The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson

Author:Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Repression on the Finca

While a smallholder coffee economy, and together with it a type of Shackled Leviathan, developed in Costa Rica, coffee expanded in Guatemala too, but in a very different, repressive direction. The reason why Rigoberta Menchú was witnessing such savagery can be traced to the edifice of labor coercion surrounding coffee cultivation in Guatemala. The logic was that anything that could threaten this machine would have to be stamped out with extreme force.

Guatemala had been the seat of colonial power in Central America, and unlike Costa Rica, it had a strong conservative merchant guild and powerful big landowners. It had a much more developed economy as well. The Indigo Growers Society had been founded as early as 1794. Guatemala also had a dense population of indigenous people. After Guatemala became independent it was ruled by a dictator, Rafael Carrera, who was in power either de facto or de jure for much of the period between 1838 until his death in 1865. As Carrera’s biographer Ralph Lee Woodward put it:

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