In the aftermath of this political upheaval, Guatemalans embarked on a tenuous democratic experiment across the 1920s. A group of radicalized Q’eqchi’s formed a branch of the Unionist Party and demanded that the state end forced wage labor, abolish debt contracts, and grant citizenship to all Mayas. For the next decade, Q’eqchi’s engaged in labor strikes and land invasions, which articulated another history of time and space based on memories of prior possession and land alienation. At the same time, urban reformers and intellectuals, including Miguel Angel Asturias, increasingly sought to move beyond the failed ladino nation-state that had taken power in 1871. To do so, they looked to Alta Verapaz to imagine a new nation based on modernization through prosperous coffee plantations and European immigration, which had yielded an alternative mestizaje project based on interracial mixing between German immigrants and Mayas. Guatemala’s decade-long democratic experiment came to an end with the Great Depression and Central America’s 1932 Red Scare.

The conclusion illustrates the uneven and nonlinear nature of Guatemalan nation-state expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also highlights the important role played by Q’eqchi’ patriarchs, the legacies of colonialism, and the centrality of race and time to political struggles. The Conclusion also illustrates how the historical debris of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories shaped Guatemala’s post-1954 descent into civil war. It shows the longer historical genealogy of the Guatemalan military’s doctrine that Mayas were dangerous because they were “alien to modernity” and how the legacies of coerced labor and planter sovereignty reemerged with new meaning and contours during the scorched-earth campaign.

Chapter 1 opens with an 1865 rebellion led by the elderly Q’eqchi’ commoner Jorge Yat, who was charged with wanting to return to an era of republican democracy and dissolve caste hierarchy. The chapter uses that event as a window into the social, economic, and cultural worlds of nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz on the eve of coffee capitalism and the 1871 liberal revolution. In particular, it demonstrates how indigenous communities distant from the centers of state power maintained a political and territorial autonomy. It further demonstrates how Q’eqchi’ society was composed of tensions between republican values of representative government and caste hierarchy, between solidarity and individualism, and how Q’eqchi’ patriarchs faced democratic challenges from below.

By the time that World War II reached full force, Altaverapacence anti-imperialist nationalisms found further expression in anti-fascism, helping to overthrow Ubico and inaugurate Guatemala’s famed “ten years of spring.” This final chapter illustrates how Guatemala’s entrance into World War II, the nationalization of German properties, and the internment of German citizens ruptured power relations both regionally and nationally, while also generating expectations for land redistribution among rural workers and peasants. Alta Verapaz thus reveals how Guatemala’s 1952 agrarian reform was shaped by the events of World War II. Struggles over Guatemala’s 1952 agrarian reform condensed nineteenth-century histories of landownership and use, violent dispossessions, coerced labor, and disinheritance into bureaucratic struggles over what counted as unproductive and productive land use.

Chapter 2 examines how Q’eqchi’ patriarchs addressed the challenges posed by popular pressures from below and new state efforts to modernize by privatizing property, institutionalizing coerced wage labor, and expanding state authority after the 1871 Liberal revolution. Q’eqchi’ patriarchs’ efforts included culturally translating communal properties into coffee plantations, engaging in the scientific cartography, and converting the spatial markers of mountain spirits into boundary markers. Ultimately, however, the efforts of Q’eqchi’ patriarchs to forge coffee plantations was limited because of internal pressures within indigenous communities, predatory capitalists, and state officials unwilling to recognize their plantations and grant labor exceptions to their workers.

The introduction highlights how Guatemalan state-building in the nineteenth century continually rendered Mayas as anachronistic subjects rather than agents of the future. Guatemalan state officials and coffee planters labeled certain forms of difference uncivilized or anachronistic to justify denying citizenship rights and to legitimize the application of coerced labor laws to individuals deemed not yet civilized. However, as the Introduction highlights, Q’eqchi’ Mayas continually undermined these strategies and built innovative political modernities based on a combination of radical liberalism and Q’eqchi’ cosmologies. The Introduction provides an overview of how modern notions of linear, measurable time and space and racial-capitalism–based political modernities and colonialism interact. Finally, it provides a methodology for reading along and against the archival grain and for dialoguing with disparate visual, textual, and oral sources.

Why do some political institutions become strong, while others remain weak? Why do imported international legal norms remain aspirational rights in some countries, but are complied with and enforced in others? Why do institutions born out of similar conditions subsequently diverge in their levels of institutional strength? Social scientists have amply demonstrated that strong institutions are essential to economic and political development. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Max Weber (1978 [1922]) famously argued that capitalist development required the development of a strong, rational, state bureaucracy. More recently, political scientists and economists alike have highlighted the importance of strong political institutions for economic growth and development (Haggard 1990; North 1990). In political science, scholars have developed theories of why and how institutions originate and change (Knight 1992; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Thelen 2004). However, much less attention has been paid to the questions of why and how institutions strengthen or alternatively remain weak, which are at the center of this edited volume.

Major electoral reforms have been strikingly frequent in Latin America since the beginning of the third wave of democratization. Such reforms include the adoption of runoff formulas for the election of the president, changes in tenure and reelection rules, the replacement of proportional representation by mixed-member rules, alterations in the number and magnitudes of electoral districts, and the creation or elimination of legislative chambers as well as modifications to their size, to name a few important instances of electoral change. Such major reforms have not been simply the result of regime change, nor have they slowed down as democratic regimes have become more stable in the region. Instead, the rate of reforms has remained constant since the 1980s – the result of cyclical crises and weak institutions, features of day-to-day politics in Latin America. In this chapter, we seek to understand what determines the enactment of major electoral reforms in the region.

We began this book with the premise that what ultimately distinguishes strong institutions from weak ones is that the former matter more than the latter. The same institution, in two different contexts or at two different times, is stronger if it makes more of a behavioral difference in one instance than in the other. As the chapters in this volume make clear, however, it is difficult to evaluate exactly how much an institution “matters.” It is relatively simple to say that an institution is strong because, on paper, it possesses features that should make it matter – for example, it commands great things. But it is an altogether different – and, we believe, far more interesting – thing to say that an institution is strong because it actually produces an outcome that is substantially different from what we might have observed in its absence, and that it continues to produce that outcome even in the face of pressures to change it or avoid it altogether.

This book is based on the premise that formal institutions in several Latin American democracies are weak; they are unstable and their capacity to shape actors’ behavior is limited. Institutional strength not only varies across countries, but also at the subnational level, as many institutions are unevenly enforced within countries (Bergman 2009; Amengual 2013, 2016; Holland 2017, this volume). Focusing on why some institutions take root in some places and not in others, we address the enforcement of forest protection legislation, a domain of environmental rules that has experienced important innovations in Latin America since the early 2000s.

As it boosted economic growth across the region, the commodity boom of the 2000s also intensified environmental degradation and sparked conflicts over the regulation of mining (see Amengual and Dargent, this volume) and the protection of forestlands jeopardized by the expansion of the agricultural frontier.