To understand why thousands of people have marched out of Central America and headed North, you must understand what came before. The CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 led to the installation of a series of brutal dictators. Decades of violence followed in a 36-year conflict that ended in 1996. Some 200,000 civilians were killed, most of them indigenous people who lived in mountain villages. A tradition of violence, repression, and discrimination continues in Guatemala today.

If you have any connection to this beautiful, complicated country, please read at least the first several paragraphs of this excellent summary by Billy Perigo, written in 2016.

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