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Cuba, the Caribbean Islands,
and Central America in 2001
Guatemala
Bec2004-09-17 18:04:31
Displayed times (last time: )
Guatemala City
I posted photos of El Salvador taken in 1993 to show the Tazumal and San Andrés Maya ruins. Actually, I did not visit El Salvador on this trip. I took a pickup truck from Copan Ruinas to the nearby Guatemala border, then a bus to Chiquimula and a second bus to Guatemala City. I found a nice yet inexpensive room at the Hospedaje de Oslo, halfway between the unsafe bus terminal zone and the Plaza Major.
The city was founded in 1776 to serve as capital after an earthquake had destroyed the earlier capital Antigua. The new site was also unstable. The new capital was almost completely destroyed in 1917 and further damaged in 1976.
The Palacio Nacional, shown here, is the seat of power in the country. The presidential Mansion is just behind. Guatemala is formally a constitutional democracy but effective power, concentrated in the hands of a small number of land owning families and foreign companies, has been expressed by right wing dictators during much of the country's existence.
Guatemala is still healing its wounds (200 000 deaths, a million refugees), from a 36 year civil was that was ended by the signature of a peace accord in the Palacio Nacional on December 29 1996. The civil war is over but the inequalities that caused it remain, 70% of the land is owned by less than 3% of the population and discrimination against indigenous people (60% of the population), is an accepted practice, inherited from the Spanish belief in white supremacy, adapted for their own benefit by the mixed blood ladinos.
Yet, the ancestors of these downtrodden people, the Maya, created the most advanced civilisation of pre-Colombian times, the first to devise an accurate calendar and the only one to have developed a writing system.
Guatemala City's "Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia" is definitely worth a visit. It is paradoxical that Guatemala be so proud of the Maya yet treat their descendants so
...
See photographs from:
Guatemala Gallery
