4 - Guatemala since 1930

Summary

Although the 108,900 square kilometres of its landmass made it smaller than both Nicaragua (148,000) and Honduras (112,000), Guatemala had in 1930 the largest population in Central America (1.7 million). The capital – Guatemala City – had, however, a population of only 130,000 and the country's second city, Quezaltenango (20,000), was no more than a modest provincial town. With a minuscule manufacturing base and an export sector almost completely dominated by coffee (which generated 77 per cent of export revenue) and bananas (13 per cent), Guatemala conformed to the stereotype of a backward plantation economy in which large commercial farms coexisted with a patchwork of small peasant plots dedicated to subsistence agriculture and the provisioning of a limited local market in foodstuffs. On the eve of the depression, GDP stood at $450 million, making Guatemala's economy considerably greater in size than those of the other states of the isthmus. (The second largest was that of El Salvador, with a GDP of $227 million; the weakest, that of Nicaragua with a GDP of only $129 million.) Moreover, Guatemala still retained much of the regional political influence it had enjoyed under Spanish colonial rule, when it was the seat of civil and ecclesiastical administration as well as the centre of commerce for the entire area. Hence, although it was a decidedly small and impoverished state compared to most in Latin America, and was dwarfed by Mexico to the north, Guatemala remained the strongest power in Central America, which constituted a distinct political arena just as much in 1930 as it does today.