Talk:Guatemala
|
|
I don't know, but the link from Quiche goes to quiche which has nothing to do with the province of Quiche meant in the text!
- Thanks for pointing that out. Sometimes an accent mark makes a LOT of difference! Changed to "Quiché". Cheers, -- Infrogmation 13:23, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)
| Contents |
54 coup
No mention of the '54 demolition of its democracy?
- You didn't bother to look at History of Guatemala, eh?
- Funny, when I see a "History" on the main page, I expect to find the history there ... in particular that if, say, I search for "54" and miss it, that there's nothing about it. Why not have the history of Guatemala all on one freaking page?
- "Guatemala" is meant to be an overview of the country, not an in-depth analysis of all aspects. Individual pages like History of Guatemala and Geography of Guatemala go into greater depth on their respective topics. If there are individual events or periods in Guatemalan history that warrant even more detail, they will have their own articles.
- If we tried to include everything about Guatemala in the "Guatemala" article, it would be far too long and detailed to be useful. (For an example of a page where too much historical detail is presented on the country page, see Germany.) It's a tough call to decide which facts, dates, and events should be included in the summary. If you think that 1954 is important enough to be mentioned in the historical summary, you can always add a short sentence about it. —Bkell 09:30, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I agree with Bkell, --SqueakBox 17:03, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)
Mormon fantasyland in Guatemala??
Why is it of any interest to anyone that some crank reliigion locates one of its fantasylands in Guatemala? I am referring to the paragraph under "Geography" that mentions the land of Lehi-Nephi or whatever. This has absolutely nothing to do with Guatemala.
- Removed text moved below. Possibly it could go in as a point in some future detailed article about tourism in Guatemala.
"In Mormon culture, Guatemala is the most popular traditional location of the Book of Mormon land of Lehi-Nephi, though this is not official doctrine of the LDS Church. The popular LDS tourism service, Israel Revealed, has package tours that include various spots in Guatemala."
- It is not for you to judge whether a religion is a "crank religion", or whether its sacred lands are "fantasylands". This is a real religious and cultural tradition and it pertains to Guatemala's geography. If geography is the wrong section, then move it to another. Either way, it must remain. When you remove content citing "crank" and "fantasyland", then I call that vandalism, and anyone else would agree. - Gilgamesh 03:43, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
As a non-Christian and student of Mayan art and society the Mormon connection is very important and very interesting.
JPZuniga I agree that the Mormon reference does not make any sense. This is not Guatemala Culture, it is Mormon Culture. I have visit Guatemala, and they are more into catholic culture, for example, tha Easter Celebration is a huge deal there, with big processions and arts on the streets. Besides the Curch still strong there and the catholics have a Guatemalan Saint, the Brother Peter, who was the first saint in Central America. The Mormo reference is just an idea from some people who believe in that, it should go to an article about Mormon Culture, or Mormon American Judaism, or something like it.
Map
See Talk:Geography of Guatemala
Missing image
Guatemalamap.gif
Map of Guatemala showing departments
Map
</div>
What do people think? would like to see a different map at Geography of Guatemala from the one we have here, --SqueakBox 23:04, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)
Haha..."crank religion." Having spent some time in Guatemala and in Belize, I can say first hand that understanding the influence of the Mennonites and the Mormons is quite significant in understanding the culture of the country.
Vandal info
The following is, I think, of interest, so I post it here, --SqueakBox 17:01, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)
Guatemala, Invaded by European Hordes more than 500 years ago and by the Unated States in 1954 when they overtrow the FIRST DEMOCRATICALY ELECTED GOVERNMENT (Jacobo Arbenz), is one of the most Weautifull countries in the world.
Is Run By Puppet Governments SOLD TO U.S. AND EUROPEAN TRANSNATIONALS COMPANIES AND CORPORATIONS ie Montana Mining, Reebok, Nike, Cellphone companies, Mcdonals (Garbage) El Cacif etc. Overun By Corruption and infested by Gangs that The Unated States Created in L.A. is one of the Most Dangerous countries to live in Specialy for the CORPORATIONS THAT COME AND RAPE OUR NATION wen people realize it.
Street Gangs are starting to get into a more Politicaly inclined Stand and is a matter of time for Frankeinstein to wake up "Chikens coming home to Roost" on The Brink of a Nation Wide REVOLUTION that Like Malcom X said: It Won't Be Televized, we still Here and we are not going anywere. The mayority of people is starting to wake up and realise that we been DOOM for more than 500 years, Corporations from ALL NATIONS Exploiting us should take Notice of that. When the time comes those who have the chance to Leave BUT didn't ARE NOT GOING TO BE SPARED, in The min time if you are coming this way, ENJOY YOUR VACATIONS.
Here is some Basic information you should know for those who had the missfortune to be "Educated" in the United States Piblics Schools.
GUATEMALA COUP CIA FILES (An Introduccion for people of low Quality Education)
1,926 pages of CIA documents covering the Agency's involvement in the 1954 coup in Guatemala to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman archived on CD-ROM. Guzman was seen as a serious Communist threat after confiscating two-thirds of United Fruit Co.'s 332,000 acres and legalized the Communist Party. These records encompass the events and circumstances causing U.S. policymakers to plan the overthrow of the Guatemalan Government in June 1954 as Cold War tensions mounted between the two superpowers; CIA plans for and execution of the covert action; the outcome; and CIA historical analysis of CIA's performance and impact of the coup. The collection includes reviews of the event by CIA historians, administrative memos regarding operational plans and internal approvals; operational cable traffic; and summaries of the Sherwood tapes used for propaganda purposes.
The files show that "hit lists" were compiled and the CIA began training Central American assassins to kill political and military Communist leaders. According to CIA review the assassination plans were never carried out and never formally approved by top State Department and CIA officials or the White House. President Guzman resigned on June 27, 1954, two weeks after U.S. supported rebels invaded Guatemala and. The files show that rebel leader Castillo Armas, who took the place of Arbenz, gave the CIA a list of 58 people to be assassinated.
In 1953, the CIA drew up plans for "K" groups, or assassin teams, to work with sabotage groups. According to a January 11, 1954 cable the CIA sent 20 silencers for .22-caliber rifles to rebels training in Honduras. In March 1954, the CIA drew up criteria for assassination targets. Files include information about "Nerve War" which included sending wooden coffins, hangman's nooses and phony bombs to targets. "Here Lives a Spy" and "You have only 5 Days" were painted on their houses.
The files include an instructional guide on assassination titled, "A Study of Assassination." The document offers descriptions of the procedures and assassination hints such as, "The simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination... A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice." "...Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached... Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/
Remembering Guatemala, 1954: It’s the Impunity, Stupid by Rosa Maria Pegueros
The photographs of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib will haunt our political landscape for a long time but the one that will not leave me is that of the elated 300 prisoners, innocent of any crime or terrorist act, who were the first to be released. It has awakened a frightful memory of the time when I first learned about political violence.
In 1955, I was living in my native city of San Francisco, California. My mother, a Salvadoran immigrant, had left behind several younger brothers then living in Guatemala. One evening, the phone rang with terrifying news: My beloved Tio, uncle, César Homero Mendez, had been abducted on the stairs of the University of San Carlos of Guatemala, where he was studying law. No one knew why my uncle, a gentle, scholarly man who had never been involved in politics or activism of any sort would be kidnapped, although it seems that everyone knew that it was more than a common crime.
During those terrible days, my mother and her sisters who lived nearby, waited with rising dread for the phone to ring again. Their anxiety was heightened by the difficulty of telephone communication with Guatemala. No one in the Guatemalan branch of the family had a telephone at home, so we could do nothing but wait for them to call us. Even at the age of four I understood that something awful was taking place.
He was gone for three days; it seemed endless at the time. By the time the call came, we had resigned ourselves to the inevitable. The news was good and bad; Tio Homero was alive, but barely.
The torture he had suffered left him frail and broken. During his detention, they had held his head under water until he had fainted; they had beaten him. They had used electrodes to shock him. There were other punishments that I overheard in whispered conversations but did not fully understand the nature of until I was much older. Heaven knows what else they did to him. It would take years for him to recuperate. He never recovered completely.
My poor uncle was a victim of mistaken identity. The democratically-elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, had been overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. Following Arbenz’s ouster and exile to Mexico, Guatemala fell into the clutches of a string of dictators before it dissolved into its long civil war.
The men who kidnapped Tio Homero thought that he was a leftist guerrilla named Cesar Romero Mendez who was thought to be connected to Arbenz. “Mendez” is as common a surname in Latin America as “Smith” is here. They realized that they had the wrong man only when a judicial official visiting the jail recognized him as the college professor and vouched for his innocence. Naked, half dead, he was put into a taxi and sent home.
My uncle eventually became a family law judge in Guatemala. My aunt says that the terrible physical injuries he suffered were dwarfed by the spiritual and mental damage that the experience left behind.
In the sad history of Guatemala, my uncle’s story has a fairly happy ending. After all, he had a relatively long life in a country torn apart by a CIA-sponsored coup and a 36 year-long civil war underwritten by the United States. He paid a terrible price but he was lucky; many others did not escape with their lives.
Many Latin Americans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, to name a few, harbor a deep and abiding hatred of the United States because of our interventions in their internal affairs, our sponsorship of their dictators, and our unblinking disregard for the “collateral damage” we leave in our wake. Some, like my uncle, had the education to recognize our shameful role in their sorrowful history.
Although we present ourselves as fighters for freedom and justice, our actions in Guatemala and many other Latin American countries do not bear out these boasts. As forensic anthropologists exhume the bodies of the dead from the mass graves in which they've lain for a third of a century, the evidence of our misdeeds is there in the bones, most of which contain American bullets. Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and even the American Associate for the Advancement of Science have compiled a sickening record of our part in these abuses.
Guatemalans, citizens of a poor and powerless country, cannot raise a hand against America: we should be grateful for that. Their guerrillas never had the money to organize a 9-11-style attack on the United States but the bitterness is there. The families of the dead will remember who killed their countrymen and women; who was ultimately responsible for the disappearances, torture, and killings.
Iraqis, too, will long remember the murderers of their innocents. Yes, Saddam Hussein gassed and murdered his own citizens, but we dropped bombs on innocent civilians, destroyed the infrastructure of their cities, and now want to take credit for bringing them freedom and peace. It’s like the guy who rapes your sister and impregnates her then wants credit for having married her.
America must face the fallout of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq with humility; with the honesty to acknowledge what really happened; and with the resolute will to punish those who are responsible for the deaths of more than 846 dead American troops in Iraq (combat and combat-related accidents) http://icasualties.org/oif/, and an estimated 8000 Iraqi civilian dead http://www.iraqbodycount.net/. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and all of their henchman should be impeached but any move in that direction would be squandered energy since it would be summarily squelched so long as both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans.
We, the people, can throw the bums out of the White House and out of Congress. We can rebuild our tattered relationships with our allies, and we can offer more than hypocritical rhetoric about honor, freedom and justice by changing our foreign policy and our comportment in the world accordingly. The Middle East, long a tinderbox, has exploded; the fire is fed by our government’s treachery and misuse of the noble military men and women who serve our country honorably. If we truly believe that we are a good people, then we must ferret out the corruption that is poisoning us and our place in the world.
In memory of Cesar Homero Mendez, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and the victims of the CIA coup in Guatemala, June 27, 1954, on its fiftieth anniversary.