What If the Secret of Wealth Were Written in Ancient Laws?
What if the true engine of prosperity were not strongmen, subsidies, or campaign promises, but something far older and simpler: trust written into law? In my previous column I spoke about Guatemala and its serial sin of undermining legal certainty. Today I want to invite you to travel back in time and discover how distant […]
Can Clientelist Decrees Generate Trust, Investment, and Growth? History Gives Us the Answer
Trust has never been a luxury of nations; it has been their foundational stone. No people that has prospered has done so without a framework of clear, fulfilled, and respected rules. From Rome to Poland, as we saw in the previous column, societies that managed to prosper understood that arbitrariness is the greatest enemy of […]
Guatemala and the Honor of One’s Word: Why Trust Is Our Greatest Debt
When I published my column about the invisible wall of distrust that blocks Guatemala’s development, I imagined that the most criticized points might be the historical examples or the international figures, but I did not consider that the central thesis of the article could itself provoke objections: that honoring contracts, respecting what has been agreed […]
One Quetzal Per Day Per Person in Exchange for Nothing: The Fiscal Ambush in Guatemala
The budget has grown 43% in three years, without roads, hospitals, or schools; with the carryover of unused balances, the real deficit could explode in 2026. Taxes in Guatemala and the Current Tax Burden You are the silent hero of this story. Because every day you have handed over almost one extra quetzal to the […]
Emergency Room: Only 0.06% of Guatemalans Dare to Become Entrepreneurs… and This Year We Are 10% Fewer
What is the use of being the most trusted country in Central America for financial markets if, internally, our economy beats weaker and weaker? The patient is called Guatemala, and today it is in the emergency room. Outside, investors applaud us; inside, the vital signs show exhaustion. The Monetary Board has just reduced the benchmark […]
From Hunger to Entrepreneurship: The Crusade for a Better Guatemala
In Victorian England, Charles Dickens portrayed the misery of hunger with brutal clarity: “Many homeless people, exhausted by hunger, close their eyes in our naked streets and, whatever their crimes may have been, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.” More than a century and a half later, in today’s Guatemala, 49% of […]
The Moral Imperative of Growth: Why Guatemala Does Not Have a Poverty Problem, but a Wealth Problem
The word imperative comes from the Latin imperativus, meaning “that which commands effectively,” that which must be done in order to achieve a just end. When that command is directed toward the good, we speak of a moral imperative, that is, of something that cannot be left undone if one wishes to live according to […]
Infrastructure as a Menu: Proposals for Guatemala with a Sense of History
Infrastructure in Guatemala is one of the country’s main challenges for economic growth. This analysis presents concrete proposals to improve its development. From Momostenango to the Atlantic there are fewer than three hundred kilometers in a straight line, yet that distance can take more than twelve hours for a farmer transporting his cargo to Puerto […]
The Nobel Prize in Economics (2025): How Culture Defines the Wealth of Nations
The recent Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Joel Mokyr, a Dutch-Jewish historian and economist, has reopened an old debate about the origins of prosperity and the misery of nations. Mokyr has demonstrated that economic growth does not arise solely from capital, geography, or institutions, but from something deeper: culture. Culture—that invisible fabric of values, […]
Argentina Voted for Freedom: Milei’s Lessons for Guatemala’s Development
Argentina’s legislative election on October 27 became a true moral referendum on the future of the nation, and the result is categorical. In just four years, La Libertad Avanza went from having a single congressman in 2021 to controlling the Executive Branch and becoming the most powerful minority in Congress and the Senate. In a […]