The Heirs of the Finca Florencia

On an expropriated farm, a proud planter's legacy endures

The torment of El Salvador's civil strife knows no interval. Fighting between government forces and leftist insurgents continued unabated last week, and so did political killings. In a single day, 37 people were assassinated by the country's security forces. In Soyapango, a slum section of San Salvador, police dragged 23 people from their homes and shot them dead in the street; seven others refused to come out and were killed indoors.

Despite the level of violence, the struggling civilian-military junta has continued to pursue its controversial, and surprisingly successful, land-reform program. Since March 1980, 790,000 acres of rich agricultural land have been expropriated from large landholders and are now farmed cooperatively by 62,000 peasant families. Next week, according to the government, the final block of 875,000 acres will be similarly taken over. TIME Correspondent William McWhirter last week visited one of the new cooperatives, the 960-acre Finca Florencia, a coffee plantation 24 miles northwest of San Salvador. His report:

Several hundred campesino families were gathered early last week on the dusty veranda of the hilltop plantation house. Dressed in their meager best, they stood respectfully and listened for more than an hour as the man in the short-sleeved guayabera shirt exhorted them to hard work and clean living. The scene looked familiar--an absentee landlord come to survey his patrimony, perhaps. In fact, the speaker was Jose Antonio Morales Ehrlich, a member of El Salvador's ruling junta and head of the country's far-reaching land-reform program. The campesinos represented 14 new cooperative farms in the area, encompassing 31,148 acres and 1,551 peasant families. They had come to watch Ehrlich swear in their newly elected representatives and hear him discuss the future of the program that had given them title to estates on which their families had labored for generations.

For the new owners of the Finca Florencia, the powerful family that built the plantation is still a ghostly presence. They revere the memory of Angel, the patriarch who founded the finca in the late 1880s and built the big rustic house with its brick pillars and its view reaching from tin-roofed barns to stone walls enclosing acre after acre of lush coffee bushes. For 60 years, the plantation prospered under Angel and his grandson Carlos. Then Carlos turned over the Finca Florencia to his four sons, and by the 1950s the farm was in the hands of a hired manager. The family had already moved to San Salvador; the hilltop views that had thrilled Angel seemed merely confining to his heirs and their restless wives, so "when the sons did come out from the city," said one of the cooperative's organizers, "it was only to play the peasant, to walk around and impress the girlfriends for the weekend."

Even as the family's absences grew longer, its demands grew larger and larger. The manager also had to squeeze his cut from the overworked land. "He was a worse s.o.b. than the sons," one worker recalled. Naturally, there was less and less for the campesinos. Finally the owners stripped the plantation, shipping out the fertilizer, selling off the cattle, dismantling the machinery. When land reform came to the Finca Florencia, as Ehrlich put it, "all we had to give to the campesinos was the land itself." Now Angel's legacy--the fertile, volcanic soil as well as the shuttered house, the cracked, weed-filled swimming pool and the primitive courtyard workrooms--belongs to the great-grandchildren of those who labored to build them.

They will have to work even harder than before. El Salvador's land-reform program is based on the hope that the country's peasants will be willing to do so, and that land ownership will wean their loyalty away from the leftists and toward the government. The appearance of Ehrlich, who is touring the new cooperatives "village by village, finca by finca," is evidence of the degree to which the government has staked its future on land reform's success. At the Finca Florencia, he told campesinos of the risks and hardships ahead. "Now that power has changed hands, each of you must work not only out of self-interest, but for the common interest. You are not only to serve yourself but also the public." The government, through collective land ownership, was attempting to implement a new social system, "but the only system in which a man can be free," he pointedly reminded them, "is a democracy."

After the speech came the hard questions, as the peasant representatives voiced their doubts and worries. But Ehrlich was impressively armed with straight answers. The rainy season was almost here, said one man, yet no one has received any money for his labor (workers are paid $5.50 per day by the government) or for the crops. "The men don't mind working for a couple of weeks without pay," another added, "as long as they can be sure it is coming." Ehrlich answered that the central bank hoped to send out checks within a week. "We wish to promise you that the financial support will be there," he reassured them. Another man complained that they had been promised technical advisers, but only one had shown up in the beginning for a few days and then had left. Could someone come and tour all the farms? Ehrlich sidestepped the question, but said privately afterward, "They want a father figure; that is the system they are used to. In many cases, they know more about agronomy than any technician."

The new owners of Finca Florencia are serious about making the plantation prosperous again. It is already ahead of other cooperatives, having paid off more than 80% of its credits and having made the first capital repayment to Angel's family. They have established a commissary and arranged for a doctor to come to the farm when needed. They are ready for the complex challenges of managing a large estate. "We know how to farm," they say. "For years we have done the real work here." What if the owners were to come one day and take back the land? "We would fight them," they say simply. They have some faith in the government, but more in the land and in their own abilities. Angel might well have recognized these proud men, not his spoiled great-grandsons, as his true heirs.

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