Our relationships in El Salvador include the Ortiz family at Finca Las Mercedes and Sergio and Isabel Ticas at Finca Los Planes. Both farms earned top places in the country’s 2006 Cup of Excellence, a competition that ranks its best coffees. Those results helped bring us together.

By the 1880s, coffee was El Salvador’s main export. Governments abolished communal lands for coffee planting, concentrating ownership among a small elite. Dependence on coffee left rural workers exposed when export prices and wages fell during the Great Depression. In 1932, a rural uprising was followed by military reprisals known as La Matanza, which killed an estimated 15,000–30,000 peasants.

Production expanded through the following decades. Land reform in 1980 turned the largest estates into cooperatives, while civil war discouraged farm care and replanting. Peace came in 1992, but ageing trees, price crises and farm abandonment continued to strain the industry.

The 2012–13 leaf-rust epidemic cut the national crop by about 60 percent within a year and eliminated tens of thousands of seasonal harvest jobs. The smaller industry has since turned towards specialty coffee and small lots, while growers continue to face debt, labour shortages and less predictable rain.