Guatemala: A Buried History

Guatemala was once at the heart of the remarkable Mayan civilization, until Spanish explorers conquered the region, and the Mayans became slaves in their homeland. Still, they remain the underprivileged majority of Guatemala’s population. I want to convey a sense of awareness towards Guatemala’s tumultuous time of civil war (1960 – 1996), and narrow the scope onto the years surrounding the 1980’s, when unscrupulous events of an immoral genocide occurred to the indigenous Mayan peoples, and as a result were adroitly hidden from the world during the years ahead. Historian Greg Grandin, referred to the Guatemala campaign of the 1980’s as the last colonial massacre, situating it as the five century long process of colonization, land grab, and massacres suffered by the indigenous people in the Americas