Guatemala City - on leaving Guatemala

I'm leaving Guatemala, flying to Cancun for one night and then to Toronto to visit my niece for a few days. My travelling companion, Fran, and I caught a boat from San Juan to Panajachel on Lake Atitlan, took a tuk tuk with our luggage up to the pickup point for our reserved, shared shuttle van to Guatemala City. 3 1/2 hours of aggressive driving and a few close calls later, we arrived at our hotel in Guatemala City, located in a wealthy area of the city, close to the airport.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a Starbucks in a mall with upscale restaurants and shops. In my wandering around this morning, I saw one family in Mayan clothing. . . everyone else appears to be Ladino, the mix of the Spanish conquistadors and the Mayan people. They make up over half of the population and pretty much control business and government in Guatemala.

I'm trying to make sense of the contrast between life in the small towns and Mayan villages that I've been in for the past month and the affluency around me here.

My Spanish teacher in San Juan, Katy, described the 36-year civil war (1960-1996) to me from the Mayan perspective, based on stories told to her by her grandfather who survived the war. Wikipedia describes the war as being between the government and leftist rebel groups. She described it as being one of discrimination against her people and the Ladino's control of the land that had been taken from the Mayans over the centuries since the Spanish arrived. She told me that her one uncle was shot and her other uncle badly wounded and left for dead. He managed to make it back to his village, crawling through the forest and is still alive today.

In order to better understand what happened - and continues to happen - in Guatemala, I went to the Casa de la Memoria in Guatemala City. All of the exhibits were in Spanish so I couldn't understand much of it and couldn't use Google translate as my data plan was running low, but still I got a sense of the struggle for truth and justice that still continues today. For much of the 20th century, Guatemala was ruled by a series of dictators backed by the United States. From 1944-54, a decade-long revolution led to economic and social reform until a US-backed military coup installed a dictatorship once again. The bloody civil war then ensued until a peace accord was negotiated by the United Nations in 1996. According to the Recovery of Historical Memory Project, about 200,000 people died, over a million people were forced to flee their homes, and hundreds of villages were destroyed.

A reproduction of the mural, "Gloriosa Victory", by Mexican painter Diego Rivera, is displayed in the Casa de a Memoria. For more than 40 years it was unaccounted for, but in 2000 it was found rolled up in the cellars of the Moscow Pushkin Museum. The artist gave away this 1954 work on a canvas of 2.5 meters to the Union of Painters of the Soviet Union during his years of communist militancy. The group in turn donated it to the Pushkin Museum in 1958, where it was exhibited on several occasions until its disappearance.

"Glorious Victory" denounces Guatemala's invasion by U.S. military forces to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz's government and defend the interests of the powerful banana company United Fruit Company in 1954. The mural contains details of great acidity towards American politics, such as a bomb with the face of then US President Dwight Eisenhower. For this reason, the exhibition was censored in the United States.

The country continues to face major issues that include food insecurity (in spite of having rich agricultural land), poverty, crime, corruption, drug trafficking, and civil instability. Racist and patriarchal views still permeate Guatemalan society. A new president was elected in January of 2024 who is focusing on economic and social investment, anti-corruption efforts, and improving infrastructure, but the people I talked to weren't impressed so far.

But here in the privileged area in Guatemala City, none of those issues are obvious as I drink my latte, go shopping in an amazing bookstore, have my choice of Italian, Greek, Indian, and Peruvian restaurants, and walk back to my hotel on a well-lit, clean and safe sidewalk.