Origins

Guatemalans in Canada come from a country with a population of diverse origins. About 60 percent of Guatemala’s nine million inhabitants comprise indigenous Indian groups (indígenas), mostly Maya peoples who speak as many as twenty-two distinct languages. The other 40 percent of the population are called ladinos, a uniquely Guatemalan term that refers to several groups: a small Caucasian elite of European origin; a substantial number of people of mixed Spanish and indigenous origin (mestizos); minorities of African, Chinese, and Arab descent; and assimilated indigenous peoples. The ladinos speak Spanish, the official language of the country.

Guatemala was part of the Maya civilization which flourished between 1000 B.C.E. and 900 CE in the form of city-states throughout much of Central America. Well before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, Maya civilization had disappeared and the remaining city-states were in frequent warfare with each other, allowing for easy conquest by the invading Europeans. After conquering the territory that now constitutes Guatemala, Spain made it the centre of the Kingdom of Guatemala, a colony extending from Costa Rica to the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Spanish colonial rule lasted until 1821, when Guatemala declared its independence. Two years later it became part of the Federation of Central America; this federation lasted until 1847, when it was replaced by its five member-states, one of which was the republic of Guatemala.

Both before and after independence, Guatemala has had an unequal social order, in which the Indians occupy the lowest position, deriving from the servile role imposed on them during the colonial period. Indian labour, Guatemala’s most valuable resource from the colonizers’ perspective, was exploited in several ways: tribute in the form of goods or labour directly to the Royal Treasury or to the Catholic Church; tribute paid to encomenderos – settlers entrusted to “protect” and ensure the religious conversion of whole native villages in exchange for a share of their labour or its products; and imposition of the so-called repartimiento, which until the late 1700s required each Indian village to provide low-wage labour to European settlers. As a result of decades of ill-treatment, overwork, and foreign diseases, the native population declined during the first century after Spanish conquest between 70 and 90 percent in size.

Guatemalan Indians began to recover their numbers during the seventeenth century. As they moved out of the towns – where they had been concentrated by Roman Catholic missionary priests in the previous century – their cultural autonomy was also restored. From the mid-eighteenth century until independence, the revitalized rural communities became the basis of numerous native revolts against colonial agents of the Spanish Crown. The Indians cultivated land on an individual family basis, although the most fertile lands were held by the village for the common use of the whole community. These valuable communal lands soon came to the attention of the government.

Beginning in 1871 and lasting until 1944, Guatemala was ruled by a succession of military dictators, or so-called liberal caudillos. Already during the 1870s, the government began to expropriate Indian communal lands and to sell them to ladino and foreign (mostly German) purchasers who were anxious to expand their lucrative coffee plantations. Consequently, the liberal caudillo period (1871–1944) witnessed an unprecedented concentration of cultivable land in the hands of a small number of Guatemalan landowners.

Efforts at agrarian reform and redistribution of land owned by wealthy Guatemalans and foreign companies (mostly from the United States) to the rural poor were undertaken during the decade-long rule (1944–54) of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Guzmán’s leftist-oriented government was overthrown with United States support in 1954, and since that time the country has been ruled by a succession of military dictators anxious to protect the interest of the large landowners, whether Guatemalan or foreign.

In response to the overturning of agrarian and labour reforms, a leftist guerrilla movement broke out in the 1960s. During the 1970s it was transformed into a popular resistance movement made up of ladinos and indígenas of all social strata, including eventually the indigenous Indians of the highlands. The government’s response was to unleash death squads that killed up to 20,000 civilians alone between 1966 and 1976. Government forces have been particularly brutal towards indigenous Indians in the highlands, where the inhabitants of entire villages have been massacred or otherwise brutalized, especially between 1980 and 1984.

It was not until the early 1990s that the Guatemalan government has been able to reach a truce and to conduct peace talks with the guerilla coalition, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), or Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. Though the civil war officially ended with peace accords signed by the government and the URNG in December 1996, Guatemala remains a country in crisis. Over three decades of civil war have reinforced poverty, and fear for personal safety has driven tens of thousands to seek refuge by fleeing abroad.

Perhaps the most important heritage from the Spanish colonial period was the Roman Catholic Church, which from the early sixteenth century set as its primary goal the conversion of the indigenous population. The prestige and authority of the church throughout Guatemalan society began to erode as a result of anti-clerical reforms carried out by the liberal caudillo governments beginning in the 1870s. After World War II, the Church strove to restore its influence, especially among the relatively isolated indigenous peasants of the western highlands, where the Catholic clergy helped to inspire social and political activism among the indigenous peasants. Most Guatemalans are still nominally Roman Catholic, although over a fifth of the population is estimated to belong to one of over 300 Protestant sects that exist in the country.

Protestantism arrived in Guatemala over a century ago, but its presence expanded enormously when evangelical missionaries began to deliver humanitarian relief to victims of the 1976 earthquake. The work of fundamentalist organizations based in the United States has contributed to the continued proliferation of evangelical congregations during the 1980s, most of which are known for being aligned with the political right. Protestantism has attracted both lower- and upper-class converts, the best-known being General Efraín Rios Montt, a born-again Christian installed as president by the Guatemalan military in 1982.