When the World Bank promised last December to lend $12,500,000 for a big hydroelectric project on the Rio Lempa, Salvadoreans agreed to raise another $5,006,000 themselves. To the government of tiny El Salvador (pop. 2,500,000), which had never tried it before, floating an internal loan looked like a precarious business. At its request, the World Bank sent in a bond-marketing expert, balding, energetic Norman M. Tucker.
Many Salvadoreans were convinced that the only way to put over a bond issue was to sell it to the "Twenty Families," the big coffee planters...
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