Guatemala travel guide

The Maya civilisation stretched across Mesoamerica from southeastern Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula, into modern-day Honduras and El Salvador, encompassing the whole of Belize and Guatemala in between. This region had Caribbean and Pacific coastlines as well as the volcanic Sierra Madre mountain range, providing it with fertile land, freshwater and diverse ecosystems. It was the perfect place for societies to flourish. Complex civilisations emerged from around 2000 BCE, cultivating crops still ubiquitous in Guatemala today: maize, pumpkin, chilli peppers, beans. Impressive cities were constructed from 750 BCE onwards, beginning in the lowlands around Petén, along with a detailed hieroglyphic writing system which can still be seen today, carved into stone stelae. Some of the largest sites, still visible today, include Tikal and El Mirador – which at its peak is believed to have been home to up to a quarter of a million inhabitants. Read more about the Maya in our page on the Ruta Maya.

By the early 16th century, there were a number of Mayan empires dotted along the coast and in the Guatemalan highlands, dominated by the Ki’che. In 1511, the first Europeans set foot in Mesoamerica when a handful of Spanish sailors crawled ashore following the wrecking of their ship in the Caribbean. The Mayans duly sacrificed them. However, three more ships followed between 1517 and 1519, and the Spanish seized the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and continued to fight the Mayans, conquering the Ki’che capital in 1524. Attempts to build relationships failed as the Spanish demanded more and more gold, and subsequent Mayan capitals fell to the conquistadores throughout the 1500s, with the final stronghold in Petén captured in 1697.

While the Spanish ruled what is now Guatemala, missionaries were sent in to convert the local population and many indigenous people were killed by introduced diseases. However, Mayan culture persisted in small, rural villages across the region, and their languages, calendar, agricultural systems, cuisine and weaving techniques continue to this day, making this one of the strongest pre-Columbian civilisations in the Americas. Their glyphs and complex calendar have largely been deciphered, and much is now known about the socio-political structure of their ancient empires, farming systems, trade networks, religious beliefs and rituals, including human sacrifice.

While the Mayans suffered under Spanish rule, their deities did not appear to have been on the side of the Spanish, either. Floods and earthquakes throughout the 16th-18th centuries destroyed many of their newly established cities – including Antigua, which was moved twice as a result of nature’s wrath. It was finally established in its current location in 1776.

Much of Central America gained nominal independence from Spain in 1821, with Guatemala gaining full independence in 1825. However, peace was far from arriving, as warring factions continued to ravage this region, executing enemies, avenging the deaths of family members and totally destroying villages in their paths. Bloody conflict followed bloody conflict as states seceded, arms were traded and peasants were persuaded to revolt. British and Belgian governments weighed in on this collapsing region, attempting to establish trading companies as well as Belgian King Leopold’s self explanatory “Belgian Colonisation Company.”

As trade from the New World increased, coffee became one of the Republic of Guatemala’s biggest exports. The creation of a railway line that would link the Pacific with the Caribbean coastlines became a huge focus of successive governments in the 19th century – prior to the construction of the Panama Canal. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) became ever more powerful across the region, as it was granted access to more and more land and existing railway lines as well as tax exemptions. Guatemala’s leaders became increasingly despotic, ordering troops to fire on striking fruit workers, sentencing non-landowners to hard labour, and giving landowners immunity from prosecution. The country became increasingly militarised throughout the 20th century, and the UFCO’s influence grew further as it evicted farmers from their land in order to create banana plantations, as well as controlling ports and electricity plants.

Coups inevitably followed, overthrowing the fascist President Ubico in 1944 in the Guatemalan Revolution. But the country’s progress towards fair and democratic elections as well as moderate capitalism was halted by the United States, which took a disliking to what they saw as a shift towards communism – thanks, in part, to propaganda disseminated by the UFCO. In 1954, CIA-backed forces invaded Guatemala, bombing its capital and setting up a radio station which broadcast “fake news” against the country’s democratically elected leader, Jacobo Árbenz. A new leader was installed, but in a story horribly familiar across Latin America, an assassination was followed by rigged elections and yet more US-backed coups, along with clashes between guerrilla fighters and rightwing paramilitaries. By 1960, the country was in the midst of a civil war that would endure for 36 years. Tensions increased following the devastating 1976 earthquake, when the struggling government failed to mount an adequate response. New guerilla organisations sprang up across the country and indigenous groups rose up against the military, which had been carrying out horrific massacres in Ki’che villages. The army responded as brutally as expected, and burned the protesters to death.

A US-backed military junta Guatemala took over under the leadership of General Efraín Ríos Montt, resulting in disappearances and the destruction of over 400 villages as part of a genocide against the Maya. Over 45,000 refugees fled across the border to Mexico as the CIA-trained paramilitaries committed shocking human rights abuses, and an estimated 200,000 people were killed.

In 1996, a peace accord negotiated by the UN finally brought an end to the civil war. In 2013, Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison – the first time a head of state has been found guilty of genocide. However, the conviction was subsequently overturned due to his age.

Guatemala today remains a violent country with the scars of its decades-long civil war still visible. Many details of the genocide and disappearances are only just beginning to emerge, leading survivors and family members to hope that justice may yet be served. Gang warfare and the flow of drugs between South and North America means that crime rates are shockingly high, and sadly it remains one of the murder capitals of the world. While tourists here are rarely affected by the very localised violence, and the Mayan villages and colonial cities such as Antigua are the very definition of peaceful, the daily reality for many Guatemalans is quite different. Inequality persists, indigenous people are still marginalised, corruption is endemic at government level and the fight for justice continues. There are some rays of hope, however – such as the wonderful Ki’che activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum. In 1992 she became the first indigenous person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and she has continued her work fighting for the rights of indigenous people, women and children. She has raised awareness around the world of the atrocities committed against her people during the civil war, and formed Guatemala’s first official indigenous-led political party, Winaq – meaning ‘people’ in Ki’che.