Giveaways
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.
A Mayan temple complex remains intact at Tikal, in northern Guatemala, and I was determined to head out there and see it for myself after spending time in the more urbanised heartland of the country.
Guatemala became independent from Spain in 1821 and, in its present boundaries, in 1840. Its national bird is the resplendent quetzal, a beautiful creature that symbolised freedom as it would always die in captivity.
Eventually, the scientists figured out that the resplendent quetzal just needed a special diet: a romantic legend slain by unromantic facts, as the saying goes.
Indeed, Guatemala and the neighbouring countries are a birdwatcher’s paradise, as even the wild turkeys of that region look rather exotic.
I stayed, to begin with, in a lovely old villa in a middle-class and peaceful corner of Guatemala City, behind a locked gate and next to two really nice shopping centres. There was a Walmart across the road where I bought all my food. In this way, I minimised the initial culture shock.
There are three main geographical areas in Guatemala: the Pacific Coastal Plains in the southwest, the central highlands — which include the capital, Guatemala City, population three million — and the low-lying plains of the northern Petén Department (i.e., province).
Here is a United Nations map that shows the departmental divisions, roads, and towns of Guatemala.
Key sites for the traveller to visit, apart from Guatemala City, include:
Tikal, of course.
Antigua Guatemala, a former capital from the colonial period, to this day full of Spanish colonial architecture of the most delicate kind, and where many old customs are still practiced. The Santa Catalina Arch in Antigua Guatemala graces the cover of the current Lonely Planet guide to Guatemala, and indeed, leads many articles on the country. I will be writing about a visit to Antigua Guatemala in an upcoming post.
Lake Atitlán, a mountain lake nestled under the high peaks of the southwest, next to the town of Sololá. Some say that Lake Atitlán is the most beautiful lake in the world.
And Semuc Champey, a remarkable system of stepped turquoise pools in the limestone country of the Alta Verapaz Department, close to the geographical centre of Guatemala.
This just scratches the surface of a country where much of the attraction lies in decorated churches such as the yellow church of San Andrés Xecul, survivals of Mayan culture, and colourful markets that can be found everywhere. Plus, the birdwatching.
As you can also see from the photographs of the Santa Catalina Arch and Lake Atitlán, there are lots of volcanoes in Guatemala, some of them active and others available to be climbed.
This year, 2024, is the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. Unlike some of the other countries in the region, which were conquered quite quickly, the indigenous Mayan kingdoms of Guatemala resisted the Spanish for 173 years, until the last one was conquered in 1697. Though they had declined somewhat from the ‘classical’ period, the Mayan kingdoms still existed and were able to put up a good resistance.
Perhaps for that reason, the Mayan languages, of which thirty are still spoken, and everyday Mayan culture, survived in reasonably good shape. Today, about half the population of Guatemala by one estimate, or about seven million people in Guatemala and neighbouring countries by another, speak a Mayan language
On the other hand, the elite or priestly culture of the Maya was suppressed for a variety of reasons, ranging from the belief that the Aztec-like indigenous religion of the Maya was a kind of Devil worship to a desire, no doubt, to replace the Mayan aristocracy with Spanish overlords.
Nearly all the books written by the Maya in their indigenous writing system were destroyed by the conquistadors and Christian priests; as with Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Mayan writing system had to be painstakingly reconstructed by later archaeologists.
From my Airbnb, which only cost me $20 a night even though it was in a fairly posh part of town by local standards (complete with cook), I wandered into the central part of the city, which is dominated by a big plaza called the Parque Central, the Cathedral, and the Palacio Nacional, a former presidential palace built by a right-wing dictator of the 1930s and 1940s named Jorge Ubico, which is now a museum, and absolutely stunning. Ubico seems to have had good taste, at least, whatever his other faults may have been, and his dictatorship also seems to have been fairly mild compared to what came later.
I noticed that in front of the Palacio Nacional there was a lamp-post with ‘No Olvidos’, meaning ‘let us not forget’: a reference to the many killings ‘disappearances’ and creation of orphans by the subsequent US-backed dictatorship after a period of left-wing government in the second half of the 1940s and 1954, and the civil wars (really, persecution of those who rose up against the new dictatorship) which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
These days, the Parque Central is full of posters, appealing to anyone who might know the whereabouts of someone who disappeared forty years ago, or where their now-grown children might now be living.
Or simply reminding the young people of today of their history (most Guatemalans alive today were born after the end of the civil wars).
The next reminder says that in Guatemala there was once genocide and child trafficking: the farming out of orphans whose parents had been murdered, and who then lost touch with their old families.
Many of the perpetrators were pardoned, as part of the deal by which the violence was ended. This deal is also the subject of protest and graffiti, especially now that the children of the perpetrators are running for political office.
And so, I crossed the Parque Central and entered the Palacio Nacional, which is now a people’s palace.
The Guatemalan flag hangs on the stage of a stately ballroom, under an amazing ceiling.
Actually, ceilings were a thing in the palace.
As were alcoves and skylights and atriums.
And stained-glass windows.
It also contains monuments, such as this one to the ‘anonymous heroes of peace’.
And another of hands, which may also be political.
Here’s a video I made, starting with by my attempts to cross the road in an ‘Americanised’ part of town (Guatemala is in America too, of course), and then, after surviving
that, the Parque Central and Palacio Nacional.
In fact, Guatemala City has a lot of fantastic architecture, including the architecture of the Museo Nacional de Arte Maya and the neighbouring national museum of modern art, which was unfortunately closed when I was there, due to renovation.
I saw strange representations of human faces in the Mayan art museum.
This is the seat of the ‘Turtle Lords of Yokib’.
And a strongly lit serpent figure.
The museum of modern art honours Carlos Mérida, perhaps the country’s most noted modern artist, a contemporary and colleague of the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, among others.
Of course, not everywhere in Guatemala City is so flash. These are more typical scenes from real life.
I met someone who worked for an NGO and we discussed what is happening in South America and Central America. If Trump won the coming US elections, Guatemalans might see more attempts at a coup d’etat: there were two in Guatemala, in November and January.
If the offspring of the old tyrants are running for office, so, likewise, the current president is Bernardo Arévalo, the son of one of the two left-wing presidents of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Juan José Arévalo, in office from 1945 to 1951.
Somewhat ironically for a country symbolised by a freedom bird, Juan José Arévalo was Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, more than a hundred years after the country became independent.
The main issue that all democratically elected presidents have faced is land reform. According to a recent post by the Land Portal Foundation, with scholarly references in the original,
Studies indicate that Guatemala has one of the highest levels of land concentration in Latin America. The 1979 census showed that 2% of the country’s largest farms covered 67% of the agricultural land, while 80% of all farms covered only 10% of the land. A 2020 report estimates that almost half of the producers own 3.2% of the land while 56.6% of the arable land is in the hands of 1.8% of producers.
After a few days in the capital, I was then to head to the nearby city of Antigua Guatemala, the most touristy place in the country. It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and many people just go straight there, as it is set up with a tourism agency, and all the tourist shuttles run through Antigua, not Guatemala City.
Although having said that, a comparatively luxurious coach service, Transporte Fuente del Norte, is headquartered in Guatemala City.
The city buses in Guatemala City are undergoing modernisation. The older buses, the so-called ‘red buses’, have often been attacked by gang members and some of the drivers even killed because the passengers pay with cash. I decided not to use them! However, the newer Transurbano system buses use cashless cards and this reduces the incentive to hijack them.
Unfortunately, the city is cutting bus services post-Covid, and putting the price up.
I went to the airport to get a tourist shuttle to Antigua, and then I got the last bed in Antigua on Airbnb. A lot of people also use booking dot com to get accommodation in Antigua.
A couple of things I found were that it paid to book tourist shuttles three days in advance, and that New Zealand credit cards were no good in Guatemala: not even VISA. I also needed a ticket out of Guatemala before I could get into the country, so I prepaid US $400 to fly to San Salvador from Flores, the tourist town and airport nearest to Tikal.
In my next post about Guatemala, I will be in Antigua.
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