undisputed engine of the Salvadoran economy. The long duration of the process reflects not only external variables, namely the growth of the international coffee market, but also internal processes, especially the resistance to state centralization on the part of some local political bosses. Although most local elites saw the growth of the state as economically advantageous, some considered it a threat to their power because they would almost certainly have less voice The Network of the State 175 in the national state than they had in their local political empires. This erosion of local authority was the price of national stability, and some bosses accepted it more grudgingly than others. Those who resisted gave rise to new modes of conflict and a political discourse that celebrated local autonomy. The mercurial process of state centralization culminated during the administrations of Jorge Meléndez (1919–1923) and Alfonso Quiñónez Molina (1923–1927). They were brothers-in-law and close political allies who created the Partido Nacional Democrático (PND), the National Democratic Party. Contrary...

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