Economy, taxes and farms

Economy, taxes and farms in the 19th century in El Salvador

Agriculture Judges of the Department of Nueva San Salvador. Within the graph, the presence of Hilario Guillen stands out, who served as Agriculture Judge of San José Villanueva for 1881. Photograph taken from the Official Gazette of El Salvador, facilitated by the General Archive of the Nation.

The hacienda was the most important economic unit during the colonial period from the s. XVII to XX. In its area of land, cattle were grown and raised to trade and subsist at the same time. Despite being an economically self -sufficient entity, he had to pay a series of taxes to the Spanish crown. These taxes were known as the alcabalas

In the colonial era, the alcabala was a tax that had to pay every seller of both slaves and semovientes (cattle), as of any other product with the aggravating person to increase the sale price for the buyer, who was the one who actually paid said tax . It is believed that this tax was established by the Castilian king Alfonso XI temporarily in 1342, but that became a fixed income for the crown since 1349 keeping in Spain and even moving to America and lasting until 1813 during the reign of Fernando VII , Sovereign that accepted the emancipation of the American colonies.

In the case of the Salvadoran hacienda, at the end of the s. XIX taxes were still paid, no longer to the crown, but the new Salvadoran state that I did not stop maintaining said tax until 1928, when it repealed it for considering it obsolete and inappropriate (Official Gazette of El Salvador 1st September 1 of that same year).

In May 1881, the municipality of San José Villanueva paid Internal Alcabala Tax to the Government of that time, a total of 14 pesos, as a purchase sales, 12 pesos as a tax to the Tajo de RESTA, 140. 6 pesos per canon of land . This constitutes a more or less thorough control of the taxes that the municipality paid to the State, this control was executed once a year and a failure was issued in the official newspaper the following year.

It must have been a difficult time, since at the end of the s. XIX and early 20 Deininger, Arthur Soundy and General Luciano Hernández among others, many times without being able to pay the amount owed to his creditor ended up losing considerable extensions of land.