agriculture:
1. From the Indian towns of your jurisdiction
provide to the owners of fincas [farms] of that
department who ask for labor the number of
workers they need, be it fifty or one hundred.
The repartimiento , the forced labor draft, had never been
abolished after independence, but now it was increased in
scope and duration. It was institutionalized in 1877 by
Decree 177, which specified that employers could request
and receive from the government up to sixty workers for
fifteen days of work if the property was in the same
department, and for thirty days if it was outside it. The
request could be renewed if the employer so desired.
These workers could be forcibly recruited unless they could
demonstrate from their personal workbook that such
service had recently been performed satisfactorily. All rural
workers were also forced to carry a workbook, called a
libreta , which included details of whom they were working
for and a record of any debts. Many rural workers were
indebted to their employers, and an indebted worker could
not leave his current employer without permission. Decree
177 further stipulated that the only way to avoid being
drafted into the repartimiento was to show you were
currently in debt to an employer. Workers were trapped. In
addition to these laws, numerous vagrancy laws were
passed so that anyone who could not prove he had a job
would be immediately recruited for the repartimiento or
other types of forced labor on the roads, or would be forced
to accept employment on a farm. As in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century South Africa, land policies after 1871
were also designed to undermine the subsistence
economy of the indigenous peoples, to force them to work
for low wages. The repartimiento lasted until the 1920s; the
libreta system and the full gamut of vagrancy laws were in
effect until 1945, when Guatemala experienced its first brief
flowering of democracy.
Just as before 1871, the Guatemalan elite ruled via
military strongmen. They continued to do so after the coffee
boom took off. Jorge Ubico, president between 1931 and
1944, ruled longest. Ubico won the presidential election in
1931 unopposed, since nobody was foolish enough to run