ABSTRACT
The historical legacy of the past weaves a multi-dimensional pattern that inextricably binds the present to the future and limits the operational domains within which dominance/subservience relationships are established, maintained, and challenged. The gradual ascendency of the United States as the regional metropolitan power in the Western Hemisphere was singularly aided by the disjunctive international phenomena of the Great Depression and World War II. Developments in Guatemala between 1930 and 1944 present an almost classic illustration of that segment of the theoretical construct of dependency descriptive of the pattern of relations between a subservient nation-state and a metropole before, during, and after a depression. The United States gradually gained predominance over Guatemala, displacing Germany in the process, in the aftermath of the Great Depression and coincidental with the rise of General Jorge Ubico Castañeda to the Presidency of the Guatemala.
