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The following lists events that happened during 2016 in Guatemala.
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| Decades: | |||||
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| See also: | |||||
The following lists events that happened during 2016 in Guatemala.
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The history of Guatemala traces back to the Maya civilization, with the country's modern history beginning with the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in 1524. By 1000 AD, most of the major Classic-era Maya cities in the Petén Basin, located in the northern lowlands, had been abandoned. The Maya states in the Belize central highlands continued to thrive until the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado—called "The Invader" by the Maya—arrived in 1525 and began to subdue the indigenous populations.
José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan military officer, politician, and dictator who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) while also leading to accusations of war crimes and genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership.
Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo is a Guatemalan politician who served as the 40th president of Guatemala from 1986 to 1991. He also served as the Secretary General of the Central American Integration System (SICA) from 2017 to 2021.
Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as the Head of Government from August 1983 to January 1986. A member of the military, he was head of state during the apex of repression and death squad activity in the Central American nation. When he was minister of defense, he rallied a coup against President Ríos Montt, which he justified by declaring that religious fanatics were abusing the government. He allowed for a return to democracy, with elections for a constituent assembly being held in 1984, followed by general elections in 1985.
Fernando Romeo Lucas García was a military officer and politician who served as the 37th president of Guatemala from July 1, 1978, to March 23, 1982. He was elected as the nominee for the Institutional Democratic Party. Elections for his presidency were fraud-ridden. During Lucas García's regime, tensions between the radical left and the government increased. The military started to murder political opponents while counterinsurgency measures further terrorized populations of poor civilians.
Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García was a Guatemalan military officer who served as the 36th president of Guatemala from 1974 until 1978. A member of the National Liberation Movement, he previously served as General Staff of the Army from 1970 to 1972 and Minister of national defence from 1972 to 1973 under President Carlos Arana Osorio.
Chisec is a town and municipality in the north of the Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz that was founded in 1813. It is situated at 230 metres (755 ft) above sea level. The municipality covers a territory of 1,244 km2.
Fray Bartolomé de las Casas is a municipality in the Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz. The population is 31,611. It lies at an altitude of 170m above sea level and covers an area of 1,229 km². The annual festival is April 30-May 4. It is named after the 15th-century Spanish priest, bishop, and writer Bartolomé de Las Casas.
San Lucas Tolimán is a municipality in the Sololá department of Guatemala. The town of 17,000 people sits on the southeastern shore of Lago de Atitlán. The population is 90–95% Highland Maya. There is a population of about the same size living in the surrounding villages.
The Guatemalan Civil War was a civil war in Guatemala fought from 1960 to 1996 between the government of Guatemala and various leftist rebel groups. The government forces have been condemned for committing genocide against the Maya population of Guatemala during the civil war and for widespread human rights violations against civilians. The context of the struggle was based on longstanding issues of unfair land distribution. Wealthy Guatemalans, mainly European-descended, and foreign companies such as the American United Fruit Company had dominated control over much of the land, and paid almost zero taxes in return – leading to conflicts with the rural indigenous poor who worked the land under miserable terms.
Ixcán is a municipality in the Guatemalan department of El Quiché. Its administrative centre is the town of Playa Grande. The municipality consists of 176 communities, called aldeas. It has an area of 1,693 km2. It is the northernmost municipality of El Quiché, and borders with Mexico, the municipalities of Chisec and Cobán of the Department of Alta Verapaz, the municipality of Santa Cruz Barillas of the Department of Huehuetenango, and the municipalities of Chajul and Uspantán of El Quiché.
Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico, to the northeast by Belize, to the east by Honduras, and to the southeast by El Salvador. It is hydrologically bordered to the south by the Pacific Ocean and to the northeast by the Gulf of Honduras.
The Ixil are a Maya people located in the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico and in the municipalities of Santa Maria Nebaj, San Gaspar Chajul, and San Juan Cotzal in the northern part of the Cuchumatanes mountains of the department of Quiché, Guatemala. These three municipalities are known as the Ixil Triangle and are the place of origin of the Ixil culture and where the majority of the population lives.
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.
First Lady of Guatemala is the title held by the wife of the president of Guatemala or designee. The current first lady is Lucrecia Peinado, wife of President Bernardo Arévalo, since 15 January 2024.
Alejandro Baltazar Maldonado Aguirre is a Guatemalan statesman who served as the acting president of Guatemala following the Congress' acceptance of the resignation of President Otto Pérez Molina on September 3, 2015.
General elections were held in Guatemala on 16 June 2019, to elect the president, Congress and local councils. A second round of the presidential elections was held on 11 August 2019, since no candidate won a majority in the first round. Alejandro Giammattei won the election in the second round of voting.
Alejandro Eduardo Giammattei Falla is a Guatemalan politician who was the 51st president of Guatemala from 2020 to 2024.
The following lists events in the year 2020 in Guatemala.
The following lists events that happened during 2020 in Central America: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.
