Guatemala sits between two oceans and at the center of the Americas, but for centuries it has functioned more as the end of the line than as a crossroads. This column travels from the ports of the Kingdom of Guatemala to La Aurora airport to explain why geographic position only generates prosperity when it becomes connection.
Any Guatemalan who has ever tried to fly to Europe or South America knows the ritual: wake up early, fly two hours south, and sit waiting for the connection at Tocumen, watching passengers pass by who are coming from São Paulo, Amsterdam, Toronto, or Buenos Aires. Panama produces almost none of what moves through that airport. It doesn’t need to: it’s enough to be the place where the roads cross. To Guatemalans, that condition of being the world’s meeting point feels foreign, almost exotic. It’s worth asking why, and the answer requires going back two hundred thirty-five years.
In 1791, the waiting room of the Hispanic American world was called Cádiz. That year, a thousand ships from seventeen nations entered its port: English, French, Portuguese, American, Dutch, Danish, Russian, and even a solitary ship arriving from Manila. And on this side of the world? Let’s recall the geography of that time: the Kingdom of Guatemala stretched from Chiapas to Costa Rica, and its Atlantic gateway was Puerto Caballos, on the coast of what is now Honduras, later supplemented by Santo Tomás and the Omoa fortress. Well then: in the entire decade of the 1730s, barely three ships from Cádiz managed to reach these shores. Three ships in ten years, for an entire kingdom. A thousand in one year against three in ten years. That disproportion is, perhaps, the key to four centuries of Guatemalan economic history.
On the Pacific side the picture was no better: the relevant ports lay outside the territory we now call Guatemala. Acajutla, in what is now El Salvador; El Realejo, in Nicaragua; and, farther off, Portobelo, where the galleon fairs concentrated the trade of half the continent.
What happened after independence says it all. In January 1822 Guatemala annexed itself to Iturbide’s Mexican Empire. El Salvador resisted, and after the empire’s collapse and the formation of the Central American Federation, made sure to incorporate Sonsonate and its port of Acajutla, which until then had depended on Guatemala. Our decision to annex ourselves to Mexico thus helped cost us the main Pacific outlet within our reach. But the bigger problem came afterward: we also never grasped that our geographic position would only have value if we turned it into an economic network. And what did we do? Almost nothing for forty-five years. Between 1823 and 1868 Guatemala did not have a single functional port on the Pacific: Iztapa barely served its purpose, San José was opened in 1853 and had no pier until 1868, and Champerico arrived in 1871. Nearly half a century of wanting to enter modernity without a gate onto the ocean through which modernity was entering. Someone might object that we had Santo Tomás on the Atlantic. True. And that proves exactly the point: we had the means, and even so we never set our sights on building economic nodes.
Because the ships didn’t only bring merchandise. They brought something more valuable: information. Prices, quotations, harvest news, available credit. On the docks of Cádiz, seventeen countries negotiated at once, and whoever was there learned before anyone else everything that moved the world. Markets aren’t born where things are produced: they’re born where flows converge, where information from many places meets, gets compared, and turns into decisions.
The difference between knowing and not knowing had an exact price. The indigo grower mortgaged his standing crop in exchange for an advance whose price was fixed before he knew the European quotation for the dye. The merchant who lent to him knew both numbers: what he paid here and what he would charge there. That asymmetry — not lack of talent, nor laziness, nor even geography — was the system’s rent. Governor Matías de Gálvez summed it up without anesthesia: rarely was there an indigo grower who didn’t have his harvest mortgaged; they were all ruined men. Ruined not from being unproductive, but from being uninformed.
Someone will say: we were few, we were small, we were poor. The data tell a different story. Around 1600, Santiago de Guatemala and Mexico City had comparable populations, some twenty-two to twenty-six thousand inhabitants. But all the viceroyalty’s trade passed through Mexico City, and that continuous flow of goods matured its market in a way Santiago never experienced. Wheat entered the New Spain capital every day; it was milled, baked, and sold in a circuit that integrated farmers, millers, bakers, and consumers into an articulated urban demand, with prices everyone knew. Information circulated along with the bread. Santiago, the same size, was the end of the line, not the crossroads. And position, over time, turns into scale: by 1805 Mexico City housed 128,000 inhabitants; Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción, fewer than 38,000. It wasn’t from clumsiness. Santiago’s merchant elite managed its access to existing networks with sophistication. What it never did was create new networks. It administered the alley; it did not build the crossroads.
And here’s what’s unsettling: that same valley had been, two thousand years earlier, exactly the opposite. Kaminaljuyu was settled on the watershed divide between the Caribbean and Pacific basins, in a zone where roads converged, and came to link eight main routes toward the South Coast, the Lowlands, and the rest of the Highlands. In the tomb of Mound E-III-3, jade, jasper, obsidian, and seashells brought from distant regions were found; obsidian from these mountains traveled along the Motagua River all the way to Yucatán. Buried beneath Guatemala City is the crossroads we once were.
Ancient history? Let’s look at the present. Today, those who migrate to our country represent barely 0.5% of Guatemala’s population. In Belize they are 15.6%; in Costa Rica, 10.2%; in Panama, 7.3%; in the Dominican Republic, 5.6%. Does that seem like a minor figure? Notice the company we keep at the bottom of the world ranking: North Korea, at 0.2%; Haiti, at 0.2%; Ethiopia, at 0.9%. A country that few people enter also receives fewer ideas, contacts, capital, and demand from abroad, because people are the ships of the twenty-first century: each one carries information about other markets, other techniques, other networks. The isolation of people and the isolation of infrastructure are the same isolation, seen from two angles. In a sense, we are still receiving three ships per decade.
And yet, something is moving. Between 2022 and 2025, La Aurora went from about 3.3 million passengers to more than 5.1 million: a 56% jump in three years that puts it at the threshold of matching El Salvador, which has operated for decades as a regional connections hub. Passengers arrived without any deliberate attraction policy, almost in spite of the government. The signal is hard to ignore: the potential is still there. It’s the same potential José Cecilio del Valle saw when, in 1820, a year before drafting the Act of Independence, he forecast that Guatemala would be the richest and most prosperous province in the region precisely because of being at the center, between the two seas, in the middle of the Americas: the province that would enjoy more wealth than any other. Del Valle was right about the geography. What he couldn’t anticipate is that geography doesn’t produce prosperity on its own: position has to be turned into connection.
And activating it is not a metaphor. It means concrete decisions: a capital airport built to be a connections hub rather than a final destination; turning our regional airports into international ones — what would an airport in Xela mean with direct flights to California, home to nearly half a million people of Guatemalan origin? — modern ports on both oceans; procedures that invite people to stay instead of scaring them off; stable rules that make investing predictable. None of these pieces is exotic: all of them exist less than three hours by air away, in the countries that decided to become crossroads.
Because Cádiz was not a geographic accident. It was a patient accumulation of institutions that made it profitable to arrive, stay, and connect: its Consulado financed dredging the channel, built arsenals, managed the mail with America. The thousand ships came because something awaited them. The three ships of Puerto Caballos tell the reverse story: there was too little to make arriving, connecting, and returning worthwhile. That is the unfinished task: to build what will make today’s ships — planes, investments, tourists, talent — want to arrive and stay. La Aurora suggests how quickly flows can respond once the door is opened a crack. The hard question remains open: how do we build the institutions that make this process more solid and turn it irreversible? That is the question for the next column. The ships, for the first time in a long while, are making port.
Ramiro Bolaños, PhD. / President of the Centro de Pensamiento y Acción Factoría Libertatis
References
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This article was originally published on RamiroBolanos.phd and republished by Factoría Libertatis as part of its institutional library of analysis and thought.
