Guatemala City

Guatemala's internal armed conflict ran for thirty six years and fell hardest on Maya communities in the highlands, where entire villages were destroyed. When it ended, the Catholic archdiocese of Guatemala City ran its own inquiry, the Recovery of Historical Memory project, sending trained interviewers from the parishes to take testimony in the communities and in the languages people actually spoke. Some six thousand statements were collected.

On 24 April 1998 the auxiliary bishop Juan Gerardi presented the four volume result in the cathedral, under the title Guatemala: Never Again. It documented tens of thousands of deaths and attributed the great majority of them to the army and its auxiliaries. Two days later he was beaten to death with a concrete block in the garage of his parish house.

The investigation was obstructed for years, and prosecutors and witnesses left the country. In 2001 a court convicted three army officers and a priest of involvement, in the first Guatemalan trial in which military officers were tried in a civilian court for a political killing; the case went through appeals and retrials afterwards. A United Nations backed truth commission reporting in 1999 reached conclusions close to the archdiocese's, and found that acts of genocide had been committed against Maya groups. The killing of a bishop for publishing them is one of the defining episodes in the modern history of the Latin American church.

Guatemala has moved faster and further from Catholic majority status than any country in Latin America. Protestant and especially Pentecostal churches grew from a tiny minority in the mid twentieth century to something approaching half the population, a shift accelerated by relief work after the earthquake of 1976 and by the appeal of small congregations offering discipline, healing and a role to lay members. The capital holds neo Pentecostal megachurches with auditoriums seating thousands.

That growth intersected with the war. Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in 1982 and presided over the most intense period of the highland campaigns, belonged to a neo Pentecostal congregation and preached on television while it happened. He was convicted of genocide in 2013; the verdict was annulled within days on procedural grounds, and he died before a retrial concluded.

Maya religious practice continued through all of it. Day keepers still count the two hundred and sixty day ritual calendar, are called to the work through dreams and illness and trained by other keepers, and conduct ceremonies with candles, copal and fire for individuals and communities. The peace accords of 1996 recognised indigenous spirituality and the right of access to sacred places, though access to sites under state or private control has remained contested. A figure known as Maximon or San Simon, honoured with cigars, alcohol and money, sits somewhere between all three traditions and is claimed by none of them officially.