Word: guatemala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...country, the worse the thievery. Says Clemency Coggins, an authority on pre-Columbian art and archaeology: "Not since the 16th century has Latin America been so ruthlessly plundered." Teams descend (sometimes literally, from helicopters) on any of the hundreds of Mayan ceremonial sites that lie scattered throughout Mexico and Guatemala...
...away with carbide-toothed power saws; cruder thieves use hammers, wedges or fire to split the irreplaceable sculptures into fragments for easy transport. In March 1971, Archaeologist Ian Graham, a research fellow in Middle American archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum, entered La Naya, a Mayan site in Guatemala; looters opened fire, killing his guide Pedro Sierra. In Costa Rica, says Dr. Dwight Heath of Brown University, who spent a Fulbright year there in 1968-69, "One percent of the labor force was involved in illicit traffic in antiquities-which means there are more bootleggers in that little country...
Robbers. Offered in 1973, such reasoning drives archaeologists to near frenzy. Said Nicholas Hellmuth, who headed a 1970 dig in the ancient Mayan city of Yaxja in Guatemala and saw tombs laid waste by robbers: "I'd like to take the next museum art director I see and dip him in honey and tie him up near an anthill." The big collections, say Curators Bennet Bronson and Donald Collier of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, are supporting an entire underworld. Collectors usually deal only with the last-and most gentlemanly-middlemen. In an atmosphere of genteel...
...ready for one of its more unusual feats of legerdemain, a full-dress, seven-day Security Council meeting this week in Panama City. The meeting almost certainly will be used to air a variety of Latin American grievances, such as Argentina's demand for the Falkland Islands and Guatemala's demand for British Honduras. But the noisiest grievances will presumably come from the host. Panamanian Strongman Omar Torrijos calls the Canal Zone "a tumor that must go through the operating room...
...outgoing charge d'affaires, George C. Moore, as well as a Belgian diplomat were murdered by Arab terrorists (see WORLD). Noel thus became the second U.S. ambassador to be killed by terrorists in less than five years. In 1968, John Gordon Mein was slain in Guatemala while trying to escape from kidnapers...