266 CHAPTER 11 THE TRIUMPH OF NEOCOLONIALISM AND THE LIBERAL STATE, 1870–1900
for coffee and the adjustments this required in
Guatemala’s economic and social structures. In
1871 they seized power, and two years later the
energetic Justo Rufi no Barrios became president.
Barrios and his successors were determined to con-
solidate state power, subjugate relatively autono-
mous indigenous communities, and create a unifi ed
national market for land, labor, and commodities.
Their liberal reform program included major
economic, social, and ideological changes. The
ideological reform introduced doctrines of white
supremacy then current in Europe and the United
States to justify racist immigration policies designed
to “whiten” the population. It also rejected clerical
and metaphysical doctrine in favor of a fi rm faith
in science and material progress. This called for the
secularization and expansion of education. The
shortage of public funds, however, greatly limited
public education; as late as 1921, the Guatemalan
illiteracy rate was over 86 percent. Seeking to re-
duce the power and authority of the church, the
liberal governments nationalized its lands, ended
its special privileges, and established freedom of re-
ligion and civil marriage.
The economic transformation encompassed
three major areas: land tenure, labor, and infra-
structure. A change in land tenure was necessary
for the creation of the new economic order. The
old staples of Guatemalan agriculture, indigo and
cochineal, had been grown by thousands of small
and medium-sized producers; coffee, however,
required large expanses of land concentrated in
relatively few hands. Under Barrios, there began
an “agrarian reform” designed to make such land
available to the coffee growers. Church and mon-
astery lands, confi scated by Barrios, were the fi rst
target. Next came uncultivated state holdings,
which were divided and sold cheaply or granted to
private interests, and indigenous communal lands.
Legislation requiring titles to private property pro-
vided the legal basis for this expropriation. The
principal native benefi ciaries of this process were
small and medium-sized coffee growers who could
purchase or otherwise obtain land from the govern-
ment. But foreign immigrants, warmly welcomed
by the liberal regimes, also benefi ted from the new
legislation. By 1914 foreign-owned (chiefl y Ger-
man) lands produced almost half of Guatemala’s
coffee. By 1926 concentration of land ownership
had reached a point where only 7.3 percent of the
population owned land.
The land reform helped achieve another objec-
tive of the liberal program: the supply of a mass of
cheap labor to the new group of native and foreign
coffee growers. Many highland natives who had
lost their land migrated to the emerging coffee-
growing areas near the coast. The most common
labor system was debt peonage—legal under Gua-
temalan law—in which indígenas were tied to the
fi ncas (plantations) by hereditary debts. This was
supplemented by the recruitment of native peoples
who came down from the mountains to work as
seasonal laborers on haciendas and plantations
to add to their meager income from their own tiny
landholdings. Barrios also revived the colonial
system of mandamientos, under which indígenas
were required to accept offers of work from planters.
The registers of native peoples maintained by local
offi cials for this purpose were also used to conscript
them for military service and public works. Those
who could not pay the two-peso head tax—the
great majority—were required to work (two weeks
a year) on road construction.
Constituting 70 percent of the nation’s 1
million people in the late nineteenth century, in-
digenous peoples naturally resisted this liberal
onslaught, occasionally through overt acts of lo-
calized rebellion. But in the face of a ruthless mili-
tary state prepared to obliterate them, they more
commonly survived by deploying “weapons of
the weak,” modes of resistance designed to limit
the risk of annihilation. In rural Guatemala, these
indigenous communities relied on guachibales,
independent religious brotherhoods rooted in colo-
nial Catholic traditions, to maintain their cultural
identities, defend their autonomy, and preserve
communal customs, ancestral languages, and re-
ligious rituals against the homogenizing power of
liberalism’s unfettered market forces.NICARAGUA, 1870–1909
The history of Nicaragua for two decades after
the collapse of the Central American federation in