Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

criticized Siaka Stevens’s policies for being profligate. He was soon murdered and thrown from the top floor of the central bank building onto the aptly named Siaka Stevens Street. Extractive political institutions thus also tend to create a vicious circle because they provide no line of defense against those who want to further usurp and misuse the powers of the state.
    Yet another mechanism for the vicious circle is that extractive institutions, by creating unconstrained power and great income inequality, increase the potential stakes of the political game. Because whoever controls the state becomes the beneficiary of this excessive power and the wealth that it generates, extractive institutions create incentives for infighting in order to control power and its benefits, a dynamic that we saw played out in Maya city-states and in Ancient Rome. In this light, it is no surprise that the extractive institutions that many African countries inherited from the colonial powers sowed the seeds of power struggles and civil wars. These struggles would be very different conflicts from the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. They would not be fought to change political institutions, introduce constraints on the exercise of power, or create pluralism, but to capture power and enrich one group at the expense of the rest. In Angola, Burundi, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Republic of Congo Brazzaville, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda, and of course in Sierra Leone, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter, these conflicts would turn into bloody civil wars and would create economic ruin and unparalleled human suffering—as well as cause state failure.
F ROM
E NCOMIENDA
TO L AND G RAB
    On January 14, 1993, Ramiro De León Carpio was sworn in as the president of Guatemala. He named Richard Aitkenhead Castillo as his minister of finance, and Ricardo Castillo Sinibaldi as his minister of development. These three men all had something in common: all were direct descendants of Spanish conquistadors who had come to Guatemala in the early sixteenth century. De León’s illustrious ancestor was Juan De León Cardona, while the Castillos were related to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a man who wrote one of the most famous eyewitness accounts of the conquest of Mexico. In reward for his service to Hernán Cortés, Díaz del Castillo was appointed governor of Santiago de los Caballeros, which is today the city of Antigua in Guatemala. Both Castillo and De León founded dynasties along with other conquistadors, such as Pedro de Alvarado. The Guatemalan sociologist Marta Casaús Arzú identified a core group of twenty-two families in Guatemala that had ties through marriage to another twenty-six families just outside the core. Her genealogical and political study suggested that these families have controlled economic and political power in Guatemala since 1531. An even broader definition of which families were part of this elite suggested that they accounted for just over 1 percent of the population in the 1990s.
    In Sierra Leone and in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the vicious circle took the form of the extractive institutions set up by colonial powers being taken over by postindependence leaders. In Guatemala, as in much of Central America, we see a simpler, more naked form of the vicious circle: those who have economic and political power structure institutions to ensure the continuity of their power, and succeed in doing so. This type of vicious circle leads to the persistence of extractive institutions and the persistence of the same elites in power together with the persistence of underdevelopment.
    At the time of the conquest, Guatemala was densely settled, probably with a population of around two million Mayas. Disease and exploitation took a heavy toll as everywhere else in the Americas. It was not until the 1920s that its total population returned to this level.As elsewhere in the Spanish Empire, the indigenous people were allocated to conquistadors in grants of
encomienda
. As we saw in the context of the colonization of Mexico and Peru, the
encomienda
was a system of forced labor, which subsequently gave way to other similar coercive institutions, particularly to the
repartimiento
, also called the
mandamiento
in Guatemala. The elite, made up of the descendants of the conquistadors and some indigenous elements, not only benefited from the