3 A Brief History of Guatemala

Pre-Columbian Era

The well-known historian of Spanish America, Antonio de Herrera, in describing the first conquest of Guatemala, states that the natives of the province of Utlatlan had ‘painted records,’ which carried their national chronicles back eight hundred years, that is, to about the year 700 A.D. Utlatlan was the Mexican name of the region in western Guatemala inhabited by the tribe called Quiches, whose capital city, Gumarcaah, was destroyed by Alvarado in 1524.^[2]

The region known today as Guatemala was historically settled by Indigenous groups, particularly the Maya, with archeological evidence dating from as early as 12,000 BCE and cultural documents dating back as early as 455 CE. Archeological research continues to unfold today in many sites across the country with recent finds of housing structures and other artifacts dating back to 700–870 CE in Tikal^[3] as well as signs of literacy back to the 8th century CE in Xultun.^[4] Scholars note the revolt of Buts’ Tiliw, known as the greatest leader of the Mayan city-state of Quiriguá, against his predecessor Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil, also referred to as Eighteen Rabbit, as a particularly important event in ancient Guatemalan history. The population size at the time of the Spanish conquest is estimated to have been about two million, all of whom were Maya. By 1550, this number had decreased to 427,850 due to conflict with the Spanish and disease.^[5]

One of the most important artifacts in Guatemalan culture was a book written in approximately 1550: the Popul Vuh, or “The Book of the People,” which describes many K’iche’ religious and cultural traditions. “The writings brought from the lowlands by the Quiché constituted an ilbal, an ‘instrument for seeing,’ and came to be named Popol Vuh, ‘Council Papers or ‘Council Book.’”^[6] The book contains a calendric system and many mythological stories, such as how the world and humans were created and the triumph of twin heroes Xbalanque and Hunahpu over the Lords of Death. Additionally, it recounts the history of K’iche’ migration and settlement, until the invasion of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, when many Mayan books were found and burned. Today, Maya priests or spiritual leaders and students of Maya cosmovision philosophy use the Popul Vuh, and the knowledge it contains still resonates with many Indigenous Maya and their allies today. The Maya believed that the sky is held up by trees of different species and colors. The ceiba is the world tree, its branches in the heavens, its trunk on Earth, its roots in the Underworld. If we cut down the ceiba, the firmament will collapse upon us.^[7]

Colonization under Spanish Rule

Of all the agents jointly at work, however, none proved more destructive than an array of diseases introduced by Spaniards from the Old World to the New [sic] .… As many as eight pandemics (smallpox, measles, typhus, and plague, alone or in withering combination) lashed Guatemala between 1519 and 1632, with some twenty-five episodes relating to more localized, epidemic outbreaks recorded between 1555 and 1618.… Maya depopulation during this period was but one downward spiral of a general, though regionally variable, pattern of New World [sic] decline.^[8]

In the early sixteenth century, the Spanish leader of the conquest of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, granted permits to brothers Gonzalo and Pedro de Alvarado to colonize the region. Pedro ended up at the helm of the effort, at first allying himself with the Kaqchikel nation in order to bring the K’iche’ nation to submission before later turning on the Kaqchikel. In 1523, he led a massacre against the Maya people, many of whom had already fallen victim to the new diseases brought by the Spaniards. By 1524, much of what is today called Guatemala was under Spanish rule. And though the impact of Spanish colonization was brutal, it was not new: “A common assumption is that the Spanish encountered in Guatemala culturally pristine societies whose cultures were contaminated and invalidated by their presence. Yet the Highland Maya cultures that flourished during the post-classic period, AD 900 to 1200, had been profoundly affected by repeated invasions from Mexico for at least 1000 years before the Spaniards’ arrival.”^[9]

The early colonial period also marks the origins of the Afro-descendant population in Guatemala, who were brought as enslaved people into the capital of Santiago, greatly influencing the economy and culture through music, food, and art. These people filled any number of labor roles, ranging from domestic workers to supervisors of cacao groves. Not only did the Spanish elites own enslaved people, but also a small population of the native Indigenous people, seeking to emulate the Spanish, participated in this as well, equating ownership of enslaved Africans with a high socio-economic status in society. This is not a well-known history in Guatemala, part of why the contributions of Afro-descendant people invisible. “In both popular and official understandings, Guatemala is not only one of the most Indian countries in Latin America but also one of the least African. The fact that Africans and their descendants were once enslaved in Guatemala is almost entirely absent from national consciousness.”^[10]

The region during the colonial period was known as Capitanía General de Guatemala—the Captaincy General of Guatemala, which was a part of New Spain (present-day Mexico and Central America). “The Spanish capital in Guatemala was Central America’s major hub of commerce, transit, in-migration, and hispanization, starting in the sixteenth century.”^[11] So, present-day Guatemala was the site of the regional capital under Spanish rule; this, in turn, may explain later tensions with leaders from other parts of the region during and after independence as Guatemala was associated with Spain and the colonial legacy. Villa de Santiago de Guatemala, the first capital of the captaincy-general, was founded in 1524, only to be moved three years later to Ciudad Vieja following a Kaqchikel attack on the city. Santiago—which is today called Antigua—found its final location in 1541, next to trade routes in the Valley of Panchoy, which supported the growing cacao trade in the region.

Santiago was home to a diverse community including Spaniards, Indigenous people, mestizos, and enslaved Africans and free people. Though gender violence was “both legal and pervasive in colonial Latin America, and infant mortality rates were high, especially among both rural and urban poor,”^[12] non-elite women were often able to create independent lives for themselves without having to join convents as corroborated by the work of historians.^[13]

Independence and Early State Building

During the initial debate over the future of the region after the collapse of Spanish rule in 1821, the traditional Guatemalan landowning and merchant elite used its tremendous influence to push the colony toward annexation by the Mexican empire of Agustín [de] Iturbide. The collapse of this enterprise by 1823, however, discredited this local nobility and allowed a younger, more radical element to play a greater role in the political and economic life of what would become the Central American Federation.^[14]

The Captaincy General of Guatemala that had been established by Spain, which consisted of present-day Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and the southernmost state of Chiapas in Mexico, achieved independence from Spain in 1821. This union was dissolved a mere two years later, following a failed attempt at annexation into the Mexican Empire. The United Provinces of Central America—also referred to as the Central American Federation and Central American Confederation—was established in 1824. Under the Federation constitution, the federal capital was in Guatemala City, with a president for each of the constituent states: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. In 1825, Liberal Salvadoran army officer Manuel José Arce was elected the first president of the United Provinces.

Though disagreement existed between the Liberals and the Conservatives, they both belonged to an elite Spanish Creole group—los Criollos—who Guatemalan historian, Severo Martínez Peláez, claims created and perpetuated economic circumstances that assured prosperity for a few and deprivation for the majority.^[15] These circumstances were altered neither by independence in 1821 nor by Liberal reforms following 1871. This inequality perpetuated by elites was based on hierarchies of class and race, and stemmed from the discrimination to which Indigenous people were subjected: “Racism was to become a key element of the new liberal, oligarchic state, in which the Indigenous person—who during the Colonial Period was recognized legally as belonging to a social and racial group and enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy to guarantee the smooth functioning of the corporativist State—loses all their rights and becomes invisible.”^[16] Tensions developed between Liberal and Conservative elites in Guatemala due to disagreements over how the nation should grow after independence: Conservatives took on a more nationalist approach, wanting to maintain the Guatemala that was made under colonial rule; Liberals were inspired by the Enlightenment, and wanted to convert Guatemala into a “modern, outward-looking ladino state.”^[17]

Liberals had control of the government from 1823 to 1839, ending their era with Mariano Gálvez when Conservative Rafael Carrera took power by leading an uprising of Indigenous people. Under his leadership, “the legislators closed their first session with more decrees designed to restore Hispanic tradition. They reduced taxes on foodstuffs in another response to popular demand . . . They abolished the head tax altogether” with the goal of returning to the type of treatment of Indigenous peoples as practiced under colonization.^[18] Carrera saw the retention of Indigenous customs as the highest priority for his government, rejecting the Europeanization that Liberals sought. He helped this cause through several means: by removing taxes on the Indigenous population, which decreased their need to make money by working on estates and plantations; allowing Indigenous people to hold government positions; and—perhaps most significantly—returning land to Indigenous communities. In 1845, the government declared “all who worked unclaimed lands should receive them,” a decree that overwhelmingly favored Indigenous communities.^[19]

When Carrera died in 1865, the elite ladinos saw it as their chance to reclaim the country—and they achieved this with Liberal President Justo Rufino Barrios, who came to power in 1873. Under Barrios, Western capitalism was introduced into Guatemala. Liberals wanted to nurture budding coffee exports, a crop that was being grown more and more throughout Central America for a global market. “Less inspired by an enlightened belief in liberty than by precepts of progress and order, if not necessarily law, these new coffee liberals, led by Justo Rufino Barrios, enacted land and labor reforms intended to promote coffee cultivation and exportation.”^[20] Codified in law, this “liberal” era did not serve the interests of women and Indigenous peoples. “Exhibiting a marked ‘patriarchal authoritarianism,’ second-generation liberals also moved to curtail female independence, enhance male privilege, and promote the patriarchal nuclear family model.”^[21] And in 1876, President Barrios implemented the mandamiento policy, which forcefully conscripted people—specifically men, women, and children from Maya communities—to work coffee plantations. Some hundred thousand Maya migrated for weeks or months at a time to work the plantations: “Land was transformed from a cultural into an economic resource, from community to commodity, by Liberal desires to capitalize on Guatemala’s untapped potential as a producer of coffee.… Investment by domestic and foreign capital resulted in coffee emerging during the second half of the nineteenth century as Guatemala’s principal export crop, a position it has maintained in the national economy from the time of President Barrios until today.”^[22]

This period of Liberal leadership consolidated a model that prepared the conditions for twentieth century agro-exports based on the exploitation, disenfranchisement, and labor of Indigenous people. “As long as a ‘bedrock of subsistence rights’ continued to exist, communal divisions could be contained and collective interests defended. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a number of factors began to chisel away at this subsistence foundation.”^[23] Through new laws, reforms, and decrees, the Liberal state took land away from Indigenous communities, creating a mobile work force with no choice but to work on the coffee plantations. “Guatemala’s entrance into the nineteenth-century international coffee market remains one of the most brutal in the hemisphere.”^[24]

Twentieth Century

Democratization and social reform threatened the power, resources, and status of the small elite that had dominated Guatemala largely unchallenged until the ten-year progressive period that began in 1944. To that elite, the elimination of what they perceived as the communist threat of the Árbenz period (1951–54) also meant a return to their privileged position, a dominance justified by a level of socioeconomic underdevelopment that still required elite ‘guidance’.… Accordingly, elites and the rest of the right wing used the club of anticommunism, whether cynically or sincerely, to attack left-of-center political parties, labor organizing, and any reforms that might threaten their vested interests.^[25]

In 1931, former Minister of War Jorge Ubico Casteñada was elected as president in an election in which he was the only candidate on the ballot. Ubico, intent on pulling Guatemala out of its economic slump, implemented “unprecedented centralization of the state,” taking a devout pro-U.S. stance.^[26] This newfound alliance facilitated the growth of the United Fruit Company’s control over banana production and made this sector Guatemala’s most important business. Ubico ruled as a dictator, oppressing his political opponents viciously and massacring Indigenous people who rebelled against him. He was overthrown during the 1944 Revolution, which ended this system of authoritarian government “that had lasted since the republic gained its independence in 1821.”^[27] The 1944 Revolution later became known as the “Ten Years of Spring,” as it was a decade of the only democratically representative government in Guatemala until the end of the civil war in 1996.

Juan José Arévalo was democratically elected in 1945; this made him the first president in Guatemala’s post-caudillo (military strongman) era. Arévalo called himself a “spiritual socialist,” meaning he “conceived of the state as an aggregation of collective interests and values and viewed the function of government as seeing equally the individual and the collectivity.”^[28] However, he did not identify politically as a socialist or communist, repeatedly clarifying that he was not a Marxist. This did not prevent the United States from becoming nervous about his progressive leanings, especially when he implemented major changes to labor laws, encouraged unionization of major companies such as the United Fruit Company, and set a national minimum wage, among other policies. It’s very important to remember the depth and extent of U.S. involvement in the affairs of Guatemala. This influence has unfolded for decades; it includes not just the overthrow of President Árbenz, which you will read about below, but support to the Guatemalan government and armed forces during the ensuing civil war. And this involvement continues up through today, as Gustavo Palma reminds us: “It can be affirmed, without a doubt, that in the last decades of the last century and in the almost two of the current twenty-first century, the political and economic actions of and in Guatemala have been determined by the strategic agenda and interests of the United States.”^[29]

Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Arévalo’s minister of defense, took office in 1951, the first “peaceful and punctual transfer of executive power” in the Guatemalan Republic’s 130-year history.^[30] Árbenz pledged to continue the reform efforts of A révalo, wanting to “convert the country from a dependent nation to economic independence; to convert from a ‘feudal’ to a modern, capitalist economy.”^[31] Árbenz’s focus was energizing the countryside first and foremost: with this in mind, he created the Agrarian Reform Law of 1952, which stated that uncultivated land on estates over 220 acres were subject to expropriation and redistribution. This, of course, agitated the landowning elite, who immediately dubbed the reform “communist”—a charge that quickly caught the attention of the United States, which had already been on alert during the Arévalo administration and quickly moved to overthrow Árbenz. Guatemalan elites grew fearful of growing power among the lower classes due to the reforms, new forms of local leadership, and the potential for rebellion.^[32] The United States leveraged this anxiety for the overthrow of Árbenz. “Most [U.S.] ‘regime change’ operations have achieved their short-term goals. Before the CIA deposed the government of Guatemala in 1954, for example, United Fruit was not free to operate as it wished in that country; afterward it was. From the vantage point of history, however, it is clear that most of these operations actually weakened American security. They cast whole regions of the world in the upheaval, creating whirlpools of instability from which undreamed of threats arose years later.”^[33]

Árbenz’s policy resulted in the expropriation of a sizable portion of United Fruit’s land holdings and new highway construction threatened their transportation monopoly. The CIA, or U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who had close ties with United Fruit, began to plan an intervention. Concerned about the tension, the Árbenz administration went to the Soviet Union for arms in 1954, which the United States took as final proof that the Guatemalan government was under communist control. The U.S. government supplied Guatemalan army exile Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas with military supplies, a small army of mercenaries, and a communications campaign to carry out a coup against Árbenz. Árbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, just ten years after the start of the Revolution, and went into exile in Mexico. “[Castillo Armas’] military background, honest reputation, folk-hero image, and Mayan appearance made him a good choice to lead the invasion. By June 1954, he confidently asserted that he would ‘return very shortly’ to his homeland. The American government furnished Castillo Armas with all the requisites for the invasion. He received money and an ‘army,’ among whose ranks were many mercenaries recruited from the area.”^[34]

The United States installed Castillo Armas into the Guatemalan presidency, his primary supporters being the U.S. State Department, the United Fruit Company, the Guatemalan army, and the Guatemalan elites. Castillo Armas immediately took to reversing most of Árbenz’s reforms, returning land to United Fruit and even drawing up a new contract with the company to limit its taxes to just 30 percent of profits.^[35] With support from the United States, he also moved to imprison all suspected communists. “Yet the [U.S.] embassy’s own research shed doubt on the nature of the ‘communist’ threat. An anthropologist the embassy itself contracted to investigate the politics of Guatemalans imprisoned by the new regime found that not a single one was a member of Guatemala’s communist party, and few had ever even heard of Karl Marx. They were activists, but local activists involved in local issues. Seventy-five percent had participated in political parties, labor unions, peasant leagues, and agrarian committees.”^[36]

Over one hundred thousand landless rural families, the newly established campesino class that had benefited from the 1952 Agrarian Reform, were thrust back into disenfranchisement.^[37] Civil unrest grew during the three short but violent years of Castillo Armas’ rule—there were several failed coup attempts against him, along with student-led protests, the deadliest of which occurred in 1956, ending with 168 arrests, six deaths, and dozens of wounded, all of which contributed to social, political, and economic instability.^[38] On July 27, 1957, Castillo Armas was assassinated by one of his presidential guards. However, albeit briefly, this ten-year period of democracy and programs addressing inequality and access to land, did have national impacts: “A unique alliance of political forces put the power of the state at the service of workers and peasants in order to make a more equitable nation. Peasants, Indians, and workers immediately took advantage of this opening and began a wave of organizing.”^[39]

Guatemala’s Civil War Era

In the 1950s, a reformist government attempted to introduce some land reform by appropriating land from wealthy landowners and redistributing it. However, the President, [Jacobo] Árbenz, was ousted from power in 1954 by a CIA backed coup. Following this, a number of left-wing guerrilla movements began to form and a civil war ensued between 1960 and 1996. Over 200,000 people died during the conflict.^[40]

In 1958, General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who had previously challenged both Árbenz and Castillo Armas for the presidency, usurped power. His administration was dubbed “a farce of incompetence, corruption and patronage” and 1960 saw the beginnings of insurgent movements comprised of disgruntled members of the military, intellectuals, and students, along with the rural Maya and other left-wing civilian movements protesting the government.^[41] The military, in particular, was disillusioned with Ydígoras, and when he agreed to let the United States train an invasion force in preparation for the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba without consulting members of the military and without sharing the payout received from the United States, the military staged a coup. President Ydígoras was overthrown in 1963, and the military took control.

The military instituted a vicious, oppressive regime, particularly against the Maya, who were seen as “domestic enemies . . . deemed to be the social base for the guerrillas.”^[42] This perspective stems from the fact that the guerrilla groups sought support from the Indigenous communities, not because they were Indigenous, but rather because they were poor and “stuck in the bottom quintile of an extraordinarily unequal society” which appealed to the revolutionaries as they were fighting, in their view, a class war.^[43] The Guatemalan revolutionaries pitted themselves against the national army, who were financially and militarily backed by the United States and Israel; the Guatemalan military received an estimated $30 million in U.S. aid in the 1960s and 1970s^[44] and a wide range of military equipment from Israel, including tanks, munitions, and Galil rifles valued a t six million dollars.^[45] In 1966, the military allowed the democratic election of a civilian government, and Julio César Méndez Montenegro came to power. This resulted in a pause of guerrilla warfare, an “unofficial truce,” but the military took this as an opportunity to launch counterinsurgency efforts, and a “state of siege” was declared, suspending civil rights across Guatemala, as well as the placement of all local police and security guards under the Ministry of Defense and implementing strict censorship of the press.

In 1968, Archbishop Mario Casariego y Acevedo was kidnapped, most likely by Guatemalan security forces on orders from the Guatemalan army. The kidnapping seemed to be staged, with the intention of framing the guerrilla forces; the Archbishop, who was an outspoken supporter of the authoritarian regime at the time, may have organized this “self-kidnapping” himself. After the Archbishop’s safe return four days later, the war saw a brief lull in political violence, with a small decrease in murders by the death squads, and the “state of siege” reduced to a “state of alarm.” This momentary calm ended a few months later when U.S. ambassador John Gordon Mein was assassinated by the guerrilla group, FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes or Rebel Armed Forces), although some believe the Guatemalan army was involved in the murder. Regardless, this event led to an increase in U.S. security in the country and harsher counterinsurgency efforts, along with another increase in death squad-killings of the opposition.

A “state of siege” was re-established in 1970 with the election of Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio as president, which led to increased repression. This situation was challenged in 1971 when over twelve thousand students from the University of San Carlos of Guatemala staged a protest against the security forces. The Guatemalan military responded with a raid on the campus, mobilizing eight hundred troops, tanks, and helicopters, searching for weapons caches but ultimately finding nothing. During this time, more death squads were being formed, one of the most infamous being the “Ojo por Ojo” (Eye for an Eye); this death squad killed and tortured civilians suspected of working with the FAR. By the end of 1973, it was estimated that up to forty-two thousand Guatemalan civilians had either been killed or disappeared since the beginning of the war.

The FAR and its supporters were targeted heavily during the U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaign in the 1960s; in the 1970s, the survivors of this campaign regrouped, and in 1974 formed the EGP (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres or Guerrilla Army of the Poor). The EGP received support from some Maya groups, who had felt that the FAR had not taken the racial discrimination against Indigenous peoples sufficiently into account. In 1980, the EGP led an attack against the Guatemalan National Palace as well as on the Guatemalan government headquarters in an attempt to prevent a pro-government demonstration. Six adults and a child died from the explosion of a bomb-filled vehicle, in addition to many more wounded and damage to art pieces in the National Palace. This action was only one of several that guerrilla groups carried out in response to the increased killings by death squads and government forces. General Efraín Ríos Montt took power in 1982 via a coup; in this same year, several guerrilla groups joined efforts to form the URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca or National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity). Montt implemented a scorched earth policy that led to the systemic massacre and forced displacement of many Mayan communities. In this singular year, the military’s counterinsurgency regime resulted in seventy-five thousand deaths and the destruction of 440 villages.^[46] In 1984, Montt was usurped by his Minister of Defense, General Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores.

End of the War

Indeed, in its recently published report, the Commission [for Historical Clarification—CEH] concluded that 626 villages had been destroyed, more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, 1.5 million were displaced by the violence, and more than 150,000 driven to seek refuge in Mexico. Further, the Commission found the state responsible for 93 percent of the acts of violence and the guerrillas for 3 percent. All told, 83 percent of the victims were Maya and 17 percent were ladino.^[47]

Peace talks started in 1986, one year after a new Constitution was drafted and elections were reinstated. Eleven peace agreements were proposed and discarded across a decade and the violence continued. Finally, the twelfth agreement promised to address several key issues that had catalyzed the civil war in the first place, including the human rights of Indigenous communities and agrarian development. This set of peace accords was signed, and in 1996—after the deaths of over 200,000 people, the internal displacement of around 1.5 million Guatemalans, and another 150,000 having fled over the Mexican border—the Guatemalan civil war, one of Latin America’s most violent wars, finally came to an end. Of the two hundred thousand-person death toll, 83 percent were Indigenous Maya civilians. Most of these killings were carried out by government officials, death squads affiliated with the government armed forces such as the Secret Anticommunist Army and Mobile Military Police acting on orders to pillage Mayan villages and systematically massacre them. This genocide against the Maya became known as the Silent Holocaust. It is important to note that the genocide had gendered ramifications, and by that, we mean many Maya women were targeted as subversives and Indigenous girls and women were to be raped.^[48]

Present-Day Guatemala: Challenges, Opportunities, and Achievements

In spite of legitimate pessimism, there are noteworthy signs that some things in Guatemala are changing.… For example, the last presidential election, in the fall of 2007, was remarkably different from past elections on many levels. Although the subject of tax reform was not broached, the issues of poverty, education, and the rights of women and the Indigenous were front and centre on the platforms for all major parties.… Another positive sign of change was the fact that Rigoberta Menchú, 1993 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Indigenous leader, also campaigned for president in 2007.^[49]

Guatemala has made some strides toward political and economic stability since the end of the civil war, but many challenges remain. “By no means the poorest country in Central America in macroeconomic terms, postwar Guatemala has remained among the countries with the highest levels of socioeconomic inequality in the world.”^[50] This, in turn, is accompanied by weak state institutions, the presence of drug cartels, sustained discrimination against the Indigenous population, deforestation, and one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, all of which also contribute to outbound immigration.

Many argue that there are multiple historical events in Guatemala—Spanish colonization with the support of the Catholic church, early statehood consolidation and the emergence of political and economic elites, and the 36-year civil war (1960–1996)—that contribute to today’s high levels of gender-based violence.^[51] There are also a number of present-day social factors such as inequality, poverty, discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity, as well as high levels of violence due to insecurity, gangs, and drug trafficking, that contribute to the “normalization” of gender violence in the domestic or private sphere as well as in the public sphere. The countries with the highest femicide rates in Latin America are El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.^[52] Femicide is the killing of a woman because of her gender; it is an extreme example of gender-based violence, which is on the rise.^[53] From 2000 to 2019, 11,519 women were killed violently;^[54] the rate of violent deaths of women is growing faster than homicide levels (though homicide rates remain higher than femicide rates). In 2018 alone, 661 women were killed violently in Guatemala.^[55] In fact, violence against women is one of the most highly reported crimes in Guatemala, yet impunity rates are abysmally high: only 3.46 percent of cases presented between 2008 and 2017 were resolved according to the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala.^[56] Impunity and structural violence—poverty and discrimination, for example—can keep women from reporting, but this is exacerbated by the absence of witness protection as well.^[57]

Gender violence has spurred civil society efforts in which women’s organizations across the country and women’s groups at the community level are stepping up to hold government offices accountable and simultaneously providing services to women survivors themselves.^[58] Women’s organizations, including Indigenous women’s organizations, have organized across the country, often supporting each other and demanding better laws and their implementation, providing services to survivors, and even providing training to public employees tasked with serving women. Women’s organizations have also played a role in the postconflict transition, leveraging their connections across the country.

Indigenous peoples, particularly the Maya, have also been able to sustain community organizing efforts that were encouraged under Árbenz and used to survive the civil war. “Maya from all over Guatemala are uniting around a variety of causes. Language for example is central to the Maya movement.”^[59] The Maya movement is a vibrant social movement that includes many types of organizations and associations across the country as well as transnational networking and collaboration. “The movement is truly a national, at times transnational, phenomenon. This is in sharp contrast to the community-based allegiances that have long characterized Maya social identity.… The movement promotes association based on linguistic groups and then, building on that basis, hopes to foster a pan-Maya, even pan-Native American, identity. By so doing it hopes to peacefully unite Guatemalan Indians into a powerful base that can exert a proportional influence on Guatemalan politics and so claim social and economic justice for all Maya people.”^[60]

Though 1996 ushered in renewed hope for a peaceful and democratic country, a major event nearing the turn of the century raised concerns about rule of law in Guatemala. This was the assassination of Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi, just two years after the end of the civil war. Bishop Gerardi was an outspoken defender of Indigenous rights, working on the REMHI report (Recuperación de la Memoria Historia or Historical Memory Recovery Project), which documented the crimes against humanity committed during the war. The report stated that the vast majority of all human rights violations that occurred were committed by the military. Two days after Bishop Gerardi announced the release of the forthcoming REMHI report, titled Guatemala: ¡Nunca Más! or Guatemala: Never Again, he was beaten to death in the garage of his house. In 2012, former general and dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was put on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity—including almost 2,000 deaths, 1,500 rapes, and the displacement of 30,000 citizens during his time as president. He was convicted and imprisoned in 2013 on those counts, although the conviction was dropped after only ten days. The trial was reopened in 2015, but he was not re-sentenced due to his deteriorating health. Ríos Montt died in 2018.

After winning the presidential election with 67 percent of votes, Jimmy Morales served as Guatemala’s president starting in 2016. Ironically, although he ran his presidential campaign on a platform of fighting corruption, with a campaign slogan of “Ni corrupto, ni ladrón” (Neither corrupt nor a thief), Morales was the center of several corruption controversies. In January 2017, his older brother and adviser, Samuel, and his son, José, were arrested for money laundering; the arrests prompted protests demanding Morales’ removal, but he refused to resign. In September of the same year, it was revealed that Morales was receiving an additional $7,300 per month on top of his mandated salary from the Ministry of Defense, beginning in December 2016. Although he denied the bonuses were illegal, Morales ultimately returned roughly $60,000 to the government.

At the beginning of 2019, Morales terminated the Guatemalan government’s agreement with the United Nations that allowed for the international body, International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala or CICIG, to conduct investigations into crimes committed in the country. “The commission was charged with assisting state institutions in the investigation and dismantling of illegal security groups and clandestine security organizations that had long threatened democracy and peace in Guatemala.”^[61] CICIG’s contract was to last until September of 2019. The Guatemalan elite approved of Morales’ decision while the United Nations rejected the termination, as did the Guatemalan Constitutional Court. Morales claimed that CICIG was involved in illegal acts and abuse of authority. These allegations and actions on Morales’ part are speculated to be in retaliation against the report CICIG released about his campaign finances in 2016. All of these events demonstrate the ongoing fragility of Guatemala’s democracy and governance—particularly rule of law—of the Guatemalan state. This conclusion is further aggravated by the violence of organized crime, high levels of gender violence, and the poverty of the majority Indigenous Maya which fuels outbound emigration. Immigrants, in turn, send remittances back to almost eight hundred thousand families within Guatemala. In 2004, the total amount of these remittances comprised the equivalent of two minimum salaries per month per family. “In this way, the rural population of Guatemala ends up subsidizing the State and its role of ‘fighting poverty.’”^[62]

Recommended Reading

Asturias, Miguel Ángel. El Señor Presidente. Mexico City: Costa-Amic, 1946.

Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Leyendas de Guatemala. Madrid: Ediciones Oriente, 1930.

Bazzett, Michael (translator). The Popol Vuh: a New English Version. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2018.

Goldman, Francisco. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? New York: Grove Press, 2007.

Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Latin America Otherwise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Grandin, Greg, Deborah T. Levenson, and Elizabeth Oglesby, eds. The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Green, Linda. Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Jonas, Susanne, and Nestor Rodríguez. Guatemala-U.S. Migration: Transforming Regions, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.

Kinzer, Stephen. “Chapter 6: Get Rid of This Stinker.” In Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, 129-147. New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2006.

Menjívar, Cecilia. Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

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