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litia further strengthened national control over the rural hinterlands. Barrios was decidedly
pro-Western and sought to impose a European worldview to suppress what he saw as a
vastly inferior Indian culture. Liberal economic policies ensured minimal protection of vil-
lage lands, Indian culture, or the welfare of peasant villages.
During this time, coffee came to dominate the Guatemalan economy and Barrios's eco-
nomicpoliciesensuredtheavailabilityofapeasantworkforcetosupplythelabor-intensive
coffee harvest with its share of needed workers. Furthermore, the increasingly racist atti-
tudes of Guatemala's coffee elites toward the Indians served to justify the coercive means
used to secure this labor force. The Indians were seen as lazy, making forced labor and the
submission of the indigenous masses both necessary and morally justified. In this regard,
the
mandamiento,
which came to replace the
repartimiento,
was increasingly enforced in
the last two decades of the 19th century, requiring villages to supply a specified number of
laborers per year.
Increasingly, however, elites found more coercive ways to exact labor from the Indians
bywayofdebtpeonage.Ruralworkerswererequiredtocarrya
libreto,
arecordcontaining
an individual's labor and debt figures.
Habilitadores,
or labor contractors, were charged
with advancing money to peasants in exchange for labor contracts. The contractors often
used alcohol as an added incentive and took advantage of widespread peasant illiteracy to
ensure many of them contracted debts they would never be able to repay. In this way, de-
pressed rural wages from debt peonage and low-cost labor increased the wealth of agricul-
tural elites while making the rural peasantry even poorer.
Justo Rufino Barrios died in battle in 1885 while fighting to create a re-unified Central
America under Guatemalan leadership. He was succeeded by a string of short-lived
cau-
dillo
presidents. The next to hold power for any significant time was Manuel Estrada Cab-
rera, whose legacy included undivided support for big business and crackdowns on labor
organization. He ruled from 1898 until his overthrow in 1920, having been declared men-
tally insane. Among Cabrera's many peculiarities was the construction of several temples
to honor Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. Cabrera's legacy includes gross corrup-
tion, a beefed-up military, and a neglected educational system.
Export agriculture continued its unprecedented growth under Cabrera, thus paving the
wayforthedominanceoftwoforeigngroupsthatwouldcometocontrolmuchofGuatem-
ala's economy in later years. The first of these were German coffee planters who settled
in the region of Las Verapaces. By 1913 this German enclave owned 170 of the country's
coffee plantations, with about half of them in the vicinity of Cobán. The other significant
foreignpresenceinGuatemala duringthistimewastheU.S.-ownedUnitedFruitCompany
(UFCo),aptlynicknamed“ElPulpo”(TheOctopus),anditstentaclesconsistingofInterna-
