An eleven-year-old boy was hiding in the coffee bushes, watching two men get drunk on cheap guaro.
It was December 24, 1994, and there was carousing all over the small Salvadoran town of Atiquizaya. The two men gulped down the liquor until a hot and muddled dream seemed to descend on them along with the torrid afternoon. One, a day worker from a coffee plantation, doubled over and fell to the ground. His companion, the foreman, yelled at him to stand up and keep drinking. The boy watched them from between dense branches. He waited, patiently, for the liquor to finish its job. After emptying the last of the bottles, with nothing left to drink and nobody to drink it with, the foreman staggered homeward.
The boy followed stealthily. He knew it was his moment. He walked down a dirt path that forked off the paved road heading toward the department’s capital, Ahuachapán. He burst through the bushes and whacked the foreman, a hard blow to the head. The thick club knocked the man to the ground. The boy wanted to finish the job. He used a few big stones to smash his head and the back of his neck. The stones were as heavy as an eleven-year-old could lift.
The boy wanted to make sure he’d killed him. He went back to the dirt path that wound through the coffee bushes, watching over the foreman’s body. A couple hours later it would be Christmas.
Under the first rays of light, a small delivery truck driving its route stopped in front of a heap of bloody clothing. That heap of rags, the drivers discovered, was breathing. They loaded the foreman into one of the hammocks that these kinds of drivers carry with them everywhere—so they can stop and take a nap wherever they find two trees. They drove him to the hospital in Ahuachapán.
The boy, still hiding in the bushes, was disappointed. He hadn’t been strong enough to kill.
On that Christmas Eve, 1994, Miguel Ángel Tobar failed in his first attempt at murder. It was a skill he would later perfect.
The first coffee beans planted in El Salvador had arrived from India just after the drop in the price of indigo—the natural dye that had been the country’s principal export—and the economic disaster that followed in 1850.
This economic debacle began with a singular event—an experiment conducted by a chemist’s apprentice in a makeshift laboratory on the back patio of a London home. William Henry Perkin, an eighteen-year-old apprentice of Dr. August Wilhelm von Hoffman, the director of London’s first chemistry school, had been running experiments with various materials. The mission was to discover a synthetic substitute for quinine, the antimalaria medication that colonial agents of imperial Britain so badly needed.
That April afternoon, young Perkin combined the contents of one test tube with that of another and then applied heat. He mixed it around. Shook it. The resulting product would have no effect on malaria, but, inside the test tube, something marvelous was happening. Little by little, the liquid turned purple.
Young Perkin thought it was curious, nothing more, and wrote it up in his ledger. But when his mentor saw what he had done, he realized they’d made an important discovery: the first artificial dye.
At that time, almost all dyes were made of natural substances: ground-up insects or the resin of tropical trees. Indigo, extracted from the fruit of the anil plant, had been used for hundreds of years by indigenous peoples and, later, by Europeans. Now, it had suddenly become possible to dye cloth blue and purple without going through the laborious process of extracting and exporting natural indigo. Perkin became rich and famous, receiving four medals for chemistry and eight honorary doctorates. He built up an entire chemical industry and was knighted in 1906, a year before dying of pneumonia and appendicitis.
While the industry launched by Perkin enriched some, on the other side of the world, the smallest country of the Americas was blasted into crisis.
Little by little, the abundant anil plants began to wither. The plantations were abandoned, and hunger and poverty spread throughout the recently founded El Salvador. The country’s elites and government officials had bet everything on the export of these leaves. When an economy is based on a single product, it’s hard to adapt.
Gerardo Barrios, the president of El Salvador—who was eventually executed by firing squad—had a bright idea: repurpose the whole apparatus of agricultural exportation to serve another crop. Coffee. And that was the moment we all went crazy in El Salvador.
Coffee is capricious. It’s a small tree or shrub that refuses to bear fruit at the wrong altitude. It needs abundant water and won’t share its space with another harvestable plant. If it has too much shade, it dies. If it’s exposed to too much sun, it dies. Above all, it needs attention. Unlike the anil, this tree and the processing of its fruits require constant labor.
The country’s elites possessed the capital, the technical supplies, and all the necessary infrastructure to start producing coffee. They only lacked two things: land to plant the trees on, and field hands to harvest the berries.
And so their eyes fastened on the people who’d been ignored for more than 200 years: the indigenous population.
The colonial Spaniards had given to indigenous tribes, as a way of protecting them, communal land in the hills and mountains. High-altitude land, that wasn’t worth much at the time. Indigenous peoples were relegated to the sidelines and backwoods when the country was founded. And then, suddenly, their lands became essential for the country’s survival.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, President Rafael Zaldívar signed a decree. The communal lands where the Indians worked, grew their crops, and protected themselves from the government, were taken away at the stroke of a pen. Most of these lands were taken directly by the state, which sold them to coffee cultivators.
The country had found its coffee fields. It only needed to find its laborers. The indigenous families who had just been stripped of their lands were now obliged to work them on others’ behalf, for miserable wages. But coffee would demand even more of them.
Vagrancy laws were passed that let the state arrest people and force them to work for free, like slaves, so long as they were over twelve years old and couldn’t prove they were already working on a plantation.
Both the land and the indigenous people were handed over to private interests.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, most of the country’s coffee cultivation flourished in the west, and many Salvadorans desperate for work followed the coffee trail. Hungry, ragged multitudes, beggared by Zaldívar’s decree, flocked to the western hills.
These masses were not, in reality, how they were portrayed in official culture: happy and carefree brown folk, dressed in traditional costume and singing as they shucked coffee berries. No. It was a despoiled army simmering with hate. Hatred of the Ladinos (the foremen, administrators, plantation owners) and even other mestizo campesinos slightly less deprived than themselves—all those whom the indigenous considered guilty for the theft of their land.
Decades passed, while poverty and hatred rose to a boiling point.
Some communist leaders tried to channel the discontent into a political movement. But by 1932, forty years of indigenous rancor at being forced to tend an alien shrub where their milpas and ayotales used to be—while also being raped, mistreated, and enslaved—could no longer be contained.
US missionary Roy McNaught woke with a start around midnight on January 23, 1932, in a village in western El Salvador. As he recounted later, he heard hundreds of indigenous workers attacking a nearby National Guard post, the telegraph and the mayor’s office. Dozens more workers used sticks and stones to break down the massive wooden doors of the home of a wealthy coffee baron, Emilio Redaelli. The rebels had a few firearms—pistols and old hunting rifles—which they used to execute Radaelli. And then they did the same with his wife and kids. Next, they went for the liquor cabinet. They drank it dry before taking their fury to the neighboring village.
At least six communities were captured by the rebels. The same plan of attack was used in all of them. Take down the guard post, take down the telegraph, and ambush the homes of the rich coffee growers who’d taunted them for years. And yet, overall, little blood was shed. According to the American historian Erick Chin, the foremost expert on this period, the indigenous uprising barely saw a hundred people dead.
But it took the state by surprise. What happened in the weeks following the uprising has gone down as the bloodiest era in El Salvador’s history. Speaking of El Salvador, that’s saying something.
President General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez called his war minister, General Calderón, and his orders were clear: crush the rebellion, and make sure it stays crushed.
In an old, yellowing photograph, a group of men wearing hunting clothes pose next to a cart full of bodies. In another, a horrified young man peers at a pile of dead bodies—all of them, again, indigenous. In another, a priest reads from a black book to Francisco Sánchez, one of the leaders of the rebellion. In another, Sánchez hangs from a noose tied to a tree in downtown Izalco. They left his body exposed until it rotted—an example of what happens to indigenous people when they refuse to obey. When they don’t harvest coffee.
At least 30,000 people, mostly young men, were murdered in western El Salvador in under a month. Many more were executed by the end of the year. None of those deaths were logged in the city’s formal homicide registry.
The celebrated Salvadoran poet, Roque Dalton—a member of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), executed by the same ERP in 1975 after being wrongly suspected of being a CIA informer—wrote the following poem, Todos (All of Us), about the slaughter:
We were born half dead in 1932
we survived but only half alive
each with a bill of thirty thousand dead
that started accruing interest
paying dividends
and today suffices to spread death on those
still being born
half dead and
half alive.We were born half dead in 1932
to be Salvadoran is to be half dead
the part that still kicks
is the half-life they left us.
The haciendas continued to grow and harvest the wretched plant. Exporting and adding more shrubs, always more. Villages became small feudal enclaves. They had their own currency, their own corner shops, their own laws. And, fitting for El Salvador in those years, their own dictators. The foremen had become demigods. They took whatever they wanted, even if what they wanted lay between the legs of one of their female coffee harvesters. And if anyone talked back, they’d end up beheaded and left in a ditch.
The rich became very rich in the decades following 1932. The poor could hardly have been any poorer.
There’s an indigenous saying that coffee, a cursed plant, thrives on blood. That’s why coffee berries are red.
The boy—who would later become the Hollywood Kid—fled, running along the rows of coffee, disappointed in himself. But he took something with him that would be invaluable to his future. From the belt of the man he’d failed to stone to death, he took a .38 revolver.
The gun was of little consolation at first. Miguel Ángel hadn’t been able to avenge his sister’s honor or punish the foreman for his cruelty. Miguel Ángel could never undo what his father had allowed to happen, again and again.
Miguel Ángel’s family was, during those coffee-growing years, a patchwork of other families.
His mother, Doña Rosa, had abandoned another family. Of that first family, one daughter and two sons remained. Two of her other children had died before their fifth birthdays. When I asked people who knew the family what those children had died of, they gave vague answers that meekly attempted to justify, in few words, the human life that had ended. They died of measles. They died because they caught something in the air. They died of a stomach bug. They died because of a soft spot on their heads. No one knows what they died of, but child death was normal in their world.
In the late 1970s, as the plantation owners saw their kingdom shaken by international competition, Doña Rosa got to know Don Jorge, the miquero of a hacienda.
Being a miquero means doing the work of an animal. A monkey, to be precise. The miqueros are in charge of stripping the high branches of shade trees. A good shade tree is tall but must be pruned, to compete as little as possible with the coffee shrubs below. The miquero, with a machete and a rope (but without harness or gloves) climbs up to the crowns of Japanese cashews, laurels, and other trees specific to the region. He lops the trees so that they cast shade, but not too much, and let through some sun, but not too much. If the miquero falls, it’s his problem.
Doña Rosa got to know a miquero who fell. It sounded like a clap of thunder when Jorge hit the ground. They took him to his hut in the hacienda and prescribed rest and herbal tea, and he healed as best he could. It turned out he couldn’t heal very well at all. His left arm remained bent and limp. The pieces of his broken bones barely knitted. His spine was left crooked, and he was in constant pain.
The miquero became a laborer. A laborer with one good arm, harvesting the beans that grew thanks to that perfect blend of shade and sun he’d made possible until he fell.
Years went by, the couple trudging from hacienda to hacienda, asking for whatever work they could find.
Doña Rosa and Don Jorge had four children. Sandra, the eldest, was born around 1979. Jorge in 1981. Miguel Ángel in 1983. And a little girl, whose name no one remembers, who died of measles when she was a year and a half old.
Doña Rosa, Miguel Ángel’s mother, was a mother to three dead children.
Don Jorge, Miguel Ángel’s father, was heir to the murdered indigenous people.
Don Jorge inherited his miserable job from those murdered people. He was born into plantation life, under the iron fists of the foremen.
They went from hacienda to hacienda until, in the 1990s, they finally settled on one. The hacienda was in Atiquizaya, in an area known—a cruel joke—as Paradise.
Don Jorge turned to alcohol and Doña Rosa’s mind gradually grew feebler until she turned into a deranged old woman. The children basically raised themselves.
The foreman gave work to a crippled campesino with a large family. He even let him live in the hacienda. But he wanted a favor in return, for which he asked Don Jorge during one of his guaro benders: the eldest daughter. He didn’t want her as his wife, he already had one of those. He just wanted her as an after-work treat.
Don Jorge accepted. He gave the foreman permission to rape his daughter Sandra as often as he pleased.
Over many months, the man would come around in the evenings to blow off steam with a fifteen-year-old girl. Afterward, he’d take out his guaro and get drunk with her father.
The foreman would order Sandra’s brothers out of the house before he raped her. But, a few times, Miguel Ángel didn’t leave altogether. Instead, he hid outside and, through gaps in the planks, watched his father’s boss hump his older sister.
Miguel Ángel grew sick with hate. On December 24, 1994, while all Atiquizaya was celebrating, Miguel Ángel decided to kill for the first time.
He was a child—eleven years old—when he hid in the coffee bushes as two men nearby got drunk on guaro.