In 1932 there was a peasant uprising. It was quickly put down but Pipil Indians were blamed and severely repressed. That might not be approved of by outsiders such as the USA. Thus this stamp, printed in America was a bit of a deception implying everything was fine. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The stamp today is a farm out stamp from if not a banana republic, more precisely a coffee republic. Therefore when the home country is having problems with their Pipil Indians who were the coffee plantation workers, why not put out stamps for America that show happy productive Indians. I find myself having some respect for the deception. Stamps should be used to put forth a countries best self. The displaying of the ideal also reinforces that it is indeed the way things should be.
The stamp today is issue A137, a 5 centavo stamp issued by El Salvador in 1938. It is part of a nine stamp issue in various denominations that display various aspects of Pipil Indian life. According to the Scott catalog, it is worth 25 cents used.
El Salvador received independence from Spain in 1821. At first it was feared that El Salvador and the other central American areas would be absorbed by Mexico. To avoid this, A Federation of the Central American states was started and El Salvador even petitioned to become an American state. Luckily the petition was ignored and Mexico decided that they would not press claims in Central America. The Federation dissolved in 1837 and the states went forward alone. At first the main crop was indigo with the then numerous Pipil Indians engaged in subsistence farming on reservations. With the decline in indigo, coffee became the cash crop. More land was needed and Indian land was taken under newly passed vagrancy laws and the Indians themselves set to work the coffee plantations for a days pay that only covered 2 tortillas and a few beans that had to be bought at the plantation store.
A coup lead to a new regime lead by Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez that stabilized the government and was favored by the wealthy landowners. The new regime allowed previously exiled Communists such as Farabundo Marti to return. Marti started signing up members and organizing a peasant uprising. He was educated and personally secure but managed to win some support from the Indian peasantry. An uprising occurred during Holy Week while the government was off. Indians attacked landowners with machetes and communist officers in the Army took briefly the radio station. Once Hernandez Martinez was back in place he rallied loyal army units to put down the rebellion. Marti was captured and quickly shot. He became an important figure in El Salvador and both the eighties left wing rebellion and the current El Salvadoran left of center party use his name in their title.
More importantly, Hernandez Martinez began to heavily go after the Pipil Indians. The Indians had to stop wearing there traditional dress and stop speaking their language to avoid trouble with Hernandez’s troops. There is very little left of the Pipil Indians in El Salvador today. Hernandez Martinez was into the occult. Once during a small pox epidemic he had colored lights hung around the capital believing this a cure. He also thought it worse to kill an ant than a men as a man would be reincarnated while the ant was just finished. After he was in power for about 15 years he finally resigned when a student strike went national and paralyzed the country. He went into exile. As an old man living in Honduras in the 1960s, Hernandez Martinez was assassinated by his chauffeur. It seems the driver’s father was killed in the uprising 30 years earlier. What goes around comes around.
Well my drink is empty. Today there are myriad stamp issues from all over gushing about a minority. I wonder if in the fullness of history they will seem as being as fraudulent as todays stamp. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2018.