The communal land ownership that the Mayans had controlled was abolished in 1877 and a new system was adopted. This is clearly one of the main reasons why the Indians took up arms and this is clearly demonstrated by the marriage customs that Rigoberta speaks of. "The girl says: "I will be a mother, I will suffer, my children will suffer, many of my children will die young because of the circumstances created for us by white men." The systems of work that where implanted by the ladinos (mixture of Indian and white) gave the Indians the short end of the stick and created hereditary debts that would carry on for years. The government made sure that the Indians would pay the price for the ladinos economic success and prosperity. .
The lack of work that was made available to the Guatemalan Indians also plays an important role in the guerilla uprisings of the late 1970s and 80s. The dispossessed Indian was never absorbed into a capitalist economy, because manufacturing jobs were not being produced. The cotton, maize, and coffee plantations were the central part of the Guatemalan economy and since these were located on the coastal areas and most of the indigenous population lived in the mountains, it was a hard trek to earn the low wages that were offered. "We spent four months in our little house in the Altiplano and the rest of the year we had to go down to the coast- For Rigoberta and her family this was the only way in which to make an income to purchase the goods need for them to stay alive. The lack of control that Indians had over their own life was much due to the government that ruled over them. To most Indians this government was illegitimate and did not have the authority to impose the laws that they did. "The President who had been in power all this time, was, for my parents, for all of us, President of the ladinos" government. It wasn't the government of our country. That's what we always thought.