Guatemala

The most indigenous country in the Americas, and the place where an American intervention over land reform led to thirty-six years of war. Maya civilisation was centred here, with Tikal among its greatest cities, and Maya peoples remain around forty per cent of the population speaking over twenty languages. Spain conquered the highlands in the 1520s under Pedro de Alvarado. After the Central American federation collapsed, Guatemala's economy became coffee and then bananas, with the United Fruit Company holding vast uncultivated estates, the railways, the ports and the postal service. The elected government of Jacobo Arbenz began expropriating unused company land with compensation at the value the company had declared for tax, and in 1954 the CIA organised the coup that removed him. The civil war that followed ran from 1960 to 1996 and killed around two hundred thousand people, the great majority Maya civilians; a UN-backed commission found the army had committed acts of genocide in the Ixil region. Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel peace prize in 1992. Efrain Rios Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013 and the verdict annulled days later. Antigua and Tikal are World Heritage sites. The country has about eighteen million people, the most in Central America. It has thirty-seven volcanoes, several of them active. Lake Atitlan fills a collapsed caldera. Guatemala City is the largest city in the region. Its highland textiles carry village-specific patterns. Quetzaltenango is the second city and the highland Maya centre. The quetzal gives the country both its currency and its national bird.

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