Word: harvesters
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...acre cattle ranch, which is $200,000 in debt. "You can't sell land here," says Bud, 53. "Nobody is going to buy it." The Hirsts have hit on a unique way to lay their burden down. They have collected poems by Hazel, 52, in a booklet titled Bitter Harvest, and are selling copies for $8 each (sample verse: "But hope won't clothe your children/ It can't their hunger salve/ It will not pay the mortgage/ And hope is all we have"). Proceeds from the sales will be used to repay the Hirsts' IOUs, and each purchaser will...
...guerrillas $2.50." After two more days of secretive telephone calls, a deal was finally struck. The grower would pay his laborers $3.63 per 100 lbs.; the workers would bring their own lunch. The guerrillas, members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), would receive $500 for the entire harvest. In return, the grower would have the services of all the workers he needed for the lengthy harvest season, and coffee trucks would roll unmolested from his plantations to processing and storage mills...
Similar under-the-table transactions have been taking place in recent weeks all over central and eastern El Salvador as the harvest of the country's biggest cash crop got under way. Despite the bitter enmity between Salvadoran landowners and the Liberation Front, the coffee harvest is a time when the two sides find good use for each other. This year the interdependence appears to be greater than ever. Says a lawyer in the central department of Usulutan: "Everybody is making deals with the guerrillas." The reason, he explains, is that "the guerrillas are stronger. Their presence is being accepted...
...coffee has provided more than 50% of the country's export revenues. It still does, but since 1980 income from coffee has shrunk, from more than $615 million to $403 million. This year bountiful rains promise a slight reversal of the trend. At current world prices, the Salvadoran coffee harvest could bring in as much as $410 million in desperately needed foreign exchange. Because roughly 25% of the crop is grown in areas contested or controlled by the guerrillas, more and more landowners have come to see the virtue of cooperating with their enemies, whose right to represent local workers...
...Liberation Front charges workers a fee for its bargaining "services," but involving themselves in the wage negotiations adds to the rebels' political weight. Last November the rebels began distributing leaflets in one of their mountainous northern strongholds, Chalatenango department, urging local peasants who travel south for the coffee harvest to band together for negotiating purposes. At about the same time, a full-page advertisement appeared in a newspaper in the capital, San Salvador, putting forth wage and working demands. The advertisement was signed by two mysterious organizations previously unknown in Salvadoran labor circles, the National Association of Campesinos...