Guatemala

March 30, 2012
John L. Hammond

Even to many who paid attention to the rest of Latin America, Central America was terra incognita into the 1970s. I distinctly remember one night in the late 1970s when I pulled out the atlas and located the Central American countries in the very small area that they occupied on the continental map. This was the beginning of my intense engagement with Central America, and there was much more to learn.

March 23, 2012
Michael Fox

Thirty years ago, today, on March 23, 1982, Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt overthrew President Romeo Lucas García. The new military junta suspended the Constitution, closed the legislature, and installed one of the bloodiest military regimes in Guatemalan history. Three decades later, for the first issue of our 45th anniversary volume, we look to the legacies of war in Central America.

November 9, 2011
Bryan Finlayson

On Sunday, voters in Nicaragua and Guatemala chose their country’s next presidents. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega sailed to victory and a third term. In Guatemala, retired general Otto Perez Molina was elected despite concerns over his involvement in human rights violations during the former military regime.

September 13, 2011
In Sunday's presidential election, Mexico’s southern neighbors gave some 60% of their votes to two candidates of the hard right who will now face each other in a November 6 runoff. It was disheartening to many Mexicans to see the "iron fist" emerge as a symbol of the Guatemala campaign’s leading candidates.
September 8, 2011
In the 1940s U.S. Public Health medical researchers conducted appalling experiments on vulnerable populations in Guatemala. After last week's convening of President Obama's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the revelations are back in the news.
September 4, 2011
Kirsten Weld

Guatemalans are appalled over new revelations that from 1946 to 1948 U.S. medical researchers infected more than a thousand non-consenting Guatemalans with venereal diseases. The doctors who administered similar experiments on African-American sharecroppers in 1932 had told their research subjects simply that they were being treated for “bad blood.” And bad blood is what has been generated—or simply augmented—by this grim episode in the history of U.S.-Guatemala relations.

August 2, 2011
A week and a half ago, a group of activists and immigrants began a trek from various locations in Guatemala and Mexico’s southern border to Mexico City. Among them were anguished mothers and fathers carrying portraits of their missing sons and daughters. The mothers, in particular, looked, talked, and mourned like any other “mothers of the disappeared”—decades ago in Argentina and Chile; more recently in Guatemala and El Salvador—only this time their sons and daughters were not disappeared for being radical activists, but for being undocumented migrants trying to make their way northward.
October 24, 2008
James Rodríguez

The third Americas Social Forum (ASF) took place in Guatemala City from October 7 to 12, 2008. Thousands of people and organizations, from every corner of the American hemisphere, gathered in the campus of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala, to participate, debate, exhibit, network, and develop progressive alternatives. As usual for any World Social Forum event, the ASF process in Guatemala was not without internal debates.

September 25, 2007
Carol A. Smith
September 25, 2007
Louise Edwards

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