Guatemala (Modern & National Period)

Guatemala is stunningly beautiful and rich in geographic and cultural diversity. The country also has had a long history of oppression, ethnic discrimination, and violence, resistance, and rebellion. Historical legacies loom large and continue to shape lives and possibilities, but Guatemalans share in a culture of resilience and a remarkable ability to find joy in the present. The early republic took shape amid Latin America’s familiar struggles between liberal and conservative ideologies. After two years as part of Mexico (1821–1823) and then as the capital of an unstable, Liberal-led Central American federation, an independent Guatemala emerged under Conservative-backed Rafael Carrera, who dominated the nation for a quarter-century beginning in 1840. Liberals prospered with the growth of coffee after 1860, gaining national power in 1871. So-called Liberal dictatorships during the next seven decades (except for an important reformist interruption in the 1920s) solidified Guatemala’s agro-export model and opened the door to the Boston-based United Fruit Company, which created a powerful banana enclave. Between coffee and fruit, peasants and workers suffered land loss and labor coercion in the highlands where most of the country’s Maya majority lived and in lowland plantations where workers (Mayas and “Ladinos,” as non-Mayas are known) produced fruit, sugar, and cotton under onerous conditions. In 1944, reformists overthrew dictator Jorge Ubico, opening the way to Guatemala’s first democratic governments. The Arévalo and Árbenz presidencies brought changes in labor laws, voting rights, education, and, in 1952, land tenure. The agrarian reform law encouraged the distribution of fallow portions of the nation’s largest landholdings. The mobilization that the law spurred and fierce backlash it provoked prompted Árbenz’s ouster in 1954 in a coup orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intervening in the name of anti-Communism. US-backed military dictatorships followed almost uninterrupted for the next thirty years, and a guerrilla oppositional insurgency began in 1960. The thirty-six-year war resulted in about 200,000 people killed, an estimated 83 percent of them Maya civilians. A truth commission found state forces to be responsible for 93 percent of killings, including genocidal army massacres of entire communities. The government and guerrilla forces signed an agreement in 1996 bringing an end to the war. The postwar era has been fraught and unsettled, with underlying causes of conflict unresolved; however, much has changed. A new “multiculturalism” is the norm, with at least lip service paid to the rights of Guatemalan Mayas, and a vocal civil society works openly and vigorously to insist on a government accountable to its citizens.