324 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
Figure 8.10 Followers of Pepe Figueres in the 1948 Costa Rican uprising. Reprinted, with
permission, from Victor Hugo Acuña, Conflicto y Reforma en Costa Rica: 1940–1949,Nuestra
Historia (17) San José, Costa Rica: Universidad Estatal a Distancia, 1991.dissident Guatemalan soldiers and mercenaries in a 1954 coup that overthrew the Ar-
benz government. Development and reform did not entirely end in Guatemala with
the coup, but subsequent years were characterized by repressive military rule, ac-
companied by massive accumulation of wealth for the few but dire poverty for most
Indians and lower-class ladinos.
Costa Rica’s attempt to modernize through developmental reforms in the l940s
and 1950s was not as bold as Guatemala’s, and as in Guatemala it failed to take into
account the small number of communities still identifying themselves as Indians in that
country. Nevertheless, as we see in Box 8.4, Costa Rica’s development reforms turned
out to be more practical and longer lasting than Guatemala’s (see also Figure 8.10).Indigenist Development in Central America. Most of the Central American
countries ratified the agreements reached by the First Inter-American Indigenist
Congress held in Mexico in 1940, and subsequently established national indigenist
institutes of their own. Only in Guatemala, however, did this institute play much of
a developmental role, and even there its influence was extremely weak compared
with Mexico. For example, as already indicated, the important reforms of 1944 to
1954 in Guatemala were not strongly indigenist; as in Mexico, the Indian
communities were seen as impediments to progress and therefore in need of
assimilation into the broader “ladino” (mestizo) culture.
The military regimes that succeeded the reform government in Guatemala after
1954 were essentially anti-Indian. Unlike the Mexican indigenists who wanted to in-