Guatemala

The Maya Classic period — Tikal and the greatest American civilisation

The Maya Classic period (250–900 CE) produced in Guatemala the highest achievements of pre-Columbian civilisation — Tikal, a city of 100,000 people and 3,000 structures rising from the Petén jungle; a mathematical system that independently discovered the concept of zero; a calendar more accurate than Europe's; and an astronomical knowledge so sophisticated that Maya scribes predicted solar eclipses centuries in advance.

The Spanish conquest of Guatemala

The Spanish conquest of Guatemala (1519–1524 CE) — led by Pedro de Alvarado, one of Hernán Cortés's most brutal lieutenants — destroyed the K'iche' Maya kingdom (whose last king Tecún Umán died in battle against Alvarado) and established a colonial society built on indigenous labour, disease-induced demographic catastrophe, and forced conversion to Christianity.

The banana republic — United Fruit Company and US intervention

Guatemala's history from the 1890s to 1954 was dominated by the United Fruit Company (UFCO) — the American corporation that owned 42% of Guatemala's land, ran its own railroad, telegraph system, and ports, paid no taxes, and effectively ruled the country through its political influence, before a CIA coup in 1954 overthrew the democratically elected president who had tried to reclaim the company's unused land.

Guatemala's civil war — 36 years and 200,000 dead

Guatemala's civil war (1960–1996 CE) was the Western Hemisphere's longest — 36 years of conflict between US-backed military governments and leftist guerrillas, punctuated by genocidal campaigns against the Maya indigenous population in the early 1980s under General Ríos Montt, leaving 200,000 dead (83% indigenous Maya) and 45,000 disappeared.

Rigoberta Menchú and Maya cultural survival

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K'iche' Maya woman from Guatemala's Quiché department whose family was killed by the Guatemalan military during the civil war, became the world's most prominent indigenous rights advocate — winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 — and her autobiographical account "I, Rigoberta Menchú" (1983) brought Guatemala's genocide to global attention.

The Maya today — 60% of Guatemala's population

Guatemala is unique in the Americas: the Maya are not a marginal minority but the majority of the country's population — 60% of 17 million Guatemalans are indigenous, speaking 22 distinct Maya languages, maintaining traditional dress (traje), cosmology, and the 260-day tzolkin calendar alongside Christianity, and increasingly asserting political and cultural rights that colonial rule suppressed for 500 years.