against him. Like the Consulado, he didn’t approve of
doing things that would have induced creative destruction
and threatened both his political power and his and the
elite’s profits. He therefore opposed industry for the same
reason that Francis I in Austria-Hungary and Nicholas I in
Russia did: industrial workers would have caused trouble.
In a legislation unparalleled in its paranoid repressiveness,
Ubico banned the use of words such as obreros (workers),
sindicatos (labor unions), and huelgas (strikes). You could
be jailed for using any one of them. Even though Ubico was
powerful, the elite pulled the strings. Opposition to his
regime mounted in 1944, headed by disaffected university
students who began to organize demonstrations. Popular
discontent increased, and on June 24, 311 people, many of
them from the elite, signed the Memorial de los 311, an
open letter denouncing the regime. Ubico resigned on July
1. Though he was followed by a democratic regime in
1945, this was overthrown by a coup in 1954, leading to a
murderous civil war. Guatemala democratized again after
only 1986.
The Spanish conquistadors had no compunction about
setting up an extractive political and economic system. That
was why they had come all the way to the New World. But
most of the institutions they set up were meant to be
temporary.
The encomienda , for example, was a
temporary grant of rights over labor. They did not have a
fully worked-out plan of how they would set up a system that
would persist for another four hundred years. In fact, the
institutions they set up changed significantly along the way,
but one thing did not: the extractive nature of the institutions,
the result of the vicious circle. The form of extraction
changed, but neither the extractive nature of the institutions
nor the identity of the elite did. In Guatemala the
encomienda , the repartimiento , and the monopolization of
trade gave way to the libreta and the land grab. But the
majority of the indigenous Maya continued to work as low-
wage laborers with little education, no rights, and no public
services.
In Guatemala, as in much of Central America, in a typical
pattern of the vicious circle, extractive political institutions
supported extractive economic institutions, which in turn
provided the basis for extractive political institutions and