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Conclusion El Salvador’s modern political history can be divided into two eras, those before and after the 1931 coup that brought General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez to power. Before Martínez, El Salvador’s political system was marked by a series of dictatorships, led by both civilians and military officers, that was defined by relentless competition between rival patron-client networks. In time, and especially after the onset of the coffee economy in the late nineteenth century, the rivalries gave way to a more centralized, albeit no less dictatorial, system. The only political respite came during a brief period of reformism between 1927 and 1931 under the administrations of Pío Romero Bosque and Arturo Araujo. After the 1931 coup, the modern military regimes took a hold that lasted for the next five decades. In fact, the real power of the military lasted even longer, until the end of the civil war in 1992. One of the central arguments of this study is that El Salvador’s political system exhibited a marked degree of continuity between those two eras. Martínez based his system on past structures, serving as a bridge between the patron-client dictatorships of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the modern military regimes of the latter part of the twentieth century. In response to the democratization and reformism of his two predecessors, Martínez adhered to tradition and rolled the political system back to its prereformist mode. He ensured that elites were safely in control of political office in the municipalities, and he promoted an export-based economy built around production on privately owned estates. He also channeled all things political through the increasingly powerful central state, just as his predecessors in the Meléndez-Quiñónez dynasty had sought to do between 1913 and 1926. 336 Conclusion 337 The preexisting system on which Martínez built his political edifice was characterized by patronage and clientelism. It was an informal system guided by a body of unwritten rules handed down over time through learned behavior and oral tradition. Although informal, those rules exhibited a traceable and coherent pattern, as revealed in the extant archival record . The present study has shown how that system functioned. It picked up the documentary trail in the 1840s and 1850s, as El Salvador embarked on its path of independent nationhood, and ended in 1940, when the Martínez regime had consolidated power and the archival record trails off. In the aftermath of decolonization from Spain and the demise of the United Provinces of Central America, local elites, who were part landowner , part military strongman, and part governing official, commanded their respective municipalities. I applied the term political bosses to them. The base of a boss’s power was his body of supporters—friends, family, laborers, dependent clients, ethnic kinsmen, and so on—which he used as leverage in forming alliances with other bosses, thereby creating a patronage network. These networks propelled their leaders into power, in competition with rivals who were looking to do the same. Once in command of their localities, local bosses could enter into patronage relationships with superiors at the departmental and national levels who were building their respective political networks in hopes of competing for higher-level offices. The local bosses, who were sometimes referred to as subalterns (subalternos), were expected to produce the political capital (votes) or the raw materials (manpower, food, money, or guns) to promote their superiors ’ advance up the political ladder. In return, locals either rode their patrons ’ coattails up the ladder or stayed at home and used their alliances to help them in local political battles. In the pre-coffee era, this system functioned in a decentralized manner . Politics consisted of factional conflicts between regional networks based primarily in the departmental capitals. Political fortunes rose and fell in accordance with the formation and breaking of patronage alliances. The conflagrations between networks often turned violent, taking the form of coups and civil wars. The conflicts were essentially interdepartmental disputes, but occasionally they spilled over into neighboring countries in networks’ unending search for allies and support, which gave the clashes an interstate dimension. 338 Authoritarian El Salvador After the arrival of the coffee economy in the latter third of the nineteenth century, the political system functioned in the same way, but in a more centralized form. Revenues from the sale of coffee allowed whoever was in control of government to consolidate authority and invest in building up the power of the...

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