Guatemala

Discovery: Vast Network of Connected Mayan Cities in Guatemala

The discovery, using LIDAR technology, of more than 400 settlements connected by more than 100 miles of highways suggests that the Mayan civilization was even more developed than previously believed. The discovery also raises major issues of preservation and public access to the site. 

When the United Fruit Company Wanted to Buy Guatemala

by Olúfémi O. Táíwò

The United Fruit Company secured the overthrow of Guatemala's government after it refused to pay what amounted to a ransom of more than $200 million in today's dollars. 

Dosing Arkansas Prisoners with Ivermectin Just Latest Incident of Medical Abuse

by Lydia Crafts

"News that an Arkansas prison doctor deceived inmates to take Ivermectin as a COVID preventative shows that nonconsensual research and the experimental use of drugs on vulnerable people remain common — despite evidence of its danger and laws designed to prevent it."

The 1954 US-Backed Coup in Guatemala

by Ben Tumin

Ben Tumin's "Skipped History" video series returns with a discussion of the 1954 Guatemala Coup, drawing on the work of Greg Grandin, Stephen Kinzer and Steven Schleshinger, and Vincent Bevins.

Out of the Rubble: Doctors Strikes and State Repression in Guatemala’s Cold War

by Ilan Palacios Avineri

An earthquake in Guatemala, and subsequent demands for their labor, shook many medical professionals out of complacency and cooperation with the country's right-wing government at the height of the nation's civil war.

"Follow the Science," but Explain and Apologize

by Susan M. Reverby

Governments need to establish trust so that their public health announcements are credible and persuasive, but have undermined that trust by conducting ethically questionable studies. A model of apology is part of the solution. 

Venezuela Failed Raid: US Has a History of Using Mercenaries to Undermine Other Regimes

by Andrew Thomson

The arrest of Silvercorp mercenaries in Venezuela echoes a long history of the U.S. government supporting private troops to overthrow foreign governments. 

The Controversial History of United Fruit

Harvard Business School professor Geoffrey Jones, an expert in business history, discusses the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 in a U.S.-backed coup in support of the United Fruit Co. (now Chiquita Brands International).

Guatemala Police Archive under Threat

Repository of historic human rights evidence faces government crackdown.

Slate reveals that despite our apology, nothing’s been done to help Guatemalans infected in an experiment worse than Tuskegee

Seventy years ago American researchers infected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea -- then left without treating them.

Researchers Discover Incredible Mayan Monument

"We gasped and looked in, and there's the face of a king just staring straight out at us."

Johns Hopkins Faces $1-Billion Lawsuit Over U.S. Experiments in Guatemala

Nearly 800 former research subjects and their families filed a billion-dollar lawsuit on Wednesday against the Johns Hopkins University, blaming the institution for its role in U.S.-government experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s that infected hundreds of people with sexually transmitted diseases.

Why All of Latin America Is Cheering the Re-establishment of Relations with Cuba

by John Dickson

This was one small historic step for the U.S. and Cuba, but a larger historic step in the hemisphere.

Guess What Mexico Did When Tens of Thousands of Guatemalans Overran Its Border in the 1980s?

by Aaron Margolis

Mexico ignored protests and opened its hearts. We should do no less.

Archaeologists make once-in-a-lifetime find of Mayan frieze in northern Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY — Archaeologists have found an “extraordinary” Mayan frieze richly decorated with images of deities and rulers and a long dedicatory inscription, the Guatemalan government said Wednesday.The frieze was discovered by Guatemalan archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University’s Anthropology Department, and his team in the northern Province of Peten, the government said in a joint statement with Estrada-Belli....

NACLA: "This American Life" whitewashed U.S. crimes in Latin America

Celebrating 2012’s best examples of broadcast journalism, the George Foster Peabody Awards attracted the likes of D.L. Hughley, Amy Poehler and Bryant Gumbel to the Waldorf-Astoria’s four-story grand ballroom in New York this past May. In a gaudy ceremony hosted by CBS star-anchor Scott Pelley, National Public Radio’s This American Life received the industry’s oldest and perhaps most prestigious accolade. The 16-member Peabody Board, consisting of “television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts,” had selected a particular This American Life episode—“What Happened at Dos Erres”—as one of the winners of its 72nd annual awards on the basis of “only one criterion: excellence.”...

How a documentary changed Guatemala's history

Most documentaries record and preserve history – only a few change the arc of history.In Guatemala in the early 1980s, a young American documentary filmmaker named Pamela Yates bore witness to massive crimes and atrocities at great personal risk to make her film.This year, a quarter-century later, her footage became critical evidence used to convict a military dictator of genocide. The Central American country had been torn apart by decades of U.S. funded civil war when General Efrain Rios Montt seized power in 1982 and launched a scorched earth campaign against the Mayans and leftist guerillas....

Efrain Rios Montt Will Still Face Justice -- and So Should Henry Kissinger

by Van Gosse

Credit: Flickr.Despite the May 20 ruling by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, which overturned the original verdict on procedural grounds, the May 10 conviction of that country’s former head of state, General Efrain Rios Montt, for the genocide of Guatemala’s Mayan people, could be a defining event in modern history.

Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide Against Mayan Group

GUATEMALA CITY — A Guatemalan court on Friday found Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during one of the bloodiest periods of its long civil war, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.Judge Yasmín Barrios sentenced General Ríos Montt, 86, to 80 years in prison. His co-defendant, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, who served as the director of intelligence under the general, was acquitted of the same two charges.“We are completely convinced of the intent to destroy the Ixil ethnic group,” Judge Barrios said as she read the hourlong summary of the ruling by the three-judge panel. Over five weeks, the tribunal heard more than 100 witnesses, including psychologists, military experts and Maya Ixil Indian survivors who told how General Ríos Montt’s soldiers had killed their families and wiped out their villages....

In testimony, Guatemalans give account of suffering

MEXICO CITY — They were just children when Guatemalan soldiers rampaged through their villages, often killing their parents and siblings. Many fled to mountain forests, where they foraged for food and watched some of their numbers starve to death.  Some were abducted and sent to other families to be raised, in cities and towns far from the life they had known.Now, the somber Mayan men and women in their 30s and 40s have traveled from their villages to tell their stories for the prosecution during the first month of the genocide trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala City. In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included. Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached “100 percent support.”...