More From Our Geographers

Read more of our interview with Dr. George Lovell about the Maya Indians of Guatemala and the historical roots of the Maya's current situation.

Guatemalans of every hue like to lay the blame for the country's problems on the Spaniards. In my eyes, more directly responsible is a man called Justo Rufino Barrios. Even though statues of him can be found in towns and villages throughout Guatemala, very few people realize that it was his vision that transformed Guatemala from a colonial backwater into an outward-looking coffee nation, a modern capitalist nation.

And it's not really until the coming to power of Justo Rufino Barrios and the sort of liberal reformer of the 1870's that you get an assault on Indian land and indeed a double plunder and assault on Indian labor. Basically, it was during the Barrios reforms that large chunks, large areas, large tracts of Indian land were lost to the sort of coffee economy. So it's really in a sense to the late 19th Century historical experience that the land question, the land problem of Guatemala is more directly rooted and not in the nature of the colonial experience.

I think there's basically been one conquest that's ongoing, but a conquest that's gone through different cycles. The first cycle of conquest was the one that we're most familiar with, or most people are familiar with: conquest by imperial Spain. But there was a second cycle of conquests that began really with Barrios, conquests of Maya communities by local and international capitalism. And really conquest has continued to this day. And the third cycle of conquest is one that I would attribute to the state violence and terror of the '70s and '80s and '90s.