326 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
defined in cultural rather than class terms was engaged by Guatemalan scholars and
political leaders. But the stakes were much higher in Guatemala, for among those who
claimed the Indians to be culturally distinct and therefore in need of “special” treat-
ment were members of right-wing death squads; and those who saw the Indians as so-
cially equivalent to ladino proletariats included members of left-wing guerrilla
organizations. The Indians, however, were both culturally distinct andproletarianized,
and they demonstrated this condition during the bloody revolutionary war of the
1970s and 1980s by joining the insurgent side without abandoning nativist cultural
agendas. Whether a more robust Mexican-type indigenist program would have pre-
vented the civil war in Guatemala is an open question, but its absence certainly hard-
ened the positions of both the insurgent Indians and their military adversaries, and
therefore helped initiate the Indians’ vicious life-and-death struggle brought on by
the civil war.
In El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua the respective Indian institutes did very
little either to aid the Indians in the development process or to integrate them into
their respective national societies. In Nicaragua, the National Indigenist Institute
may even have facilitated the loss of communal Indian lands and cultures. Costa
Rica’s first serious efforts to establish an indigenist organization did not take place
until the 1970s, when the government set up the National Commission for Indige-
nous Affairs (CONAI) and decreed laws to protect Indian lands and provide for self-
rule in the Indian territories. Unfortunately, CONAI proved to be ineffective, and the
Indian laws were repeatedly violated by thousands of “whites” who invaded the Indian
reserves.
By the 1970s, capitalist-oriented developmental reforms had already produced
social conditions that precipitated the radical revolutions described earlier for the
Central American region. In parallel with Mexico, these capitalist developments at
first brought overall growth and prosperity to the Central American countries, al-
though the Indian communities scarcely shared in the benefits. Gross national prod-
uct (GNP) increased in the region for the three decades from 1950 to 1980 by the
prodigious rate of 6 percent per year. Growth was especially high in export goods pro-
duced by commercial agriculture, the five leading products being coffee, cotton, ba-
nanas, sugar, and beef. Growth in manufactured products was almost as great, but
most of the products were funneled into the region’s common market (CACM). The
withdrawal of Honduras from the CACM and the regional market’s subsequent dis-
integration toward the end of the 1970s, however, was a sign of the negative growth
and profound economic problems that the Central American countries began to ex-
perience in the 1980s.
The Central American revolutionary wars described before dominated political
developments during the l970s and 1980s. The relatively strong support for the rev-
olutionaries by the Indians was a clear indication that they had not generally bene-
fited from the economic developments that seemed so promising in Central America.
It is also evident that Indian participation in the civil wars brought with it a heavy de-
velopmental toll, and its impact has continued up to the present time (Spence 2004).
This result is understandable, given the disasters the wars wrought on the economic,