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In the 1940s an emerging class of urban professionals and merchants sought to modernize Guatemala and break the dependency on coffee exports

heir goal was not socialism, but modernization and industrialization within a national framework. The working-class movement in Guatemala, including the Communist Party, identified and worked with this movement. Jacobo Arbenz, the candidate of this movement, came to power in 1954.

The root causes of the class conflict are in Guatemala's economic system, which simply provide for nothing except the luxury of the big bourgeoisie and the upward mobility of a slender percentage of the urban middle- class.

The overthrow of Arbenz led to a deepening of the agro-export economic model, including further expropriation of Indian land. One of the consequences of this was that "de-ruralization" took place without any sort of parallel urbanization and proletarian process. The dispossessed Indian was never absorbed into a capitalist economy, because manufacturing jobs were not being produced. Instead, the big plantations were becoming more and more mechanized and fewer and fewer jobs became available. The Indian could only find work on a seasonal basis and those who could not find work often found their way into the informal economy as street peddlers or subproletarians.

The wealthiest 20 percent of the population received 47% of national income in 1970. This grew to 57% in 1984. The wealthiest 10 percent increased its share from 41% in 1980 to 44% in 1987. Meanwhile, the poorest 50% fell from a 24% share in 1970 to 18% in 1984. In the countryside during the 1980s, the top 2% of the rural population received 40% of income, while 83% received only 35%

The largest 2 percent of Guatemala's farms cover 67% of usable land, while 80% of farms account for 10% of the land. In another indicator of the growing inequality, over 50% of peasant income came from land cultivation in 1976. By 1988, this percentage had decreased to 25%.

And yet Guatemala remains the one country in Central America that has not passed any significant land redistribution law.

But this is the peace of the graveyard. Will there be struggle in the future? It is safe to say that the misery that caused the last outburst will sooner or later cause a new upsurge in the future. Whether it will take the same form as the guerrilla warfare of the 1980s can not be guaranteed. The old mole revolution adopts many guises.

"The colonialists’ need to preserve the basic Indian economic and social organization order to facilitate the exploitation of a rural labor force, is one of the factors which explains why the Indian culture, revolving around precapitalist agriculture based on maize and the corresponding level of social organization, survive in the new colonial society; but it also explains why this culture not develop. The culture imposed by the Spanish colonialists (western, greco-latin, judeo-christian) dominated the Maya-Quicbe culture, because it expressed a mode of production superior to that of the Mesoamerican Indians.

The sense of ethnic-cultural identity--the other key to understanding the survival of the Indian culture as we know it today--finds its explanation in the relative independence of the superstructure with regard to the material base which gives rise to it at a given moment."

“In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”

Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.

Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.

developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

“The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”

“These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”

the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”

“Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”

The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.