El Salvador 14 Families May 2026

Take the Kriete family (descendants of the old Fourteen through marriage). They own Grupo Agrisal, which controls hotels, shopping malls, and the largest private bank. They endorsed Bukele. The Salaverría family (another oligarchic line) owns La Prensa Gráfica, the country’s largest newspaper. Bukele has attacked them as “the old regime”—but he has not broken their monopolies.

When it was over, the Fourteen did not apologize. They did not even acknowledge it in their private letters. Instead, they threw parties. A surviving guest list from a Dueñas family soirée in March 1932 reads like a victory celebration. The indigenous community of El Salvador—once a third of the population—simply vanished from public life. Náhuat went underground. And the oligarchy’s grip became absolute. Fast-forward to the 1970s. The world changes. The Fourteen do not. Their names are now on banks (Banco Agrícola), on soft drinks (La Constancia beer), on industrial conglomerates (Grupo Poma). They have diversified out of coffee into finance, textiles, and shipping. But the structure is identical: a dozen families, intermarried, owning roughly 90% of the nation’s wealth. el salvador 14 families

By the time the peace accords were signed in 1992, 75,000 Salvadorans were dead. And the Fourteen? They lost almost nothing. A weak land-transfer program redistributed a fraction of the old coffee estates, but the families kept their banks, their import monopolies, their media outlets. They simply moved their money into offshore accounts and waited. Today, El Salvador has a millennial president, Nayib Bukele, who wears jeans and tweets about bitcoin. He is popular, authoritarian, and has crushed the gangs. But look closely at his cabinet, his donors, his in-laws. The names keep appearing. Take the Kriete family (descendants of the old