Coffee Series

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. The Germans had the advantage, since they maintained ongoing relation with German brokerage firms that gave them lower interest rates. They also had recourse to diplomatic intervention and maintained close ties to foreign-controlled export and import houses.

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. In many Latin American countries Germans already held significant positions in the coffee industry. 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.

Under the United States coercion German, Italian, and Japanese settlers in Latin America – many of whom were coffee growers – were increasingly subjected to official blacklists. Their farms and businesses were confiscated, and in many cases they were actually deported and incarcerated. There has been a great deal of publicity about the internment camps for Japanese Americans, yet few people are aware that the US government extradited coffee growers from Latin America to imprisonment in similar internment camps.

In Guatemala, pragmatic dictator Jorge Ubico abandoned his German coffee friends in the wake of Pearl Harbor. 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 largely to “hold them in escrow for bargaining purposes.” Another motivation may have been to eliminate business competition.