Guatemala City
Gateway to a beautiful country symbolised by an exotic bird of freedom, but only just now becoming democratic
THIS March, after New York, I flew south to Guatemala, a country immediately to the south of Mexico that I’d often heard about in the direst of terms, with its CIA-backed coup in 1954 against a moderate reformer and thirty years of genocidal civil war — mostly directed against the indigenous Maya — that only ended in the mid-1990s. Frankly, I was scared to go there.
To this day, the United States has official warnings against travel to parts of Guatemala. Still, when you consider school shootings and the National Guard in the NY subway stations, there are no warnings for the USA. They have regular crime in today’s Guatemala and still some ongoing political murders, but not mass shootings USA-style.
In reality, tourism is recovering in Guatemala, though it still has some way to go.
The population of Guatemala is now more than 17 million, going on 18. A large percentage are Maya, the descendants of an old pyramid-building civilisation that declined, possibly for environmental reasons, some centuries before the Spanish conquest of the region. The elaborate stone carvings of the ‘classical’ Maya period would be familiar to many people.
