: Main article Guatemalan Civil War

The Guatemalan Civil War ( 1960 – 96 ) involved the government, right-wing paramilitary organizations, and left-wing insurgents.

Over a million Guatemalan emigrants went to the US in the 1980s and 1990s for a better life mostly because of the Civil War.

Six officials, among them Efraín Ríos Montt and Óscar Humberto Mejía, were formally charged on 7 July 2006 to appear in the Spanish National Court after Spain's Constitutional Court ruled in September 2005, the Spanish Constitutional Court declaration that the " principle of universal jurisdiction prevails over the existence of national interests ", following the Menchu suit brought against the officials for atrocities committed in the Guatemalan Civil War

The drama features Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando, in their first film roles, as two indigenous youths who flee Guatemala in the early 1980s due to ethnic and political persecution of the Guatemalan Civil War.

Throughout the Guatemalan Civil War, both military and " civilian " governments utilized death squads as a counterinsurgency strategy.

Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala's indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War ( 1960 – 1996 ), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country.

Category: Guatemalan Civil War

The main achievement of his presidency was to sign an agreement with the guerrilla group the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, that ended Guatemala's 36-year-long Civil War.

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity ( in Spanish: Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, URNG-MAIZ or most commonly URNG ) is a Guatemalan political party that started as a guerrilla movement but laid down its arms in 1996 and became a legal political party in 1998 after the peace process after the Guatemalan Civil War.

They became the public face of the long-running insurgency against the Guatemalan government throughout the Civil War.

The UNRG has since apologized for the atrocities that occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War, asking forgiveness from all victims, families and other who experienced any kind of excesses.

* Guatemalan Civil War

Category: Guatemalan Civil War

In response to the expropriation of prime-farmland assets, the United Fruit Company asked the US Governments of presidents Harry Truman ( 1945 – 53 ) and Dwight Eisenhower ( 1953 – 61 ) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Árbenz Guzmán, which, in 1954, resulted in the Guatemalan coup d ’ état that provoked the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War, from 1960 to and 1996, in which were killed 140, 000 to 250, 000 Guatemalans.

In 1960, three years later, began the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War ( 1960 – 96 ), featuring brutal counterinsurgency operations and massacres that conflated historical ethnic conflict between ladino ( mestizo ) Guatemalans and ethnic Maya Guatemalans, who were accused of being either communists or “ fellow travellers ”, passive communist sympathizers.

The thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War, between the military government of Guatemala and insurgent Guatemalans, ran from 1960 to 1996 ; the number of casualties of war ranges from 140, 000 to 200, 000 dead and missing people.

By the 1990s, in the final stage of the Guatemalan Civil War, the military had developed a parallel, semi-visible, low-profile, but high-impact, control of the national life of Guatemala.

* Guatemalan Civil War

* Georgie Anne Geyer ( born 1935 ); covered the Guatemalan Civil War and the Algerian Civil War.

Operation PBSUCCESS: the Cold War geopolitics of the US included the Guatemalan Labour Party to the International Communist Conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere ; hence the 1954 Guatemalan coup d ’ état by the CIA.

Post – War, the Guatemalan organisation for national truth and reconciliation, the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico ( CEH, Historical Clarification Commission ), established with a remit to investigate and report the human rights violations perpetrated by the government and the insurgents ( January 1962 – December 1996 ), reported that the influence of the Guatemalan military upon the civil government occurred in stages throughout the civil-war years.

Belize was contested between the Spanish Empire and the British Empire, a dispute that continued after the independence of Guatemala, who considered Belize to be a Guatemalan department.

The central ceremonial center of Kaminaljuyu was however protected by the Guatemalan government and is now a park within the city.

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.

As a result, the Guatemalan government was often subservient to the interests of the UFC.

In 1944, General Jorge Ubico ’ s thirteen-year dictatorship ( 1931 – 44 ) of Guatemala was overthrown by the October Revolutionaries, a group of Guatemalan nationalists — politically dissident military officers, university students, and liberal professionals — who were politically empowered, by the almost-simultaneous revolutions that deposed superannuated dictatorships in Venezuela, Cuba, and El Salvador.

The killing of a school teacher by a Guatemalan Army soldier culminated the civil unrest that precipitated the coup d ’ état ; the moral outrage of the Guatemalan national populace was manifested with a general strike that halted the national economy and stilled the country.

Arbenz together with Arévalo further promoted the progressive social change that characterized the latter's presidency, clearing much of the old restrictions on political parties and labour unions, while also purging the army brass of its remaining pro-Arana officers — one of whom was Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas ; a man who would play a major role in Guatemalan politics in the coming years.

They had estimated it as high as Q 15, 854, 849, which was almost twenty times more than what the Guatemalan government had offered.

The Guatemalan government had to fight the pressure because although U. S. had recognized, in words, that Guatemala had the right to conduct their own politics and business, U. S. representatives also claimed that they had to interfere because UFCo was their company that had brought in a lot of profit and harming the interests of that company was harming the U. S. economy.

He claimed that Guatemalan government was not prepared to make an exception for U. S. concerning decree 900.

The coup was supported by CIA radio broadcasts and so the Guatemalan army refused to resist the coup, Arbenz was forced to resign.

Participation was in theory voluntary, but in practice, many rural Guatemalan men ( including young boys and the elderly ), especially in the northwest, had no choice but to join either the PACs or be tarred as guerrillas.

The most notable human rights abuses of this period were the brutal slaying of Bishop Juan José Gerardi two days after he had publicly presented a major Catholic Church sponsored human rights report known as REMHI, and the disappearance of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, also known as Comandante Everardo, who, it was later revealed, was tortured and assassinated in 1993 without trial by Guatemalan Army officers on the payroll of the CIA.

An important part of that prehistory was the Mayan presence around the city of Copán, in western Honduras which is near the Guatemalan border.

The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau ( now the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization ) and the Guatemalan government.

Although Guatemalan claims to Belize delayed independence, full independence was granted in 1981.

In that same year, due to his relationship with his brother Allen Dulles, the Director of CIA and a former member of the Board Of Directors of the United Fruit Company, based in Guatemala, Foster Dulles was pivotal in promoting and executing the CIA-led Operation PBSUCCESS that overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

The racial makeup of Stanislaus County was 337, 342 ( 65. 6 %) White, 14, 721 ( 2. 9 %) African American, 5, 902 ( 1. 1 %) Native American, 26, 090 ( 5. 1 %) Asian ( 1. 5 % Indian, 1. 1 % Filipino, 0. 7 % Cambodian, 0. 5 % Chinese, 0. 3 % Vietnamese, 0. 3 % Laotian, 0. 1 % Japanese, 0. 1 % Korean, 0. 1 % Cambodian ), 3, 401 ( 0. 7 %) Pacific Islander, 99, 210 ( 19. 3 %) from other races, and 27, 787 ( 5. 4 %) from two or more races ; Hispanic or Latino of any race were 215, 658 persons ( 41. 9 %); 37. 6 % of Stanislaus County is Mexican, 0. 6 % Puerto Rican, 0. 5 % Salvadoran, 0. 2 % Nicaraguan, and 0. 2 % Guatemalan.

On August 22 2012, the Popol Vuh was declared intangible cultural heritage of Guatemala by the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture.

A young Guatemalan woman, Alejandra Maria Torres, was lynched by a mob in Guatemala City on December 15, 2009.