Republic of Guatemala

Republic of Guatemala República de Guatemala
Flag Coat of arms
Capital and largest city	Guatemala City
Official languages	Spanish
Dominant mode of production	Capitalism
Government	Presidential republic
• President	Alejandro Giammattei
Area
• Total	108,889 km²
Population
• 2018 estimate	17,263,239

Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. 44% of its population is indigenous.

History

Military dictator Jorge Ubico was overthrown in 1944.

Árbenz presidency

Jacobo Árbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1951. He redistributed land to 100,000 peasants and improved unionization rights. The CIA began planning to overthrow him in 1952. In 1954, the CIA bombed Guatemala and overthrew its government. Árbenz asked the United Nations and OAS for help against the coup. Dwight Eisenhower claimed that Guatemala was a Soviet puppet state, but Guatemala and the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations or embassies.

Ydígoras dictatorship

In November 1960, the military began a nationalist rebellion against Fuentes. The rebels, who included up to half of Guatemala's soldiers, took over two military bases. The CIA and Cuban exiles bombed rebel-controlled areas, ending the rebellion within days.

In 1962, thousands of people protested against the government of Ydigoras Fuentes and began a general strike. The police and military eventually ended the protest. The United States established a military base in the northeast to teach counter-insurgency tactics to the Guatemalan military. Fuentes lost U.S. support when he allowed former progressive leader Juan José Arévalo to return to the country, and he planned to step down in 1964 and allow an election. In March 1963 the United States organized another coup, and Colonel Enrique Peralta overthrew Fuentes.

Peralta dictatorship

Peralta executed eight trade union leaders by driving trucks over them. He did not allow the U.S. to supply troops to fight the guerrillas and preferred to use his own soldiers. In March 1966, Julio César Méndez won an election and took power as a U.S.-backed civilian leader. A few days after he took office, Colonel John D. Webber, Jr. arrived in Guatemala to take control of the U.S. military mission. Between October 1966 and March 1968, the police and military killed between 3,000 and 8,000 Guatemalans. Most of the people killed were not actual guerrillas. In January 1968, guerrillas assassinated Webber as revenge for his imperialist actions.

Arana dictatorship

Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio took power in 1970 and killed over 7,000 people in each year of his rule. Diplomats in Guatemala City believed that right-wing forces killed 15 times as many people as the guerrillas and revolutionaries.

By 1976, the police, military, and death squads had killed over 20,000 people. Many bodies were thrown into rivers or the Pacific Ocean. In the Gualán area, people stopped fishing because they found so many corpses in the rivers. Suspected guerrillas were tortured with insecticide or electric shocks. Many people were found with their eyes gouged out or their tongues and hands removed. The U.S. used F-51 planes to drop napalm over suspected guerrilla areas, similar to the Vietnam War. The Guatemalan Army of the Poor was formed in 1976 to resist the junta.

Ríos dictatorship

Christian fundamentalist Efraín Ríos Montt took power in a coup in 1982 and destroyed over 400 villages. He killed over 2,600 people during his six months in power. Ronald Reagan gave Ríos military supplies and denied human rights abuses.

Politics

The current Guatemalan government is corrupt and right-wing. The indigenous leftist Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples ran for the first time in the 2019 elections, and its leader Thelma Cabrera received 10% of the vote while the current president Alejandro Giammattei received 14%. Giamattei is very conservative and a dual citizen of Italy. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal blocked the MLP from running in the 2023 elections.