Welcome
Travelogues
Begin trip
Previous: El Salvador
|
Capital: Guatemala City
|
français = texte de 2001 español= texto de 2001 I have covered the pre-Colombian history of Guatemala in the page on the history of the Maya Nation so I will only mention some of the post Colombian events that I perceive as having caused Guatemala to be as it is today. The Maya culture had gone through its decadence (900 to 1000 AD), and the Toltec-Maya renaissance was itself entering decadence through Cocom and Xiu conflicts when the Spanish struck around 1530 after first having dispatched the powerful Aztecs. The brutal eradication of the Maya culture by the Spanish ranks with the genocide of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks in 1915 and the holocaust perpetrated on Jews by Nazis during W.W.II. After the conquest, the Maya majority survived by adopting the disguise a Christianity which hid their own traditional deities. They survived , but they were completely excluded from the centres of power which were fought over by extremist Conservatives and Liberals with a violence characteristic of the Spanish Heritage in its ex colonies. After independence from Spain in 1821 and from Mexico 1823 and the break-up of the Central American Federation in 1840, Guatemala was ruled by a succession of conservative dictators with rare intervals of liberal regimes. After W.W.II, a liberal president, Juan José Arévalo, elected in 1945, instituted National Social Security, and a number of other progressive reforms that were pursued in 1951 by his successor Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. When Arbenz declared his intention to carry out an agrarian reform the USA organised an invasion from Honduras in 1954, led by exiled Guatemalan officers to prevent the distribution of the vast land holdings of United Fruit to those who farmed them. The violence of protest and repression grew yearly and peaked under General José Efrain Ríos who seized power in 1982. Amnesty international estimates that political violence cost 60 000 lives in the '70s and another 15 000 during Ríos Montt's 11 month term. In 1983 Ríos Montt was deposed by Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores who continued the bloodbath with an estimated 100 political assassinations and 40 abductions per month. The scandal of these excesses became so bad that the US had to withdraw its support of the military. Three elections brought civilians to power in 1985, 1990 and 1996 but the fighting war raged on until a peace accord was signed between the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union (URNG) and the government in 1996 after 36 years of civil war. Guatemala now has a small "middle class" but the top 20% of the population enjoys incomes 30 times greater than those of the poorest 20%. Guatemala's Gini Coefficient hovers around 0.60, one of the highest in the world. |
|
| Atlapedia CIA Country Reports Lonely Planet Traveldocs Wikipedia | ||
Antigua, founded in1543, was the capital of Guatemala from 1543 to 1776 when it was moved to Guatemala city after the 1773 catastrophic earthquake.
Antigua was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in1979. Beautiful Antigua is a popular tourist destination not only because of its rich traditional architecture but also because local entrepreneurs have decided to specialise into the business of teaching Spanish to tourists.
I enroled in one of the 30 competing schools and stayed at the Pension Belarmina not far from the school I had chosen. This photo shows Vinicio Belarmina, his sister Christina with the baby, both of which teach Spanish to tourists, Bella Belarmina and three american guests, the names of whom I have forgotten.
At that time I managed to be more or less understood in Spanish for I had spent many vacations in Mexico. It was time for me to move ahead and speak Spanish more correctly so I studied in San José and stopped in Antigua to see what they could do for me.
The schools and the teachers were OK but Antigua was so crowded with "Gringos" leaning Spanish that everyone in the restaurants and bars spoke English at night. Not a good place for total immersion!
After a week of Spanish courses and excessive boozing in English at night, I embarked on a 17 hour journey to the island town of Flores, the base from which I could visit the important Maya site of Tical.
It was a very difficult trip bumping along on a rough road in a decrepit bus. The pipi stop at Poptun was an encouraging sign that we were getting closer to Flores.
After a night in the historic Maya island fortress of Flores I took a bus to the Maya ruins of Tikal.
I would have taken more pictures of Tikal at tat time had I known I would be writing about it in 2001.
This picture shows Temple 1 in the background as seen from behind Temple II.
Below left, Temple I, looking east from the terrace of the North Acropolis.
On the right, Temple II seen across the East Plaza. The chap in the foreground is a Spanish backpacker I met there, Alejandro Crespillo.
That's me, in front of the North Acropolis.
And here are Alejandro with his friend Antonio Garre Lopez that I saw again when I visited "La Costa del Sol" in 1999.
Here is a view from the top of Temple IV of the flat jungle land that once was part of the Maya Empire that dissapeared sometime around 1000 BC.
From Tikal I went on to nearby Belize where I travelled with a Japanese backpacker Naoko to Livington that was a very fashionable destination for backpackers in 1993, and back to Antigua.
