Complete Thesis_double spaced abstract.pdf

the Liberal’s initial rule in post-independent Guatemala. In post-independent Guatemala, Liberal
policies alienated and angered indigenous Maya populations, as well as the Conservative criollo
elites and ladinos who valued a role for the state and the Catholic Church as the arbiters of social
and economic policy. Uprisings and revolts were common among the peasant classes. The
uprisings were often violent; such uprisings were put down by the military or by the plantation
militias.
The second change concerns the Guatemalan military in 1870s. There was a federal
consolidation of power over the military, an increase in the size of the federal military, and an
increase in military violence against domestic labor uprisings. Throughout the Liberal
Revolution state sanctioned military violence was increasingly used to enforce forced labor
policies throughout the state (Vanden, 2002, 255). Under successive Liberal dictators, the
Guatemalan state mandates and enforces the movement of “at least 100,000 highland Maya
workers” to migrate each season for weeks and months at a time to harvest coffee beans on the
large coffee plantations alongside the Pacific Ocean (Lovell and Lutz, 1996, 403). The
Guatemalan state enacted the Reglamento de Joraleros (Regulation of Day Laborers) and the Ley
contra la Vagancia (Vagrancy Law) in 1877 and 1888 respectively. Under the laws Mayans were
forced to work “100 to 150 days per year on the coffee plantation” (REMHI, 1999, 181). Forced
labor meant the plantations could keep wages low, women earned half a real per day and men
earned one real per day (REMHI, 1999, 181). In the southern coffee growing region alongside
the Pacific Ocean the plantation owners would frequently boast that “a man is cheaper than a
mule” (Galeano, 1973, 98). Frequently plantation owners would refuse to sign or authenticate the
cards the migrants carried, keeping the migrants in continuous debt bondage. Unfortunately for
the indigenous Mayans living in Quetzaltenango, San Marcos and Alta Verapaz their communal
lands were prime for agricultural production (REMHI, 1999, 181-182). As their land was
63