To observe that events are determined by historical antecedents is hardly informative. What is difficult about history is that it is rarely equally easy to find out how the past shapes the future. Central America presents an interesting case in which indigenous cultures and Spanish conquest have succeeded in reproducing old geographical patterns while the cultures and societies therein have changed in extraordinary ways. The present paper suggests how it is that some of these cultural and social relational continuities, perhaps difficult to understand apart from this long tradition, may have continued down from the pre-Columbian period to the present. A key element in the process seems to lie in the ethnic relations, those relations that have been retained between Ladinos and the state on the one hand, and the highly populous Indian population of Guatemala.

In 1821 Central Americans who had united to throw off the control of Spain, found themselves hopelessly divided on issues concerning the nature of the political and social institutions of the nation they had created. Confidently the Liberals challenged authority and tradition, condemned the past and its institutions and strove to construct a new world of freedom, equality, democracy and progress. Conservatives feared the rashness and the uncertainty of that new world. They thought it both foolish and unnecessary to destroy the old in order to build the new. The confrontation between Liberals and Conservatives was to be lengthy and violent. Both groups aspired to political control and, lacking practical experience in government or statesmanship, each sought political power as a vehicle for ensuring its own ascendancy and imposing its views upon the nation. One of the most troublesome issues on which they clashed was the form of government. And one of the most central figures in that conflict was Father Juan José de Aycinena.

Since the 1920s, the San Antonio sugar mill in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua has been that country's largest manufacturing establishment. The ingenio (the sugar mill along with the plantation) employed close to 2,000 workers in 1920, and has since consistently employed far more workers than any other single enterprise. The owners of San Antonio were—and continue to be—the most economically powerful group within the Nicaraguan elite, In contemporary Nicaragua, the above affirmations remain valid: San Antonio is still the largest employer and economically most powerful financial group in the country.

Any consideration of the development of Nicaraguan capitalism must take into account the history of the Ingenio San Antonio (ISA). In this article, I will examine the development of relations among labor, management, and the state in San Antonio from the 1890s until 1930 using archival and oral sources. Throughout this period, politics and economics were inseparable for the workers. Particularly after the U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and bolstered the Conservative regime, the political Liberalism of the San Antonio workers was something of a popular revolutionary

The Indian is an inexhaustable layer of exploitation and his best song is his taciturnity…. Guatemala is sad; a desperate, horrid, fearful sadness … a sad people living with a totally alien world within us. (Ernesto Juan Fonfrias, “Guatemala: un pueblo triste,” Diario de Centro América, Sept. 1, 1950.)

Fonfrias’ assessment of Guatemala in 1950 contains important clues to understanding the “revolution” from 1944 to 1954 and its overthrow. The revolution has been extensively studied; but most works have concentrated on American involvement in the overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 and have thus only provided us with limited views of the various conflicts that developed during the two revolutionary administrations (Juan José Arévalo, 1944-51, and Arbenz, 1951-54). This has most certainly been the case with studies of rural Guatemala during the revolution. Despite the importance of the agrarian reform initiated in 1952, the reform and the conflicts that it fostered are not clearly understood. Recent research has suggested, however, that the tensions were more complex and more deeply rooted in Guatemala's rural history than earlier works had indicated.

“Our institutions,” remarked a North American Protestant missionary in Guatemala in 1910 referring to his denomination's missions, schools and clinics, “can do more than gunboats.” From the time of the Liberal reform of Justo Rufino Barrios, most of Guatemala's Liberal rulers had agreed. Valued by nineteenth century Liberal rulers for their development projects, their usefulness in the struggle against Catholic clericalism, and, most importantly, for the packaging of North American values, beliefs and culture in which they wrapped the Word of God, Protestant missionaries worked in Guatemala with the blessing and encouragement of the government from the late nineteenth century until 1944. That year, the “last caudillo”—the old Liberal dictator Jorge Ubico —was ousted from power and replaced by a reformist junta, marking the beginning of Guatemala's decade-long flirtation with progressive revolutionary government.