Beautiful Lake Atitlan
NPR has an interesting article on human rights researchers sifting through tens of millions of documents in a warehouse in Guatemala, looking for evidence of the Guatemalan police’s role in murders during the height of what the article calls Guatemala’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and 1980s. My family left Guatemala for Germany in 1983, when I was 5 years old. The violence and political instability during this incredibly bloody civil war were among the main reasons why we left the country. To this day, the nation remains plagued by violence, poverty, and corruption. Which seems even more unfortunate once you have traveled the country a bit and realize how gorgeous a place it is and how wonderful its people are. So much beauty in such a small place – from the pacific coast to the indigenous villages, from to the rain forest to the Maya ruins of Tikal, from colonial-style Antigua (surrounded by coffee plantations and three volcanoes and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Center), to lake Atitlan, which Ernest Hemingway once called “the most beautiful lake in the world”…
Particularly interesting in the NPR piece is John Burnett’s “Reporter’s Notebook”, detailing some of his impressions and experiences during his two years in Guatemala. From the intro to his notes:
For the next two years, when most of the world’s attention was focused on wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, he witnessed one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala’s armed conflict. The guerrillas and the government signed a peace accord in 1996, after which it was determined that an estimated 200,000 victims died in Guatemala’s conflict – more than the other two Central American wars combined.
Two hundred thousand deaths. It’s one of the many human tragedies in the world that, unfortunately, seem to be largely unnoticed by most of the world.