Agricultural Elites; Economic Structure; and the Transition Towards Democracy in El Salvador

Abstract

This article addresses the process of democratization in El Salvador. More particularly, it attempts to explain a political outcome: the Peace Accords that were achieved in this country in January of 1992. Despite the attention recent theories about democracy have placed on political variables and strategic behavior, this study focusses mainly on structural factors emphasizing the role that such variables played in explaining democratic change in El Salvador. The argument lay down here rests on Barrington Moore’s thesis regarding the role of agrarian elites in democratic transitions. Based on his seminal comparative study, he established that no democratic result could possibly emerge without an erosion of the agrarian elite’s power base. As this article discloses, the Moore Condition was fullfiled for El Salvador in the 80s, rendering possible the peace accords. One of the most important consequences of the war -and the political and social processes that accompanied it- concerned the changes that took place in the economy. Those transformations moved El Salvador away from an agro-export economy to place it into a commercial and moreindustrialized one, leading in turn to a weakening of the traditional agrarian elite.