in Western Europe and North America were creating a mass demand for many products that a country such as Guatemala could potentially produce.
Early in the century, some indigo and then cochineal, both natural dyes, had been produced for export, but the more profitable opportunity would become coffee production. Guatemala had a lot of land suitable for coffee, and cultivation began to spread—without any assistance from the Consulado. As the world price of coffee rose and international trade expanded, there were huge profits to be made, and the Guatemalan elite became interested in coffee. In 1871 the long-lasting regime of the dictator Carrera was finally overthrown by a group of people calling themselves Liberals, after the worldwide movement of that name. What liberalism means has changed over time. But in the nineteenth century in the United States and Europe, it was similar to what is today called libertarianism, and it stood for freedom of individuals, limited government, and free trade. Things worked a little differently in Guatemala. Led initially by Miguel García Granados, and after 1873 by Justo Rufino Barrios, the Guatemalan Liberals were, for the most part, not new men with liberal ideals. By and large, the same families remained in charge. They maintained extractive political institutions and implemented a huge reorganization of the economy to exploit coffee. They did abolish the Consulado in 1871, but economic circumstances had changed. The focus of extractive economic institutions would now be the production and export of coffee.
Coffee production needed land and labor. To create land for coffee farms, the Liberals pushed through land privatization, in fact really a land grab in which they would be able to capture land previously held communally or by the government. Though their attempt was bitterly contested, given the highly extractive political institutions and the concentration of political power in Guatemala, the elite were ultimately victorious. Between 1871 and 1883 nearly one million acres of land, mostly indigenous communal land and frontier lands, passed into the hands of the elite, and it was only then that coffee developed rapidly. The aim was the formation of large estates. The privatized lands were auctioned off typically to members of the traditional elite or those connected with them. The coercive power of the Liberal state was then used to help large landowners gain access to labor by adapting and intensifying various systems of forced labor. In November 1876, President Barrios wrote to all the governors of Guatemala noting that
because the country has extensive areas of land that it needs to exploit by cultivation using the multitude of workers who today remain outside the movement of development of the nation’s productive elements, you are to give all help to export agriculture:
1. From the Indian towns of your jurisdiction provide to the owners of fincas [farms] of that department who ask for labor the number of workers they need, be it fifty or one hundred.
The repartimiento, the forced labor draft, had never been abolished after independence, but now it was increased in scope and duration. It was institutionalized in 1877 by Decree 177, which specified that employers could request and receive from the government up to sixty workers for fifteen days of work if the property was in the same department, and for thirty days if it was outside it. The request could be renewed if the employer so desired. These workers could be forcibly recruited unless they could demonstrate from their personal workbook that such service had recently been performed satisfactorily. All rural workers were also forced to carry a workbook, called a libreta, which included details of whom they were working for and a record of any debts. Many rural workers were indebted to their employers, and an indebted worker could not leave his current employer without permission. Decree 177 further stipulated that the only way to avoid being drafted into the repartimiento was to show you were currently in debt to an employer. Workers were trapped. In addition to these laws, numerous vagrancy laws were passed so that anyone who could not prove he had a job would be immediately recruited for the repartimiento or other types of forced labor on the roads, or would be forced to accept employment on a farm. As in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa, land policies after 1871 were also designed to undermine the subsistence economy of the indigenous peoples, to force them to work for low wages. The repartimiento lasted until the 1920s; the libreta system and the full gamut of vagrancy