Complete Thesis_double spaced abstract.pdf

the industrial goals of society reinforce each other” as the state seeks to maintain power. Any
groups, whether they are political, social, or economic, who do not fit into the state’s economic
development plans or who do not fit into the ideological frame of the state are ostracized.
McCreery (1994) contends that individuals migrate between departments and out of state to avoid
violence in highly repressive departments. He predicts and explains a similar pattern of state
behavior and movement of people for each wave of economic development or diversification.
The pattern is illustrated below in figure 2.2.
Figure2.2
Economic Modernization
(Export agriculture, free
trade, industrialization)
A
State Sponsored Violence
(Forced labor, debt peonage,
repression of organized labor
and political parties)
In McCreery’s (1994) example, at point A the newly landless peasants are not willing to
work as wage workers even though their ability to engage in subsistence farming has been or is
being destroyed. Simultaneously, the owners of the plantations or fincas are unified in their
concern and frustration by a perceived abundance of unemployed and unwilling labor in
neighboring departments or regions. The state operates as an agent of the owners of capital or the
landowners and provides the mechanisms of coercion; forced migration is the result. Occasional
infighting among the coffee growing elites does not dissuade the group from presenting a united
front to the state. McCreery (1994) reports in the years prior to 1900, it was difficult for the small
and relatively disorganized military to patrol for labor scofflaws in rural areas. As a result the
Guatemalan state introduces the use of militias; by 1900 there were “173 militia detachments”
operating in rural Guatemala (McCreery, 1994, 181). McCreery (1994) notes the labor laws put
into place at the behest of the owners of coffee plantations, laborers would be allowed three
B
Migration
(Intrastate, Interstate)
31