The history of Guatemala

Guatemala was a heartland of Maya civilisation for more than two thousand years, from the giant Preclassic pyramids of El Mirador to the Classic city of Tikal and the highland kingdoms that met the Spanish in 1524. Conquered by Pedro de Alvarado, it became the seat of Spanish rule over all of Central America, and after independence in 1821 it was governed for long periods by caudillos and dictators who built an economy of coffee and bananas on the forced labour of Maya communities. A decade of democratic reform after 1944 ended in a coup organised by the United States in 1954, which was followed by military rule and a civil war from 1960 to 1996. A United Nations-backed truth commission found that more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared and that the army committed acts of genocide against the Maya. Today more than four in ten Guatemalans are Indigenous, speaking some twenty Mayan languages.

People were hunting and gathering in the highlands and on the Pacific coast by around 6500 BCE, and pollen from lake beds suggests maize was being grown by about 3500 BCE. By the second millennium BCE pottery-making villages had appeared along the Pacific coast, and large earthen platforms and sculpture at sites such as La Blanca and Tak'alik Ab'aj show contact with the Olmecs of the Gulf of Mexico.

In the northern lowlands of the Petén, Maya communities built on a monumental scale far earlier than archaeologists once believed. Nakbé was raising platforms and temples by around 800 BCE, and by the Late Preclassic, roughly 300 BCE to 150 CE, El Mirador had become one of the largest cities of the ancient Americas, with the La Danta and El Tigre pyramids linked to neighbouring towns by raised causeways. Painted murals at San Bartolo, from around 100 BCE, show that Maya writing and royal religious imagery were already well developed. In the highlands, Kaminaljuyu, on the site of today's Guatemala City, controlled trade in obsidian and jade. Lidar surveys since 2018 have revealed tens of thousands of unknown structures beneath the forest.

The Classic period, from about 250 to 900 CE, was the age of divine kings who recorded their reigns on carved stone stelae in Maya hieroglyphs, dated by the Long Count calendar. Tikal, in the heart of the Petén, was one of the greatest of these cities. In 378 a warrior named Siyaj K'ahk', linked to the distant Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, arrived at Tikal on the day its king died, and a new dynasty with Teotihuacan connections took the throne. For two centuries Tikal's main rival was the Kaan dynasty of Calakmul, in what is now Mexico, which built a network of allies around it; Tikal was defeated in 562 by Caracol, in present-day Belize, and entered a long decline before King Jasaw Chan K'awiil defeated Calakmul in 695 and rebuilt the city with the great temples that still stand.

Other kingdoms flourished at Uaxactún, Naranjo, Piedras Negras, Dos Pilas and Quiriguá. In 738 Quiriguá's ruler captured and beheaded the king of Copán, its overlord across the border in Honduras. From the late eighth century the lowland cities fell into crisis. Warfare, overpopulation, deforestation and severe droughts are all proposed as causes, and their relative weight is debated. Tikal's last dated inscription is from 869, and much of the Petén was depopulated, though the Maya themselves did not disappear.

After the Classic collapse, the centre of Maya power in Guatemala shifted to the western highlands. By the fifteenth century the K'iche' kingdom, ruled from Q'umarkaj (Utatlán), dominated much of the region. The Kaqchikel broke away and founded their own capital at Iximche around 1470, while the Tz'utujil held the shores of Lake Atitlán and the Mam ruled from the fortress of Zaculeu. These were rival tribute-taking states with strong ties to central Mexico. Their own histories survive in texts written down in Mayan languages using the Latin alphabet soon after the conquest, above all the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' account of the creation of the world and of the origins of their ruling lineages, and the Annals of the Kaqchikels. In the Petén, the Itza Maya kept an independent kingdom on an island in Lake Petén Itzá, with its capital at Nojpetén.

Epidemic disease arrived before the conquistadors: a sickness, probably smallpox, swept the highlands around 1520, killing many people, including Kaqchikel rulers. In 1524 Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire, sent his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado south with a few hundred Spanish soldiers and thousands of Nahua allies from central Mexico. Alvarado defeated the K'iche' near Quetzaltenango, in battles where tradition places the death of the K'iche' leader Tecún Umán, now a national hero. He then burned Q'umarkaj and its captured lords, and allied with the Kaqchikel to defeat the Tz'utujil. On 25 July 1524 he founded the Spanish capital, Santiago, beside Iximche.

His demands for gold soon drove the Kaqchikel into a revolt that lasted until about 1530. Campaigns against the Mam, the Poqomam and other peoples continued for years, while in the north the friar Bartolomé de las Casas and the Dominicans won the right to bring the region they renamed Verapaz, "true peace", under Spanish rule by preaching rather than war. The Spanish capital moved to the Almolonga valley in 1527, where it was destroyed by a mudflow from the Volcán de Agua in 1541, and then to the Panchoy valley, the city now known as Antigua Guatemala. The Itza at Nojpetén held out far longer than any other Maya kingdom, until a Spanish force stormed the island on 13 March 1697.

For almost three centuries the Audiencia, or Captaincy General, of Guatemala governed a territory stretching from Chiapas to Costa Rica, nominally within the viceroyalty of New Spain but largely run from Santiago. Its importance rested on people more than on silver. Under the encomienda and later the repartimiento, Maya communities owed tribute and labour to Spanish settlers and the Crown, and the Spanish Empire resettled scattered villages into planned towns built around churches. Disease, war and overwork caused a catastrophic fall in the Indigenous population during the sixteenth century; the New Laws of 1542, issued under Charles V after protests by Las Casas and others, banned the enslavement of Indians, though forced labour continued in other forms. The colony exported cacao and, later, indigo and cochineal dyes.

Colonial society was a hierarchy of Spanish-born officials, American-born criollo landowners and merchants, a growing population of mixed descent known as ladinos, enslaved and free Africans, and the Maya majority, who kept their languages and much of their communal life and folded Catholic saints into older religious practice. Maya communities rose against tribute and abuses many times, as in the Tzeltal revolt of 1712 in Chiapas and the K'iche' uprising at Totonicapán in 1820. After the Santa Marta earthquakes of 1773 wrecked Santiago, in 1776 the capital was moved to a new site, Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción, today's Guatemala City.

The collapse of Spanish authority during the Napoleonic Wars and the Spanish American wars of independence reached Central America with little fighting. On 15 September 1821 the leaders in Guatemala City declared independence, and in 1822 the region was annexed to the short-lived Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide. When that empire fell, the provinces except Chiapas formed the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823, with Guatemala City as its capital, together with El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

The federation was torn apart by war between Liberals and Conservatives. Liberal reforms under Mariano Gálvez provoked a peasant revolt in 1837 during a cholera epidemic. Its leader, Rafael Carrera, a young ladino swineherd with strong support among Maya and poor ladino communities, took Guatemala City in 1839 and defeated the federal leader Francisco Morazán in 1840. Carrera dominated Guatemala until his death in 1865, proclaiming it a separate republic in 1847 and being named president for life in 1854. In 1859 his government signed a treaty with Britain that described the border of British Honduras, a treaty Guatemala later repudiated, starting a claim to Belize that is now before the International Court of Justice.

The Liberal Revolution of 1871 brought to power Justo Rufino Barrios, president from 1873 to 1885, who made coffee the basis of the economy. His governments seized Church property and large areas of Maya communal land, sold it to planters, many of them German immigrants, and revived colonial-style forced labour through the mandamiento and debt peonage, which compelled highland Maya to work on the coffee estates of the Pacific slope and Alta Verapaz. Barrios was killed in 1885 at Chalchuapa, in El Salvador, trying to reunite Central America by force.

Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled from 1898 to 1920, granted huge concessions to American companies, above all the United Fruit Company, whose banana plantations, railway and port made it the largest landowner and employer in the country. Jorge Ubico, dictator from 1931 to 1944, abolished debt peonage but replaced it with a vagrancy law requiring landless men to work at least 100 days a year, and gave landowners near impunity over their workers.

Strikes and protests forced Ubico out in June 1944, and on 20 October a revolt of young officers and students overthrew his successor. The period that followed, often called the "ten years of spring", brought Guatemala's first genuinely democratic governments. Juan José Arévalo, elected in 1944, introduced a labour code, social security and a large literacy programme. His successor, Jacobo Árbenz, elected in 1950, passed the agrarian reform law known as Decree 900 in 1952, which expropriated uncultivated land on large estates, with compensation based on declared tax values, and distributed it to about 500,000 people, roughly a sixth of the population. Much of the expropriated land belonged to United Fruit.

The company lobbied Washington, and in the climate of the Cold War the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower came to view Árbenz, who had legalised the small communist party and accepted its support, as a Soviet foothold. The CIA organised Operation PBSuccess: a small force under Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas invaded from Honduras in June 1954, backed by propaganda broadcasts and bombing raids, and when the army refused to fight, Árbenz resigned on 27 June. Among those who witnessed the coup was a young Argentine doctor, Che Guevara, who drew from it lessons he would apply in Cuba. Castillo Armas reversed the land reform, banned parties and unions and persecuted supporters of the revolution, beginning three decades of military-dominated rule.

Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957. In November 1960 a group of junior officers rebelled against the government of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, and survivors of the failed revolt formed the first guerrilla movements, which received support from Cuba. A counter-insurgency campaign in the eastern departments in the late 1960s, with American advisers, killed thousands of civilians, and death squads tied to the security forces murdered politicians, union leaders, students and peasants.

In the 1970s the war moved to the western highlands and the northern lowlands, where new guerrilla groups such as the Guerrilla Army of the Poor recruited among Maya communities who had organised cooperatives, Catholic Action groups and peasant leagues. The army came to treat the Maya population as a whole as the enemy. In May 1978 soldiers killed dozens of Q'eqchi' protesters at Panzós, and on 31 January 1980 police stormed the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City, which K'iche' and Ixil protesters had occupied; 37 people died in the fire, among them Vicente Menchú, father of the activist Rigoberta Menchú, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Violence peaked under General Romeo Lucas García and then under General Efraín Ríos Montt, who took power in a coup in March 1982. In a scorched-earth campaign the army destroyed hundreds of villages, massacred men, women and children, and forced hundreds of thousands of men into civil patrols. Between half a million and a million and a half people were driven from their homes, and tens of thousands fled as refugees to Mexico. The Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), set up under the peace process and supported by the United Nations, published its report, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, in 1999. It estimated that more than 200,000 people had been killed or disappeared during the war, found that 83 percent of identified victims were Maya, attributed 93 percent of the violations it documented to state forces and allied paramilitaries and 3 percent to the guerrillas, and recorded 626 massacres by the army. It concluded that between 1981 and 1983 agents of the state committed acts of genocide against Maya groups in four regions, including the Ixil area of Quiché and Rabinal in Baja Verapaz. The commission also found that American training and support had a significant bearing on the abuses; in 1999 President Bill Clinton said that United States support for the Guatemalan forces had been wrong.

Ríos Montt was overthrown by his own defence minister in 1983, and a new constitution in 1985 restored civilian rule under Vinicio Cerezo. The guerrilla groups had united as the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) in 1982, and after years of talks mediated by the United Nations the government of Álvaro Arzú and the URNG signed peace accords on 29 December 1996, including agreements on Indigenous identity and rights, the resettlement of refugees and the reduction of the army. In April 1998 Bishop Juan Gerardi was murdered two days after presenting the Catholic Church's own report on the violence; army officers were later convicted.

Justice for the war proved slow. In May 2013 Ríos Montt became the first former head of state convicted of genocide by a court in his own country, for the killing of 1,771 Ixil Maya, but the Constitutional Court annulled the verdict ten days later, and he died in 2018 before a retrial could finish. Other officers have since been tried for massacres and for sexual violence against Maya women at Sepur Zarco.

Peace did not bring security or equality. Drug trafficking, gangs, extortion and one of the highest rates of child malnutrition in the Americas drove large-scale emigration to the United States, and remittances grew to around a fifth of the economy. In 2006 Guatemala and the United Nations created an International Commission against Impunity (CICIG), which in 2015 helped uncover a customs fraud ring known as La Línea. Weeks of mass protests followed, and President Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general, resigned in September 2015 and was arrested. His successor, Jimmy Morales, ended the commission's mandate in 2019, and under Morales and Alejandro Giammattei many of the prosecutors and judges who had worked with it were dismissed, prosecuted or forced into exile.

In August 2023 Bernardo Arévalo, a sociologist and son of the reforming president of 1945, won the presidency on an anti-corruption platform. When the public prosecutor's office tried to suspend his party and overturn the result, Maya communal authorities led weeks of roadblocks and protests in his defence, and he was sworn in shortly after midnight on 15 January 2024. His government has since faced continuing legal pressure from opponents in the prosecutor's office and the courts.