“This is the ugliest city I’ve ever seen,” a guy on my tour named Herb told me as we walked around the main square in San Salvador, the capitol of El Salvador.

And I really don’t know enough about the place to argue with him, except I can conjure up the words most of us associate with this Central American country: civil war, the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, coffee and bananas.

I can see the toll those hard years took on this country. Some places you visit you can feel a heaviness in the air, as if there were invisible dark matter lingering like a dark cloud, an unseen energy that sucks the positive vibes out of a place. There is an aftermath to death and destruction that lays claim to a land and it takes generations to bring the sunlight back, to change the hardened look of the people to a happier, more peaceful expression.

On our tour, our guide likes to wave his arm toward the bus window to point out where the rich people live. They live, he tells us, in those big houses near the trees over there, where there is shade.

Most of the land in El Salvador was cleared by those “rich people” hundreds of years ago when they first grew indigo and then coffee. The people of this country who were indigenous, or descendants of the indigenous peoples that once lived here, were the slaves on those plantations until the first of several revolutions began against their Spanish conquerors and the masters of industry that followed.

I am sorry to say that the warm and friendly people of El Salvador aren’t doing much better today than they were planting coffee. Now they are slaves to the multi-national corporations that have moved in and who pay a pittance to the people who work behind the counters at American restaurants and stores that have just moved into their neighborhoods.

The people who own these corporations are a very small percentage of the world and so the Salvadorans are still, symbolically, on the coffee plantations of yore. Things never get better for them because the rich and powerful have always been in charge of their fate.

Eduardo likes to point that out whenever he can.

Many people here, he tells me, live on $8 a day, but a cup of coffee at one of the many Starbucks in town is $3. Our guide laughs at this hypocrisy, and makes fun of the well-to-do who walk down the street sipping their fancy coffee in the white cardboard cups, letting others know they’re lucky to have an extra three bucks.

Those cardboard cups are a status symbol here.

El Salvador grows some of the best coffee in the world, but the coffee that Starbucks serves is cheap coffee from elsewhere, we’re told. “So these Salvadorans who go to Starbucks aren’t even drinking the rich and delicious coffee of their homeland,” Eduardo says.

The Mayan ruins we’re seeing tell a similar story. The Mayan chiefs of history lived pretty lavishly, had the best feather headdresses, hung out on the top of the pyramids above the rest of the people, and told everyone in town they were descended from gods.

“We’re the special people,” the chiefs said of their royal families, “so go find us some jade, make me a jaguar headdress, and bring me a plate of fruit. And while you’re at it, I’ll need two people to sacrifice to the sky gods tomorrow, so go round them up.”

It was supposed to be a privilege to be sacrificed for your village, but I can’t imagine anyone was thrilled when the chief’s guards knocked on your hut to announce that it was your turn to have your blood shed for the good of all. That certainly went above and beyond taking one for the team.

I try to tell Eduardo that the little people of the world are everywhere, that even in America people are struggling to make ends meet, and that he would be surprised how they live in India, where poverty is inherently greater.

“People in India might think you are lucky,” I tell him.

But I understand his anger. The world has an abundance of resources — fertile volcanic valleys that grow rich coffee, for example, but those resources are corralled and exploited and profited upon by the few, and the people who do the hardest work always have the least.

It has been this way for so long, we don’t know what to do about it except complain. But this is the lesson for mankind, I believe — to declare this paradigm unacceptable and create a different one.

I hope that’s what we do. And so does Eduardo.

We share the same hopes for our world. We just have different ideas of how to get there.