Uncommon Grounds by Mark
Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts
During the last two decades of the 1800s enterprising
Germans, many fleeing Bismarck’s militarism, flocked to Guatemala and to the
rest of Central America. Private capital from Germany to build a railroad line
to the sea was the beginning of a trend in which the Germans brought capital
and modernization to the Guatemalan coffee industry. In many Latin American
countries Germans held significant positions in the coffee industry.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s blitzkrieg stormed across the
Polish border. With startling German military successes early in the war, the
prospect of nazified neighbors to the south seemed all too real. On contemporary
map of Guatemala identified German-owned coffee fincas with red swastikas,
which dominated the cartography.
Many of the five thousand Germans in Guatemala were open
Nazi sympathizers. In the northern province of Coban, Germans owned 80 percent
of all arable land and lived well, with sports fields, swimming pools, and
private movie houses, while their paid workers as little as 3 cents a day.
Local Gestapo members brought increasing pressure to bear on
non-Nazi Guatemalan Germans, sometimes threatening them with violence if they
did not comply. The Nazis compiled a secret list of forty “unpatriotic” Germans
who were to be executed once Germany won the war and took over Guatemala.
In Guatemala, pragmatic dictator Jorge Ubico abandoned his
German coffee friends in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Under the United States
coercion, German, Italian, and Japanese settlers in Latin America – many of
whom were coffee growers – were subjected to official blacklists. With Ubico
suddenly assuming a strong pro-American posture, a blacklist of German coffee
concerns went into effect on December 12, 1941. A total of 4,058 Latin American
Germans were kidnapped, shipped to the United States, and interned. Their farms
and businesses were confiscated.
Motivation may have been to eliminate business competition.
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