Guatemala City is the capital and largest city of Guatemala
Guatemala City is also the largest city in Central America
We visited a week before Christmas Day. Most of Central America is Catholic and it's a big celebration
Spanish is the official language although distinct Mayan is also spoken in many rural areas
More info from Wikipedia on Guatemala City:
Guatemalan history is marked by the
Cold War between the
U.S. and the
USSR. The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with a small group
of Guatemalans overthrew the freely-elected Guatemalan
government of
Jacobo Arbenz in
1954 after the government expropriated unused land
owned by the
United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based banana merchant.
The CIA codename for the coup was
Operation PBSUCCESS, its second successful overthrow
of a foreign government. The subsequent military rule,
beginning with dictator
Carlos Castillo Armas led to over 30 years of civil
war that, from
1960, led to the death an estimated 200,000
Guatemalan civilians. According to the U.N.-sponsored
Truth Commission, government forces and
paramilitaries were responsible for over 90% of the
human rights violations during the war. During the first
10 years, the victims of the state-sponsored terror were
primarily students, workers, professionals, and
opposition figures of all political tendencies, but in
the last years, they were thousands of mostly rural
Mayans farmers and non-combatants. More than 450 Mayan
villages were destroyed and over one million people
became refugees. This is considered one of the worst
ethnic cleansings in modern Latin America. In
certain areas, such as
Baja Verapaz, the Truth Commission considered that
the Guatemalan state engaged in an intentional policy of
genocide against particular ethnic groups.
From the 1950s to the 1990s (with a suspension of military aid
between 1977 and 1982), the US government directly
supported Guatemala's army with training, weapons and
money. The
United States Army Special Forces (Green Berets)
were sent to Guatemala to transform its army into a
"modern counter-insurgency force" and made it the most
powerful and sophisticated in Central America. In 1999,
then US president
Bill Clinton stated that the United States was wrong
to have provided support to Guatemalan military forces
that took part in the brutal civilian killings
[3]. Further CIA involvement included the training of 5,000
Cubans opposed to
Fidel Castro and airstrips in its territory for what later became the failed
Bay of Pigs Invasion.
In 1982, four
Marxist groups formed the guerrilla organization
Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). A
bloody 36-year war ended in
1996 with a peace accord between the guerrillas and
the government of President
ﾁlvaro Arz・, negotiated by the
United Nations. Both sides made major concessions.
The army controlled urban centers, while URNG maintained
a strong presence in the countryside. Due to the
military's use of rampant torture, disappearances, "scorched
earth" warfare and many other brutal methods, the
country became a
pariah state internationally. In
1992, the
Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to
Rigoberta Mench・, an indigenous human rights
activist, for her efforts to bring international
attention to the government-sponsored
genocide against the indigenous population.
