Complete Thesis_double spaced abstract.pdf

years…the right to control water that encroached on railway lands…the sole and exclusive
government on the railway and [to never] be subject to the intervention of the government”
(Handy, 1984, 80). Approximately twenty years later the United Fruit Company was the largest
employer, exporter, and the largest landowner in Guatemala. 13 United Fruit Company’s
monopoly on bananas, monopoly on transportation and position as the largest employer meant
that it could set prices for wages, conditions and working hours on the job, transportation and
agricultural goods within Guatemala; the company begins to act as a “state within a state”
(Vanden, 2002, 256; Schlesinger and Kinzer, 1982, 70-71). However it was a joint effort
between the Guatemalan government and Untied Fruit Company that kept wages low and
workers forcibly pacified. 14
Thousands of Mayan laborers lived out their lives on the large
banana plantations in Guatemala. Housing and food, of extremely poor quality, was provided at a
marked up cost to the laborers by the plantation owners, many laborers did not earn enough
money to pay for the supplies they were charged for and lived their lives in debt peonage. The
United States consumed eighty percent of Guatemalan exports and provides seventy percent of
the imports to Guatemala in the 1920s (REMHI, 1999, 182). For most Guatemalans there was no
need to discern between United Fruit Company and the United States government, the two
entities were perceived as one in the same (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 1982, 73).
The 1920s and 1930s continued to be turbulent times for Guatemala. As the number of
Guatemalan workers participating in unions and worker associations increased there was a
13 Handy, 94. The relationship between Guatemala and the U.S. was further strengthened-by the 1940s the
United States was purchasing “90% of Guatemalan produce.”
14 An example of Guatemalan government interference on behalf of United Fruit Company is the rewritten
1878 Anti-Vagrancy Law, the 1934 Anti-Vagrancy Law “stipulated that peasants work at least 150 days
per year on the plantations, with the number of days they worked to be written down in the passbook they
were required to carry. If a peasant was found without his passbook or if it was determined that he had not
worked the required number of days, he faced jail, public whipping, or road labor” (Ropp et al, 131-2). The
Anti-Vagrancy Law specifically targeted “Indians who owned no land or less than a prescribed amount”
this ensured that the Anti-Vagrancy Law targeted Indians not landowners (Gleijeses, 1991, 13).
68