A Super Quick History of Guatemala

hello everyone and welcome [Music] this is central america and here's guatemala now let's go shall we guatemala's earliest inhabitants like in most every place were hunter-gatherers living off the beasts they slew in the wild but by the 3000 bc they had become able agriculturalists living off what they could grow then things really start moving with the rise of the maya even in their pre-classic stage they'd prove to themselves to be exceptionally clever building cities of stone and developing a written script and ingenious systems of irrigation until it all unaccountably ceased but then maya civilization made a radiant resurgence in its classic era and all of guatemala was involved rival municipalities traded and battled each other such as tikal one of the biggest amerindian cities complete with limestone step pyramids and immense technical and cultural accomplishments were made from their astronomical observations accurately recorded in their calendars to their art and sculpture and system of mathematics however as in much of mesoamerica the maya gods were particularly fond of the taste of blood and it was offered to them regularly including that of sacrificed humans usually prisoners of war and war is just one of the suggested explanations for the perplexing downfall of maya civilization the maya themselves did not disappear but for some reason from the 8th and 9th centuries onward their cities were abandoned and the epoch of grandeur withered away and no one knows why the early 1500s saw the arrival of the spanish in guatemala some maya tribes allied with the europeans others didn't such as the kitchen who put up a heroic resistance under tekuno man now considered a national hero the spaniards were not deterred however their conquest driven by a ferocious gold lust goading them on and guatemala ended up a slice of the spanish empire though the conquerors like alvarado were ruthlessly cruel they were denounced and challenged by churchmen like bartolome de las casas who pushed for kindness and the peaceful propagation of the christian faith among the natives so the years swept by and the spaniards built cities fashioned after those of spain but by the 19th century the power of espana had slumped considerably since the conquistador days the economy of colonial guatemala never really prospered and was based on the growing of cocoa beans and indigo by amerindians and imported african slaves in 1821 guatemala declared independence and in 1844 rafael carrera became the first president a strong magnetic leader who upheld conservative values and ruled until his death in 1865 there soon followed a long era of liberal leaders such as gusto ruffino barrios who confiscated both amerindian lands and church property but also introduced many morsels of modernity and promoted secular education and ramped up the production of coffee which became the key export the country later had a dictator who was removed in 1920 but then it got an even worse dictator who ended up deposed during the guatemalan revolution which saw democracy return and jacob arbenz overseeing a land redistribution scheme to give poor peasants their own plots of land to farm this angered the us-owned united fruit company whose fruitful business was hampered so they wrote a strongly worded letter no just kidding they got the cia involved who engineered a coup to kick our benz out and put a despot in who was friendly towards u.s interests what followed were decades of civil war and corrupt violent dictators who presided over manifold human rights violations much of which was aimed at the indigenous peoples their cause was championed by kitchen activist rigoberta menchu who won the 1992 nobel peace prize for her efforts on their behalf finally after much sorrow and many thousands of deaths the civil war ended in 1996 with a u.n mediated peace deal between the government and the rebels who received land to farm in exchange for relinquishing their weapons guatemala war ravaged and impoverished went on to make big improvements over the following years despite continual political discontent and has attained a medium level of human development and central america's largest economy so best of luck to guatemala for the days ahead but as for me it's bye for now bye