Guatemala

• 1. The Place Of Many Trees

  ›

  The name Guatemala comes from the Nahuatl word Cuauhtemallan, meaning "place of many trees." The Mexica first used it to describe a single Kaqchikel city called Iximche. The Spanish later stretched the word to cover an entire country. That small act of naming holds a clue to a much larger pattern. Outsiders kept arriving, kept renaming, kept redrawing the lines of who held power here.

  This is a country in northern Central America, bordered by Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador, with the Pacific to the south and the Gulf of Honduras to the northeast. It hosted the core of the Maya civilization, then a Spanish conquest, then independence, then a chain of dictators, a revolution, and a civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. How does one territory absorb so much rupture and still endure? Who decided its fate, and at what cost? The answers run through volcanoes, coffee plantations, a fruit company, and a bishop beaten to death in his own garage. What follows is the story of a land that has been conquered, renamed, and contested for thousands of years, and the people who refused to disappear inside it.

• 2. Cities Beneath The Jungle

  ›

  The first evidence of human habitation in Guatemala dates to 12,000 BC, with obsidian arrowheads hinting at a presence as early as 18,000 BC. These early settlers were hunter-gatherers. By 3500 BC, maize cultivation had taken hold, and sites in the Quiche highlands and along the central Pacific coast date back to 6500 BC.

  Archaeologists split the pre-Columbian past into the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic periods. For a long time the Preclassic was dismissed as merely formative, a time of huts and small farming villages with few permanent buildings. That assumption fell apart with discoveries in the Mirador Basin: Nakbe, Xulnal, El Tintal, Wakna, and El Mirador, monumental cities built far earlier than expected.

  The Classic period marks the height of the Maya, with the largest concentration of sites in Peten. It brought urbanization, independent city-states, and exchange with other Mesoamerican cultures. Around 900 AD, that world collapsed. The Maya abandoned cities of the central lowlands or died in a drought-induced famine. The drought theory keeps gaining ground, supported by lakebeds and ancient pollen, the residue of a people who depended on regular rainfall to feed a dense population.

  Maya influence reached from Honduras and Belize to as far north as central Mexico, more than 1000 kilometers from the Maya area. Writing, epigraphy, and the calendar did not begin with the Maya, but they brought these advances to full development. After the collapse, regional kingdoms carried the culture forward: the Itza, Kowoj, Yalain, and Kejache in Peten, and the Mam, Ki'che', and others in the highlands, whose names would soon collide with a conquistador's sword.

• 3. Conquest And Earthquakes

  ›

  Pedro de Alvarado, appointed by Hernan Cortes, launched a military campaign into the Guatemalan highlands in 1523 to 1524. He allied with the Kaqchikel Maya to defeat their rivals, the K'iche', then turned on the Kaqchikel when relations soured. Smallpox and other epidemics arrived with the Spanish, devastating the indigenous population before the conquest was even complete.

  The Spanish founded their first capital in 1524, Villa de Santiago de Guatemala, near the ruins of Iximche. They moved it to the Almolonga Valley in 1527 because of indigenous resistance. On the 11th of September 1541, a catastrophic lahar from the Volcan de Agua destroyed that site, forcing another move to the Panchoy Valley, renamed Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, now Antigua Guatemala.

  In 1542 the region became the Captaincy General of Guatemala, a subdivision of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. It stretched across present-day Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the Mexican state of Chiapas. Sitting on the Pacific coast, Guatemala joined the Manila Galleon trade between 1565 and 1815. Silver, porcelain, silk, and spices passed through on the route between Manila and Acapulco.

  In 1773 the Santa Marta earthquakes wrecked Antigua, pushing the capital once more, this time to the Ermita Valley. The new city, officially founded in 1776, became La Nueva Guatemala de la Asuncion, the Guatemala City of today. Two of the three moves of the capital were caused by the same restless geology, mudflows and tremors, that would keep shaping the country long after the Spanish left.

• 4. The King Of The Indians

  ›

  On the 15th of September 1821, Gabino Gainza Fernandez de Medrano and the Captaincy General proclaimed independence from Spain at a public meeting in Guatemala City. The region then joined the First Mexican Empire under Agustin de Iturbide, which at its height stretched from northern California to Central America. Guatemala did not create its own flag until 1825.

  The conflict that defined this era centered on Rafael Carrera. In 1838, liberal forces under Honduran leader Francisco Morazan and Guatemalan Jose Francisco Barrundia invaded and executed Chua Alvarez, Carrera's father-in-law, impaling his head on a pike. Carrera and his wife Petrona swore they would never forgive Morazan, even in his grave. What followed was a scorched-earth war of villages destroyed, brothers lost in combat, and Carrera forced to hide in the mountains.

  Carrera took Guatemala City by surprise on the 13th of April 1839. General Carlos Salazar Castro, the liberal who had earlier beaten him at Villa Nueva, fled in his nightshirt across the rooftops and reached the border disguised as a peasant. On the 17th of April 1839, Guatemala declared itself independent from the United Provinces of Central America.

  Carrera's strength rested on the indigenous communities of the western highlands. When he crossed a jungle infested with jaguars with a hundred jacalteco bodyguards to meet officer Jose Victor Zavala, Zavala agreed to serve under him. As Carrera consolidated control of Quetzaltenango, an outgoing official named Ignacio Yrigoyen murmured to a friend, "Now he is the king of the Indians, indeed!" On the 21st of March 1847, Guatemala declared itself an independent republic and Carrera became its first president.

• 5. Coffee And The Fruit Company

  ›

  Guatemala's Liberal Revolution arrived in 1871 under Justo Rufino Barrios, who pushed modernization, trade, and new crops. Coffee became the country's defining export. Barrios dreamed of reuniting Central America and died on the battlefield in 1885 fighting forces in El Salvador. Among the liberal presidents from 1871 to 1944, Manuel Barillas stood alone in handing power to his successor peacefully.

  Manuel Estrada Cabrera took the presidency after the assassination of Jose Maria Reina Barrios on the 8th of February 1898. By one account he entered the cabinet meeting "with pistol drawn" to claim a presidency he had been denied an invitation to discuss. His most bitter legacy was opening the door to the United Fruit Company. A railway from Puerto Barrios to the capital had stalled 60 miles short for lack of funding, so in 1904 Cabrera signed a contract with the company's Minor Cooper Keith. It granted tax exemptions, land grants, and control of all railroads on the Atlantic side.

  Jorge Ubico, who won an uncontested election in 1931, deepened that bargain. He granted the company 200,000 hectares of public land for a port he would later excuse it from building. The company came to control more land than any other group, plus the country's sole railroad, its only electricity, and the port at Puerto Barrios. Ubico replaced debt peonage with a vagrancy law forcing landless men to work at least 100 days of hard labor.

  Ubico admired Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini and called himself "another Napoleon," surrounding himself with statues and paintings of the emperor and noting their physical resemblance. He even compared himself to Adolf Hitler. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1941, he arrested all people in Guatemala of German descent on American instructions, a sign of how tightly the country's politics had become bound to Washington.

• 6. Ten Years Of Spring

  ›

  On the 1st of July 1944, a wave of protests and a general strike forced Jorge Ubico to resign. His chosen replacement was pushed out on the 20th of October 1944 by a coup led by Major Francisco Javier Arana and Captain Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, in which about 100 people were killed. A junta of Arana, Arbenz, and Jorge Toriello Garrido organized the country's first free election.

  Juan Jose Arevalo, a conservative writer and teacher, won that election with a majority of 86%. His "Christian Socialist" policies drew on the US New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He built health centers, increased education funding, and drafted a more liberal labor law, while facing at least 25 coup attempts. Barred from contesting the 1950 elections, he handed off to his defense minister, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

  Arbenz passed Decree 900 in 1952, a sweeping agrarian reform that transferred uncultivated land to landless peasants. Only 1,710 of the nearly 350,000 private land-holdings were affected, yet the law benefited around 500,000 people, one-sixth of the population. To the United Fruit Company, whose profits had relied on brutal labor practices, this was a threat.

  The reforms alarmed a United States primed by the Cold War to see communism. Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFortune in 1952, but it was aborted when too many details leaked. Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose aides John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had close ties to the fruit company, authorized Operation PBSuccess in August 1953. The decade of reform that Guatemalans would remember was running out of time, and a force of 480 men was about to cross the border.

• 7. The Long War

  ›

  On the 18th of June 1954, a CIA-armed force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas invaded, backed by bombings of Guatemala City and a radio station posing as genuine news. The invaders fought poorly, but the psychological warfare and the threat of a US invasion broke the army's will. Arbenz resigned on the 27th of June. Castillo Armas became president on the 7th of July 1954, reversed Decree 900, and won a later election as the only candidate with 99% of the vote.

  From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala endured a bloody civil war between the US-backed government and leftist rebels. On the 13th of November 1960, junior officers from the Escuela Politecnica academy revolted, fled to the mountains, and formed MR-13. Right-wing groups like the "White Hand" became the forerunners of death squads, while US Army Special Forces trained the Guatemalan military into the most sophisticated counter-insurgency force in Central America.

  The violence reached the Maya countryside. On the 31st of January 1980, indigenous K'iche' protesters occupied the Spanish Embassy and nearly everyone inside died in a fire. The Spanish ambassador survived and disputed the government's claim that the activists immolated themselves, and Spain broke off diplomatic relations. General Efrain Rios Montt, named president in 1982, continued torture, forced disappearances, and scorched-earth warfare, yet Ronald Reagan called him "a man of great personal integrity."

  More than 45,000 Guatemalans fled across the border into Mexican camps in Chiapas and Tabasco. In 1992 the Nobel Peace Prize went to Rigoberta Menchu for drawing international attention to the genocide against the indigenous population. The war ended in 1996 through a peace accord brokered by the United Nations, with help from Norway and Spain. A truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification, later attributed more than 93% of human rights violations to government forces and CIA-trained paramilitaries, and concluded in 1999 that state actions constituted genocide.

• 8. Reckoning And Resistance

  ›

  On the 24th of April 1998, the Recovery of Historical Memory project, led by the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala, presented its report "Guatemala: Nunca Mas!" It laid 80 per cent of the atrocities at the door of the army and its allies in the social and political elite. Two days after announcing the report, Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera was beaten to death in his garage. In 2001, in the first such trial in a civilian court, three army officers were convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

  The pursuit of accountability kept colliding with power. In January 2012, Efrain Rios Montt appeared in court on genocide charges, with evidence of at least 1,771 deaths and 1,445 rapes during his 17-month rule. On the 10th of May 2013 he was found guilty and sentenced to 80 years, the first time a national court convicted a former head of state of genocide. The conviction was later overturned, and courts ruled he could be tried but not sentenced because of his age and health.

  Corruption became its own battlefield. In 2015, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala and the attorney-general exposed a customs scam called "La Linea." A Facebook event with the hashtag RenunciaYa drew over 10,000 RSVPs, and tens of thousands filled the streets. Vice President Roxana Baldetti was arrested, and President Otto Perez Molina resigned on the 2nd of September 2015, a day after Congress impeached him. A later case, dubbed Cooperacha, alleged ministers pooled funds to buy him luxury gifts, spending over $4.7 million in three years.

  In August 2023, Bernardo Arevalo of the center-left Semilla Movement won a landslide. The outgoing Giammattei administration tried to block him, but indigenous-led protests and international pressure forced acceptance of the result. Just after midnight, he was sworn in on the 15th of January 2024. He is the son of Juan Jose Arevalo, the country's first democratically chosen president, and on the 23rd of April 2024 he fulfilled a campaign promise by cutting the presidential salary by 25%, so the head of state of Guatemala is no longer the highest-paid president in Latin America.