On January 14, 1993, Ramiro De León Carpio was sworn
in as the president of Guatemala. He named Richard
Aitkenhead Castillo as his minister of finance, and Ricardo
Castillo Sinibaldi as his minister of development. These
three men all had something in common: all were direct
descendants of Spanish conquistadors who had come to
Guatemala in the early sixteenth century. De León’s
illustrious ancestor was Juan De León Cardona, while the
Castillos were related to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a man
who wrote one of the most famous eyewitness accounts of
the conquest of Mexico. In reward for his service to Hernán
Cortés, Díaz del Castillo was appointed governor of
Santiago de los Caballeros, which is today the city of
Antigua in Guatemala. Both Castillo and De León founded
dynasties along with other conquistadors, such as Pedro
de Alvarado. The Guatemalan sociologist Marta Casaús
Arzú identified a core group of twenty-two families in
Guatemala that had ties through marriage to another
twenty-six families just outside the core. Her genealogical
and political study suggested that these families have
controlled economic and political power in Guatemala
since 1531. An even broader definition of which families
were part of this elite suggested that they accounted for just
over 1 percent of the population in the 1990s.
In Sierra Leone and in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the
vicious circle took the form of the extractive institutions set
up by colonial powers being taken over by
postindependence leaders. In Guatemala, as in much of
Central America, we see a simpler, more naked form of the
vicious circle: those who have economic and political
power structure institutions to ensure the continuity of their
power, and succeed in doing so. This type of vicious circle
leads to the persistence of extractive institutions and the
persistence of the same elites in power together with the
persistence of underdevelopment.
At the time of the conquest, Guatemala was densely
settled, probably with a population of aroun