Guatemala was already a disaster when a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake hit the country on February 4, 1976. Economic development based on low-wage large-scale capitalist agriculture for export and low wage industrial growth had not improved life for the majority of Guatemalans, who were and are among the poorest people in Latin America. To make matters worse and to protect wealth from the growing protests of the poor, national political power rested on legal and extra-legal state violence. Between the time when the Unites States engineered a coup against the reformist government in Guatemala in 1954 and February 4, 1976, state violence had taken the lives of 25,000 Guatemalans, a figure slightly larger than the approximately 21,000 killed in the 39 seconds of the 3 AM earthquake.