Guatemala

The reason it matters is not its size but the arrangement that governed it. For a century after the 1870s, Guatemala was organised around a single export, coffee, and the labour to pick it was extracted by law: vagrancy statutes, debt peonage, labour registers, and the power of the plantation to call on the army. That arrangement outlasted conservative and liberal governments, dictatorships and a ten-year revolution, and it survived the civil war that killed some 200,000 people between 1960 and 1996. Every political crisis in the country's modern history has been a fight over who controls the land, the labour on it, and the revenue it produces.

Guatemala also matters out of proportion to its power because two of the twentieth century's defining stories were written here. The overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 was the first operation in which the United States removed an elected Latin American government it disliked, and it became the template for a generation of intervention. The counterinsurgency of 1981–83 produced the only case in the Americas in which a truth commission, sponsored by the United Nations, concluded that a state had committed acts of genocide against part of its own citizens.

A note on the map. The border data draws Guatemala from 1840, so the coloured territory begins after the federation had already broken up; the first nineteen years of independence, including the annexation to Mexico, fall outside the window. The year 1932, used for the map card below, catches the country in Jorge Ubico's first full year: a coffee republic of about two million people, its exports collapsing in the Depression, its railway and banana ports in the hands of a Boston corporation.

At a glance

How did independence arrive, and why did the federation fail?

Independence came without a battle. On 15 September 1821 the provincial deputation and a junta of notables met in Guatemala City under the captain general, Gabino Gaínza, and adopted an act drafted by José Cecilio del Valle declaring the province independent of Spain. The document was cautious: it provided for a congress to meet in March 1822, kept Spanish law and the courts in being until then, guaranteed the Catholic religion "in all its integrity and purity", and left Gaínza in command of a provisional government. Chiapas, Honduras, San Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica came in over the following weeks, some of them after resistance. The decision had been taken by creole notables who feared the consequences of the liberal revolution in Spain more than they feared independence, and it was made in the capital of a colony that had never been much governed from Madrid.

Mexico decided the next step. Iturbide's empire claimed the former captaincy general, and on 5 January 1822 a junta in Guatemala City accepted annexation. San Salvador resisted and was coerced; when Iturbide abdicated in March 1823, the Central American provinces declared themselves independent of Mexico on 1 July 1823 and took the name United Provinces of Central America. A constituent assembly wrote a federal constitution modelled on that of the United States, adopted on 22 November 1824: five states — Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica — each with its own congress, governor, treasury and militia, under a federal congress and a president with a four-year term. Manuel José Arce was elected the first president in April 1825.

The design contained its own destruction. The federal government had no reliable revenue of its own and no army of its own; it depended on the states for both. The states, in turn, were controlled by rival families and regional economies: the merchants of Guatemala City, the indigo and cattle interests of San Salvador, the mining and cattle of Honduras and Nicaragua. When Arce dissolved the federal congress in 1826 and tried to govern as a centralist, the liberals of El Salvador and Honduras took up arms, and the resulting civil war ran until 1829, when the Honduran general Francisco Morazán entered Guatemala City and broke the power of the Aycinena family and the regular clergy. Morazán governed the federation from 1830 with a liberal programme imposed by decree, and his ally Mariano Gálvez ran Guatemala itself from 1831 with a programme of secular schooling, civil marriage, a modern penal code and a head tax that fell hard on the indigenous majority.

That programme, and a cholera epidemic, destroyed the federation. When cholera reached the highlands in 1837, the secular clergy and village priests told their parishioners that the liberals had poisoned the springs; a peasant rising began in the east, in the hill country of Mataquescuintla and Jalapa, under a young swineherd named Rafael Carrera, with the cry "¡Viva la religión!" and a programme that was essentially a demand that the state leave the villages and their church alone. Gálvez's attempt to crush it by scorched-earth methods finished his government. In February 1838 Carrera's men entered Guatemala City, and Gálvez fell.

The states then left, one after another. Nicaragua seceded on 30 April 1838, Honduras on 26 October, Costa Rica on 15 November; on 30 May the federal congress had already conceded that each state might adopt whatever republican government it chose. On 2 February 1839 the federal officials, Morazán among them, left office with no successors, because no federal election had been held, and on 17 April Carrera issued a decree dissolving the federation, which the rump congress accepted on 14 July. El Salvador held out until 30 January 1841. Five republics came out of the wreck, and the largest of them was Guatemala.

Who was Rafael Carrera, and what did his republic protect?

Rafael Carrera was born in Guatemala City in 1814, of mixed descent, illiterate, and by his own account a farmhand and then a swineherd in Mataquescuintla. He was twenty-three when the rising of 1837 made him a commander, and he never lost the manners or the loyalties of the village. His army was a peasant militia that fought in its own districts and dispersed when it chose; his political capital was the conviction, general among the indigenous communities of the eastern and western highlands, that he was the man who had stopped the liberals from taking their land and their saints. He was also, from 1839, the only force capable of holding Guatemala together, and the conservative notables of the capital — the Aycinena clan above all — had to accept him as their instrument and then discovered that he was the principal and they were the instrument.

His first decade was spent fighting. Morazán invaded Guatemala in March 1840 with 1,500 men and took the capital; Carrera, who had pretended to retreat, counter-attacked from the heights of Aceituno and destroyed him in the streets, and Morazán fled to exile shouting "Long live Carrera!" to save his life. Carrera then turned on Los Altos, the liberal state that Quetzaltenango had declared in 1838 and that had declared itself independent again in his absence; he took the city on 2 April 1840, had the municipal council shot, and annexed the region to Guatemala. Los Altos never recovered its separate existence, and the episode fixed the pattern of Guatemalan politics for a generation: the highlands of the west were the richest agricultural region in Central America, and whoever held them held the country.

Carrera was elected president in 1844, driven out by a liberal coalition in 1848, and brought back by his indigenous and peasant base in 1849; from 1851 he governed without serious challenge. In 1851 he destroyed a Salvadoran-Honduran army nearly three times the size of his own at La Arada, on the road to Chiquimula, and the victory made him the arbiter of Central America. In 1854 a pliant assembly named him "supreme and perpetual leader of the nation" for life, with the right to name his successor. His regime rested on three pillars: the army, the Church, and the indigenous communities. The Concordat with the Holy See, signed in 1852 and ratified in 1854, gave the religious orders the education of the country, restored tithes, returned the property confiscated in 1829, and allowed bishops to censor publications. In return the Church blessed a state that had, in effect, handed it the schools.

What the conservative republic did not do was build an economy. Guatemala's colonial export had been indigo and cochineal, the crimson dye made from insects bred on cactus; the invention of synthetic aniline dyes in the 1850s destroyed the cochineal trade within a decade, and the search for a replacement crop began under Carrera himself. Coffee was planted in the Alta Verapaz and on the Pacific slope in the 1850s and 1860s by German and Guatemalan entrepreneurs, often on land the state sold or granted. The conservative state protected the villages' communal lands and did not force labour into the fields, which was good for the Maya and bad for the planters, and the planters' dissatisfaction was one of the reasons the regime fell within a decade of Carrera's death on 14 April 1865. His successor, Field Marshal Vicente Cerna, was a soldier of the old school, and he lasted six years.

The historiography of Carrera has swung twice. Nineteenth-century liberal historians made him the epitome of clerical barbarism; twentieth-century revisionists, and above all the work on the indigenous communities of the east, made him the first Guatemalan ruler whose base was the Maya peasantry rather than the capital's merchant houses. Both readings can be true at once: he was a caudillo who protected communal land and village religion because that was his constituency, and he was also a ruler who jailed journalists, rigged elections and left a state with no schools worth the name, no roads and no banks.

What did the Liberal revolution of 1871 change?

It changed the ownership of the country. On 3 June 1871 a group of exiled liberals under Miguel García Granados issued the Act of Patzicía, disowning Cerna; on 30 June their army entered Guatemala City, and García Granados became provisional president. In 1873 he gave way to his war minister, Justo Rufino Barrios, a coffee planter from San Marcos who governed, with one brief interval, until his death in 1885. The liberals wrote a constitution in 1879 that lasted, with interruptions, until 1945, and they set about dismantling the corporate power of the Church: the Jesuits and other regular orders were expelled, tithes abolished, civil marriage and civil registry established, cemeteries secularised, education taken from the religious orders, and the pontifical university replaced by a secular national one. The cathedral survived; the Church as a landowner and schoolmaster did not.

The land question was settled in the planters' favour. The liberals held that property had to be individual, productive and taxable, and that communal and corporate holdings were the root of backwardness. A decree of 1877, the Census Redemption Decree, allowed the sale of communal and "idle" lands, and the result was the transfer of much of the highland village land to coffee planters, army officers and German immigrants, who by the 1890s owned a large part of the Alta Verapaz. The same year produced the Day Labourers' Regulation, which put the indigenous population at the disposal of the plantations: local officials were required to supply labourers on demand, an advance of wages tied the worker to the estate in debt, and a labour book recorded debts and days worked. A man without the book could be sent to the road gangs; a man with a debt could be fetched by the police. Debt peonage was not a metaphor in Guatemala. It was a legal institution with a paperwork trail.

Coffee then performed the miracle that the planters had promised. German merchants controlled about a third of national production but handled more than two-thirds of the coffee exported, and they shipped it through Hamburg rather than London or New York: exports to Germany rose from 160,000 bags in 1884 to 542,000 in 1909, by which time Guatemalan coffee was an indispensable part of almost every blend sold in Germany. The crop paid for railways, telegraphs, banks and the port works at Puerto San José and later Puerto Barrios. A German consular report of 1930 observed that in Guatemala everything — business turnover, imports, shipping — depended on the coffee harvest, and that was still close to the truth sixty years after Barrios.

Barrios also tried to reunite Central America by force, a project that had been Morazán's and would be Carrera's nightmare. In 1885 he proclaimed himself military chief of a united Central America and invaded El Salvador; he was killed at Chalchuapa on 2 April 1885, and the union died with him. His successors — Manuel Lisandro Barillas, who took power in 1886 by a bluff about five thousand troops he did not have, and José María Reina Barrios, assassinated in 1898 — kept the liberal forms and the oligarchic substance. Elections were held; the government chose the winner; and the state remained a machine for collecting customs duties and supplying labour.

How did coffee and the United Fruit Company capture the state?

Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who took the presidency in 1898 after Reina Barrios was shot by a German resident, was the first civilian head of state in half a century and the longest-serving ruler the country has had. He was a lawyer from Quetzaltenango with a taste for mysticism and a genius for surveillance; his twenty-two years were punctuated by rigged elections, a network of informers, the imprisonment and torture of opponents, and the cultivation of a personality cult that renamed towns and erected temples in his honour. He also modernised: schools, roads, the currency, the telegraph, and above all the railway that was supposed to link Guatemala City to the Caribbean and had run out of money sixty miles short.

The railway is where the United Fruit Company enters. The company had been formed in 1899 from the merger of Minor Keith's banana and railway interests with the Boston Fruit Company, and it already dominated the banana trade of the Caribbean coast. In 1901 the Guatemalan government hired it to run the postal service. In 1904 Estrada Cabrera signed a contract with Keith, without consulting the legislature, that gave the company tax exemptions, land grants and control of all the railroads on the Atlantic side, in exchange for finishing the line to Puerto Barrios. The railway became the International Railways of Central America; the port became a company port; the steamers that called there belonged to the company's Great White Fleet. By the 1930s United Fruit was the largest landowner and the largest employer in the country.

Estrada Cabrera fell in 1920, when a coalition of unionists, students and businessmen, backed by a section of the army and by a United States that had decided he was no longer useful, forced him out. The National Assembly declared him mentally incompetent in the first week of April; he surrendered on 14 April and died in 1924. The 1920s were the country's one experiment in oligarchic pluralism: a series of civilian presidents, a brief and unsuccessful attempt to revive the Central American federation in 1921, and a coffee boom that ended with the Wall Street crash. The depression hit Guatemala through the price of coffee, which fell by two-thirds, and through the collapse of the customs revenue that paid for the state.

Jorge Ubico, who took power in 1931 and held it until 1944, was the answer the coffee oligarchy found to the depression. He was an engineer by training, a general by profession, and a admirer of Mussolini and Hitler by his own cheerful admission. He balanced the budget, cut salaries, built roads, stamped out crime in the capital, and ran the country through military governors and a network of informers. In 1934 his government replaced the old debt-peonage regulations with a vagrancy law that required every man without property to show a labour book recording at least a hundred days' work a year or be sent to work on the roads for nothing. He gave United Fruit further land at Tiquisate and exempted it from taxes. He also expropriated German-owned coffee estates during the Second World War, when the revenue they generated fell and their owners became enemy aliens — the second such confiscation in a generation, since Estrada Cabrera had seized German property during the First World War.

The state Ubico left in 1944 was solvent, orderly and small. It had no income tax worth the name, no social security, no rural health service, and an army of a few thousand men whose officers governed the departments. It had a population of about three million, three-quarters of them illiterate, most of them Maya, and an infant mortality rate that placed Guatemala among the worst countries in the hemisphere. The coffee economy had recovered, but the land had not been redistributed, and the labour law had not been repealed. That was the inheritance the revolution of 1944 tried to change.

What did the revolution of 1944 try to do?

The regime that fell in 1944 fell to a general strike, not a coup. In June 1944 students and schoolteachers demonstrated in the capital against Ubico's announcement that he would serve another term; on 25 June troops fired on a march of women teachers and a teacher, María Chinchilla, was killed. The killing turned the middle classes against the government, and on 1 July Ubico resigned, handing power to a junta of generals headed by Federico Ponce Vaides. Ponce promised elections and then had the congress vote for him at gunpoint. On 20 October 1944 a group of junior officers — Captain Jacobo Árbenz, Major Francisco Javier Arana — with a civilian, Jorge Toriello, took the National Palace and the air base, and Ponce fled.

The junta held elections in December. Juan José Arévalo, a philosophy teacher who had spent the Ubico years lecturing in Argentina, won with about 85 per cent of the vote in an election generally accepted as clean, and took office in March 1945 under a new constitution. The constitution was the revolution's charter. It declared Guatemala a republic of workers and peasants, gave the state the right to expropriate property for social need (articles 90 to 92), separated church and state, granted autonomy to the university, and provided for a labour code, social security and rural education. Arévalo called his programme "spiritual socialism", a phrase vague enough to reassure the middle class and provocative enough to alarm the planters, and in practice it meant schools, a labour code in 1947, a social security institute, and a minimum wage that was largely unenforced in the countryside.

The revolution's limits were as important as its achievements. Arévalo governed with an army he did not control, and he survived more than twenty coup attempts, mostly by officers who disliked his reforms or his rhetoric. The 1945 constitution kept the vote from illiterate women, which in practice excluded most indigenous women. The labour code organised the urban and plantation workers of the coast but did little for the highland villages, where the labour-hunger of the coffee estates continued. And the reforms were financed by the coffee boom of the war years, when the United States bought Central American coffee at good prices and the blockade of Europe cut off German competition.

The revolution's most dangerous legacy was its own success in raising expectations. In 1949 Arana, who had become the most powerful officer in the country and was expected to succeed Arévalo, was killed in a shoot-out at a bridge south of the capital; who ordered it has never been settled, and both Arévalo and Árbenz have been suspected. The killing removed the army's conservative candidate, split the officer corps, and made Árbenz's election in 1950 — with three times the vote of his nearest rival, though on a restricted franchise — look to Washington like the arrival of a left-wing government by stealth.

Why did the United States overthrow Árbenz?

Jacobo Árbenz took office in March 1951 with a programme that was more radical than Arévalo's and more concrete: an income tax, a national hydroelectric plant, a highway and a port to break the railway and shipping monopoly, and an agrarian reform. The reform was the centrepiece. On 17 June 1952 the congress passed Decree 900, which empowered agrarian committees to expropriate uncultivated land on estates above a minimum size — farms of less than about 86 hectares were untouched, a figure usually rounded to 90, and estates of up to 200 hectares were exempt if two-thirds of their land was under cultivation — and to hand it to landless families in usufruct. Compensation was paid in twenty-five-year bonds bearing 3 per cent, valued at the assessment the owner had declared for tax purposes in May 1952.

The design was deliberately moderate. It was modelled on the land reforms the United States had sponsored in Japan and Taiwan after the war, it exempted productive estates of any size, it paid for what it took, and it was administered by local committees on which landowners sat. Its target was the idle half of the great estates: 2 per cent of the population controlled 72 per cent of the arable land, 88 per cent held 14 per cent of it, and less than 12 per cent of privately held land was under cultivation. Within two years the programme had redistributed 603,704 hectares to an estimated 100,000 families, and it had begun to change the labour market in the countryside, which was precisely what the planters feared.

It also hit the United Fruit Company. On 26 February 1953 the government expropriated some 234,000 acres of the company's Tiquisate estate on the Pacific coast, land it had left uncultivated; on 24 February 1954 a further 172,532 acres near Bananera were taken. Compensation was offered in twenty-five-year bonds at the value the company had declared for tax, and its appeal to the supreme court failed on 18 March. Washington replied on 25 March that deferred bonds were not prompt and effective compensation and that the sum offered was inadequate. The company, which had spent decades declaring its land at a fraction of its value, now argued that it was worth many times that, and it found a receptive audience. John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, had been a partner in the law firm that represented United Fruit; his brother Allen was director of the CIA; the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, John Moors Cabot, had family interests in the company.

The decision to remove Árbenz was taken before the expropriations, in 1951, when the CIA drew up a contingency plan codenamed PBFORTUNE after Árbenz legalised the Communist Party. That plan was cancelled, and replaced in August 1953 by PBSUCCESS, with a budget of five to seven million dollars, a headquarters in Florida, a team of officers, and a psychological warfare component that mattered more than the soldiers. A radio station calling itself the Voice of Liberation began broadcasting on 1 May 1954, claiming to speak from the mountains; in fact its programmes were recorded in Miami and flown to a mobile transmitter in the region. On 18 June a force of 480 men led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas crossed the border from Honduras in four columns and advanced, slowly and without much fighting, toward the capital.

The invasion itself was militarily insignificant. What defeated Árbenz was the decision of the Guatemalan army. The officers, who had never trusted him, refused to fight a force they could have destroyed, and on 27 June Árbenz resigned rather than arm the population, which he had tried and failed to do. A series of juntas followed; Castillo Armas became president in the first week of July after the American ambassador, John Peurifoy, brokered the arrangement in San Salvador. The war that the CIA had expected — a rising of the population against Árbenz — never happened, and the version of events that the Voice of Liberation broadcast, in which a popular movement was sweeping a communist government from power, was believed abroad for years and is still repeated.

The settlement was thorough. The 1945 constitution was annulled, the land reform reversed, the labour unions and peasant leagues outlawed, the Communist Party banned, and the franchise taken from illiterates, who were then about two-thirds of the adult population. A National Committee of Defence against Communism compiled a blacklist that eventually included one adult in ten, and a decree of August 1954 allowed the security forces to hold anyone on it for six months without trial. Castillo Armas was assassinated by a member of his own guard on 26 July 1957; his successors kept the machinery he had built.

What did the 1954 coup set in motion?

The first sign came in 1960, when a group of junior officers revolted against General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who had taken power in 1958. Their immediate grievance was corruption and the use of Guatemalan territory — the Retalhuleu airfield — for the training of the Cuban exile brigade that invaded the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The revolt failed, but a handful of the officers escaped to the mountains of the east and, with Cuban help, formed the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) in December 1962. The Historical Clarification Commission later dated the armed confrontation from 1962 rather than 1960, on the grounds that the revolt of 1960 was a barracks affair and the insurgency began with the FAR.

Ydígoras was overthrown in March 1963 by his defence minister, Enrique Peralta Azurdia, who ruled until the constituent assembly election of 1964 and the presidential election of 1966, won by Julio César Méndez Montenegro, a law professor of the centre-left. Méndez Montenegro governed with a secret pact that left the army in control of the counterinsurgency, and the army used the four years to destroy the FAR in the east. The Zacapa campaign of October 1966 to March 1968, run by Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio with a thousand American Green Berets and a network of paramilitary bands, killed between 3,000 and 8,000 peasants according to Amnesty International — some Guatemalan estimates put the figure far higher — and taught the officer corps the technique it would use in the highlands fifteen years later: identify the guerrillas' civilian base, and remove it.

How did the war come to the highlands?

The war moved west in the 1970s for reasons that were partly economic and partly military. The northern departments of Quiché, Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz had been opened to colonisation in the 1960s, and in 1970 the government created the Northern Transversal Strip, a band of land along the Mexican border, to encourage settlement, cattle and timber. The strip was also where foreign oil companies — Shenandoah, Exxon, Hispanoil, Getty — held exploration contracts, and where the army's own officers, including the future president Romeo Lucas García, bought estates. Land titles were insecure, the colonists were recent arrivals, and the catechists of the Catholic Church, after the Second Vatican Council, were organising cooperatives and teaching literacy. It was ideal recruiting ground for an insurgency and ideal terrain for a counterinsurgency.

The Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) entered the Ixcán from Mexico in January 1972, spent two years building support among the colonists, and announced itself in 1975 by killing a landowner, José Luis Arenas, in front of his workers. A second group, the Revolutionary Organisation of the People in Arms (ORPA), appeared in 1979 in the mountains above the coffee estates of the south-west. The two organisations and the remnants of the FAR formed a coordination in 1980, and by 1981 the EGP could hold public meetings in the Ixil towns of Nebaj, Chajul and Cotzal.

The state's response began before the insurgency was strong. On 29 May 1978 soldiers opened fire on a peasant demonstration in the square of Panzós, in the Polochic valley, where Q'eqchi' villagers had been petitioning for titles to land that had been registered in the name of a local strongman. Between thirty and a hundred people were killed, depending on the account; the government said five. The massacre was the first in which the victims were unarmed villagers claiming land, and it marked the moment when the Catholic Church, the university and the human rights organisations began to describe what was happening as a war against the Maya.

On 31 January 1980 a group of K'iche' and Ixil peasants occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to protest against the killing of their neighbours in Uspantán. The police stormed the building and fired incendiary devices; thirty-seven people died inside, among them Vicente Menchú, the father of Rigoberta Menchú, and two former Guatemalan ministers, and the Spanish ambassador survived only because he was not in the room. Spain broke diplomatic relations. The funeral was the largest demonstration the country had seen, and the event became the defining atrocity of the war for the urban left.

The killing then became general. General Romeo Lucas García, president from 1978, had handed the countryside to the army and the death squads; in 1980 the security forces killed perhaps 5,000 people for political reasons, and the following year the figure rose. In July 1981 the army began Operation Ashes, deploying some 15,000 troops across Quiché and Huehuetenango to separate the guerrillas from the population by destroying the villages that supported them. The Catholic Church's human rights office estimated 11,000 deaths in 1981 alone. By the end of that year the guerrillas had been driven out of most of their base areas, and the army had begun to organise the survivors into civil patrols. The war was won in the countryside by 1982; what remained was the destruction of the society that had sheltered the insurgency.

What happened under Ríos Montt?

On 23 March 1982 a group of young officers overthrew Lucas García to stop the inauguration of his chosen successor, whose election had been fraudulent even by the standards of the previous decade. They invited a retired general, Efraín Ríos Montt, to lead a three-man junta; by June he had pushed the other two aside and ruled alone. He was a convert to an evangelical church, a teetotaller, and a man who preached on television every Sunday. He declared a state of siege, dissolved the congress, suspended the constitution, and set up special tribunals for political offences. He also launched a counterinsurgency campaign that combined extreme violence with an explicit programme of pacification: "beans and rifles", in his phrase, or in the army's, techo, trabajo y tortillas — roof, work and tortillas.

The mechanism was the civil patrol. Villages were given a choice between being destroyed and joining a patrol under army command; by the end of the regime there were perhaps 900,000 men enrolled, and the patrols rounded up suspects, guarded the army's flanks and took part in massacres. Villages that resisted were destroyed and their populations moved into "model villages" or fled to the mountains, where they were hunted. Operation Victoria 82, launched in April 1982, and its successors were designed to clear the Ixil triangle and the whole of the highlands north of the Chixoy. The CEH later counted the destruction of hundreds of villages in these months and identified the period from 1981 to 1983 as the one in which the state committed acts of genocide against Mayan groups in four regions: the Ixil area, the north of Huehuetenango, the Ixcán, and the Maya Achí country around Rabinal.

The worst single massacre of the period was at Plan de Sánchez, in Rabinal, on 18 July 1982, when soldiers and patrols killed more than 250 people, most of them women, children and old men, after a guerrilla attack in the area. The pattern was repeated in dozens of places: an attack on a military post, followed by a punitive expedition against the nearest village, with the men shot and the houses burned. Ríos Montt's defenders argue that the massacres were already under way before he took power, that the army's campaign was launched in late 1981 under Lucas García, and that the killings fell sharply after mid-1982 as the patrols took control. The CEH accepted part of this chronology but drew the opposite conclusion: the violence became more systematic, more centralised, and more clearly directed at a defined ethnic group, which is what distinguishes genocide from atrocity.

Washington, which had cut military aid under Carter, restored the flow of helicopters and spare parts under Reagan; the president met Ríos Montt at San Pedro Sula in Honduras in December 1982 and described him as a man of "great personal integrity". The war was being won, and the cost was being paid by people the American public could not see. The regime fell on 8 August 1983, when the defence minister, Óscar Mejía Víctores, overthrew Ríos Montt after a dispute over promotions, corruption and the introduction of a value-added tax; seven people were killed in the coup. Ríos Montt returned to politics and in 2013 was convicted by a Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to eighty years. The constitutional court annulled the conviction ten days later on procedural grounds; the retrial was still being litigated when he died on 1 April 2018.

How did the war end?

Mejía Víctores opened the political system in order to legitimise the army's victory. A constituent assembly was elected in July 1984, and a new constitution took effect in January 1986. It is the constitution Guatemala still has: a presidential republic with a unicameral congress, a constitutional court, a human rights ombudsman, and — a novelty for the region — an explicit recognition that Guatemala is formed of diverse ethnic groups and that indigenous languages form part of the national heritage. It also entrenched the army's role in internal security and gave the president power to deploy it without congressional approval, which the accords of 1996 later tried to undo.

Vinicio Cerezo, a Christian Democrat, won the election of 1985 with about 68 per cent of the vote and took office in January 1986 — the first civilian president after a decade of generals, and the first transfer of power to an elected civilian since 1966. His government restored habeas corpus and amparo, created the human rights ombudsman, and reduced political violence in the cities. It did not touch the army, the land, or the tax system, and it survived two coup attempts, in May 1988 and May 1989, which the United States helped to defeat. By the end of his term the economy was stagnant, the unions were on strike, and the government was mired in corruption allegations.

The transition nearly ended in 1993. Jorge Serrano Elías, elected in 1990, dissolved the congress and the supreme court on 25 May 1993 and tried to rule by decree. The constitutional court ruled against him, the army refused to back him, and the streets filled; he fled the country. The congress elected the human rights ombudsman, Ramiro de León Carpio, to finish the term, and a package of constitutional reforms was approved by referendum in January 1994. The peace talks, which had begun in Oslo in 1990 under United Nations auspices, moved forward: agreements on human rights in March 1994, on the resettlement of the displaced and on historical clarification in June, on the rights of indigenous peoples in March 1995, and on socio-economic questions and land in May 1996. The final accord was signed in Guatemala City on 29 December 1996, and the United Nations deployed a verification mission, MINUGUA, in January 1997.

The accords were a long document with short deadlines. They provided for the demobilisation of the URNG and its transformation into a political party, the reduction of the army by a third and the subordination of internal security to civilian authority, a new police force, the creation of the Commission for Historical Clarification, a 50 per cent increase in spending on education and health, a fiscal reform to raise tax revenue, and a land programme with a 1999 deadline. They were, in effect, a second attempt at the programme of 1944 and 1952, negotiated rather than imposed, and they were signed by a government that had won the war.

What has the peace failed to deliver?

The truth commission reported on 25 February 1999. It had registered 42,275 individual victims — 23,671 of them killed and 6,159 disappeared — and it estimated the true toll at over 200,000 dead or disappeared. Eighty-three per cent of the fully identified victims were Maya and 17 per cent Ladino; 93 per cent of the violations it documented were the work of state forces and their paramilitary allies, including 626 massacres; and it concluded that acts of genocide had been committed by the state between 1981 and 1983. It also laid responsibility beyond the army, at the feet of a state structure built on exclusion since 1821, and it named the United States as a factor in the militarisation of the conflict. The report was received in silence by the government, and its findings are still contested by parts of the right, including a president, Jimmy Morales, who denied that a genocide had occurred.

The rest of the peace agenda fared worse. A referendum on the constitutional reforms required by the accords was defeated in May 1999, largely because the campaign was captured by the parties that opposed them. Tax revenue stayed around 10 or 11 per cent of GDP, among the lowest in the hemisphere, so the promised spending on health and education never materialised. The land programme registered some titles and distributed little land. The army was reduced and placed under civilian ministers, and the new National Civil Police replaced the old force, but the intelligence apparatus and the networks of illegal security groups survived the transition largely intact.

Violence changed shape rather than ending. Homicide rates rose through the 2000s to levels among the highest in the world, driven by drug trafficking, extortion and the impunity that had protected the old death squads, while the state answered with iron-fist presidencies and a growing reliance on the army for policing. The one institutional success was the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, created by agreement with the United Nations in 2006 and operational from 2007, which with the public prosecutor's office dismantled more than seventy criminal networks and prosecuted ministers, mayors, judges and businessmen.

How did the corruption crisis of 2015 change the country?

That success produced the crisis of 2015. In April the commission and the prosecutor general exposed "La Línea", a customs racket run from the tax administration in which importers paid bribes for reduced duties; the trail led to the private secretary of Vice President Roxana Baldetti, and then to Baldetti and President Pérez Molina himself. Baldetti resigned in May. On 21 August the commission named the president as the head of the network; the congress stripped his immunity on 1 September, he resigned on 2 September, and he was arrested on 3 September. Tens of thousands of people had marched through the capital for months, organised on social media under the slogan RenunciaYa, and in the election that followed they chose a television comedian, Jimmy Morales, who had never held office, with 67 per cent of the vote.

Morales turned out to be the beneficiary of the revolt against corruption rather than its instrument. When the commission began investigating his campaign financing, he refused to renew its mandate, declared its commissioner persona non grata, and in January 2019 tried to expel it; the constitutional court stopped him, but the mandate ended in September 2019 and the commission left. Its removal was the end of the only institution that had seriously investigated the alliance of politicians, businessmen and organised crime that the peace accords had been meant to break.

The pattern repeated in 2023, with a different outcome. In the first round of the general election on 25 June, the establishment's candidates collapsed and two outsiders went through: Sandra Torres, a former first lady, and Bernardo Arévalo, a diplomat and sociologist who was the son of the president of 1945 and the candidate of a small centre-left party, Semilla. The public prosecutor's office then suspended Semilla over alleged irregularities in its registration, an action reversed by the constitutional court within a day; after Arévalo won the runoff on 20 August with about 61 per cent, the prosecutors opened the ballot boxes, sought the annulment of the election in December, and called for the arrest of the president-elect's allies. The constitutional court upheld the result, and Arévalo was sworn in in the early hours of 15 January 2024, after a delay of some hours in the congress, in a ceremony that was itself a demonstration of how fragile the constitutional order had become.

The country Arévalo inherited is no longer the coffee republic of 1932. Coffee, sugar, bananas and cardamom still earn foreign exchange, but the largest single source of dollars is now money sent home by Guatemalans in the United States, and the fastest-growing export industry is the maquila, the assembly of clothing for American brands. What has not changed is the concentration of land and income, the weakness of the tax state, the impunity of the powerful, and the fact that the Maya majority of the western highlands remains, in the words of the truth commission, the population that the state has historically treated as its enemy. That is the continuity the map cannot show, and the reason the country's politics remain, two centuries after independence, a contest over who owns the land.

Common myths about Guatemala

Timeline of Guatemala

What the map shows next

At 1840 on the map the map colours a Guatemala that had just left the federation, with Los Altos still a separate territory on the western edge and Carrera's peasant army in control of the capital. The shape looks settled; the politics were not, and the next four decades would be spent deciding whether the state belonged to the highland villages or to the coffee planters.

At 1871 on the map the liberal revolution is under way, and at 1954 on the map the country is the one the United Fruit Company and the CIA remade — a coffee and banana republic whose army had just learned that it could decide who governed. By 1996 on the map the war is over on paper, the accords are signed, and the map shows a country whose borders have not changed since 1859 but whose state has never controlled more than part of its territory.