* 1977 – 28 people are killed in the Guatemala City air disaster.

Central America then emerged as a distinct political entity upon the independence of the Federal Republic of Central America a representative democracy with its capital at Guatemala City.

Astronaut View of Guatemala City

Guatemala City ( in full, La Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción ; locally known as Guatemala or Guate ), is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Guatemala and Central America.

Within the confines of modern Guatemala City is the ancient Maya city of Kaminaljuyu.

The center of Kaminaljuyu was located a short distance from the oldest part of Guatemala City.

In Spanish colonial times, Guatemala City was a small town.

Guatemala City was the scene of the declaration of independence of Central America from Spain, and became the capital of the United Provinces of Central America in 1821.

Cathedral of Guatemala City

Guatemala City is the economic, governmental, and cultural capital of the Republic.

Guatemala City offers all the modern amenities along with important historic sites that a world class city can be expected to have ranging from an IMAX Theater to the Ícaro film festival ( Festival Ícaro ) featuring films produced in Guatemala and Central America.

Despite its location in the tropics and the many micro climates found within the country, Guatemala City ’ s elevation and the resulting moderating influence of the higher altitude enable it to enjoy a subtropical highland climate ( Köppen Cwb ), though depending on location, it also borders on a tropical savanna climate ( Köppen Aw ).

Guatemala City is generally mild, almost springlike, throughout the course of the year.

Guatemala City Zone 10, aerial view

Guatemala City is subdivided into 22 zones designed by the urban engineering of Raúl Aguilar Batres, each one with its own streets and avenues, making it pretty easy to find addresses in the city.

The city's metro area has recently grown very rapidly and has absorbed most of the neighboring municipalities of Villa Nueva, San Miguel Petapa, Mixco, San Juan Sacatepequez, San José Pinula, Santa Catarina Pinula, Fraijanes, San Pedro Ayampuc, Amatitlán, Villa Canales, Palencia and Chinautla forming what is now known as the Guatemala City Metropolitan Area.

Guatemala City, zone 4.

Guatemala City also has a sizeable Indigenous population and minority groups such as Germans and other Europeans, Jewish, Asians primarily Chinese and Korean, and many groups of other Latin American origins such as Peruvian, and Colombian amongst others.

For this reason along with several others, Guatemala City has experienced some growth problems such as transportation saturation, availability of safe potable water in some areas at certain times as well as increased crime.

In other words, Guatemala City faces problems common to many other rapidly expanding cities.

Guatemala City monuments, all around the city streets.

El Salvador has 545 km of borders, including 342 km of borders with Honduras and 203 km with Guatemala.

In an attempt to control rapid growth of the city, the municipal government ( Municipalidad de Guatemala ) headed by longtime Mayor Álvaro Arzú, has implemented a plan to control its growth based on transects along its important arterial roads and exhibitting Transit-oriented development ( TOD ) characteristics.

Guatemala City's population has experienced drastic growth since the 1970s with the influx of indigenous migrants from the outlying departments as well as a large influx of foreign groups.

The city also has some of the most expensive private schools in Central America, The American School of Guatemala and The Mayan International School.

By 2500 BC, small settlements were developing in Guatemala ’ s Pacific lowlands in such places as Tilapa, La Blanca, Ocós, El Mesak, and Ujuxte, where the oldest pieces of ceramic pottery from Guatemala has been found.

Northern Guatemala has particularly high densities of Late Pre-classic sites, including Naachtun, Xulnal, El Mirador, Porvenir, Pacaya, La Muralla, Nakbé, El Tintal, Wakná ( formerly Güiro ), Uaxactún, and Tikal.

This has brought on difficulties for Guatemala as more people puts pressure in the nation's economic progress in a country where 70 % live in dire poverty, and political stability was weakened by an inability to have effective population growth programs.

The 1996 signing of peace accords, which ended 36 years of civil war, removed a major obstacle to foreign investment, and Guatemala since then has pursued important reforms and macroeconomic stabilization.

On 1 July 2006, the Central American Free Trade Agreement ( CAFTA ) entered into force between the US and Guatemala and has since spurred increased investment in the export sector.

* Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in the Western Hemisphere.

Guatemala has a longstanding claim to a large portion of Belize ; the territorial dispute caused problems with the United Kingdom and later with Belize following its 1981 independence from the UK.

* Mexico has an embassy in Guatemala City and a consulate in Quetzaltenango and in Tecún Umán.

* Guatemala has an embassy in Mexico City and consulates-general in Oaxaca City, Tenosique, Tijuana, Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Veracruz City.

Guatemala also has consulates in Ciudad Hidalgo, Comitán and Tapachula.

Guatemala has an embassy in Moscow.

Russia has an embassy in Guatemala City.

In recent years the number of violent crimes reported by U. S. citizens has steadily increased, though the number of Americans traveling to Guatemala has also increased.

For example, the K ' iche ' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k-and x-to mark incompletive and completive aspect ; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers-le 了 ,-zhe 着, zài-在, and-guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs ; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle.

Modern population censuses have been taken in Guatemala in 1930, 1950, 1964, 1973, 1981, 1994 and in 2002.

The Guatemalan region of Mesoamerica was dominated by the Maya civilization ( 2, 000 BC – AD 250 ), before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century ; although most of the great, Classic-era ( AD 250 – 900 ) Maya cities of the Petén Basin region, in the northern lowlands of Guatemala, had been abandoned by the year AD 1, 000 ; however, the states in the Guatemalan central highlands, flourished until the arrival of Pedro de Alvarado, the Spanish Conquistador who began subjugating the Indian states of Guatemala in 1525.

The Eisenhower administration at the time in the U. S. were not happy about the Arbenz government, they considered Arbenz to be too close to Communism ; there have been reports that Arbenz ’ s wife was a Communist and part of the Communist Party in Guatemala.

He took the politically unpopular step of recognizing the sovereignty of Belize, which until then had been officially, though fruitlessly, claimed by Guatemala as a province.

Relations between the United States and Guatemala traditionally have been close, although at times strained by human rights and civil / military issues.

Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States.

However, exceptions include Oman ; India ; Saudi Arabia ; Pakistan ( Pepsi has been a dominant sponsor of the Pakistan cricket team since the 1990s ); the Dominican Republic ; Guatemala ; the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island ; and Northern Ontario.

The source of the most valued jade, for example, is found in the Motagua River valley in eastern Guatemala, and Olmec obsidian has been traced to sources in the Guatemala highlands, such as El Chayal and San Martín Jilotepeque, or in Puebla, distances ranging from 200 to 400 km away ( 120 – 250 miles away ), respectively.

Both of these projects had been shortlisted for the 2009 Thiess International Riverprize competing against four other projects: the Yellow River in China, Lake Simcoe in Canada, the Polochic Basin in Guatemala and the Lower Owens River in the USA.

The United Fruit Company had been lobbying the CIA to oust reformist governments in the Republic of Guatemala since the time of the Government ( 1945 – 51 ) of President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo ; but it was not until the Eisenhower Administration ( 1953 – 61 ) that the CIA received attention from the White House.

What has been called a " sinkhole " by the popular press formed suddenly in Guatemala in May 2010.

The Nim Li Punit population is thought to have been aligned with Mayan settlements such as Tikal in the Petén Basin region of Guatemala.

The Spanish hoped to win over support of the Miskito elite, for example, by offering them the same sort of presents that the English, and by educating their youth in Guatemala, as so many Miskito had been educated in Jamaica.

Although there was believed to have been anywhere from 20, 000 to 60, 000 years of post-glacial time in which such immigration could have occurred over the Bering land bridge, the antiquity of human presence in the western hemisphere was popularly fixed at about 5, 000 BP (" before present ", or 3000 BC ). Obsidian projectile point from Puerta Parada, Guatemala William H. Holmes and Ales Hrdlicka led this school of thought.

Like Guatemala's other suppliers of arms, Israel ( which had been supplying arms to Guatemala since 1974 ) continued its aid provisions.

The title of " President of Guatemala " has been the usual title of the leader of Guatemala since 1839, when that title was assumed by Mariano Rivera Paz.

Earlier, Guatemala had been a state within the United Provinces of Central America since 1823, before that part of the First Mexican Empire under Agustín de Iturbide, and before 1821 ruled by the Captain General of Guatemala, a Spanish colonial official owing allegiance to the Viceroy of New Spain and the King of Spain, back to the Spanish conquest of the region in the early 16th century.

By the time Cabrera assumed the presidency, there had been repeated efforts to construct a railroad from the major port of Puerto Barrios to the capital, Guatemala City.