Guatemala is a Central American nation located to the south of Mexico and northwest of Honduras. Its capital is Guatemala City, and in 2014 it had a population of 15,806,675 people, with 82.5% of the population being of full or partial indigenous descent and 17.5% being of white descent.
History[]
The location of Guatemala
Guatemala was once home to the Mayan civilization and was a colony of the Spanish Empire until 15 September 1821, when it declared independence during the decolonization of Latin America. Guatemala, joined its neighbors as a part of the United States of Central America, and it had to deal with coups and other violence in its young years; from 1838 to 1840, Guatemala fought against the secessionist state of Los Altos in Quetzaltenango. In 1847, Guatemala declared independence from th USCA and became a fully-independent country, and the state of Los Altos was crushed after repeated attempts to win independence in the rest of the 1840s. In the mid-19th century, settlers from Germany came to Guatemala and founded serveral plantations in the country, and Guatemala became a multicultural society.
Guatemala was unstable during the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries, with various dictators taking power and corruption being widespread. In 1931, a dictator named Jorge Ubico seized power and had a 13-year reign until the popular Guatemalan Revolution forced him to resign on 1 July 1944. On 20 October, his supporters' military junta was put down, and Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman ruled over a democratic socialist society for ten years, the "Ten Years of Spring". However, in 1954 the United States' CIA backed a coup that overthrew Guzman, and a dictatorship took power; from 1960 to 1996, the Guatemalan Civil War raged as various leftist groups fought against the US-supported dictatorship. The government sent paramilitaries to crush the rebels, and these militias were responsible for 95% of the war crimes committed during the conflict against Guatemalan civilians. In 1996, a peace accord led to the rebels disbanding and receiving land to work, but the rebel URNG became a political party. Since then, the military rulers of the country have been been put on trial for war crimes, and the country is recovering from the civil war. High rates of poverty, crime, drug trade, and instability are issues in the country, and it has a way to go before it can fully recover from the civil war.
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