The Cooperative Catholic Spirit of Capitalism in Guatemala’s Western Highlands

This paper takes as a point of departure Eric Van Young’s abiding interest in the mutually reinforcing power of economic and cultural forces by analyzing Maya Catholic participation in credit, consumer, and agricultural cooperatives introduced by Catholic missionaries in Guatemala from the 1950s through the 1970s.  Cooperatives were central to the proselytization programs of missionaries from the United States, Europe, and Canada who sought to “convert” Mayas to orthodox practices of Catholicism and to improve their conditions of life.   The missionaries hoped that emphasis on production for community rather than for profit would reinforce Catholic values and community structures at the same time that it engendered Maya participation in capitalist markets.

Maya leadership of cooperatives came to parallel that of the “traditional” civil-religious hierarchy whose control over community resources facilitated Maya autonomy in the face of Spanish colonial and later Liberal state encroachments.  A modern project of “conversion” dovetailed with traditional Maya practices in which religion and economy were linked at the same time as it offered a means of bypassing the traditional civil religious hierarchy and providing Mayas access to markets. Missionaries’ introduction of cooperatives followed on the heels of deposed Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz’s establishment of cooperatives as a component of his agrarian reform program. Ultimately they helped to integrate programs introduced by the United States Agency for International Development, which established cooperatives as a feature of its development programs in the 1960s.  The missionary directed cooperative training centers prepared and channeled Maya leaders into the USAID training center at the Catholic Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala City.  The Maya-Catholic network that emerged from cooperative programs helped to transform Guatemala’s economic and political structures and ultimately came into conflict with the country’s military and elite.