Departments of Guatemala in the context of "Flores, Guatemala"

Petén (from the Itz'a, Noj Petén, 'Great Island') is a department of Guatemala. It is geographically the northernmost department of Guatemala, as well as the largest by area – at 35,854 km (13,843 sq mi) it accounts for about one third of Guatemala's area. The capital is Flores. The population at the mid-2018 official estimate was 595,548.

Sololá is a department in the west of Guatemala. The capital is the city of Sololá. Lake Atitlan is a key feature surrounded by a number of the municipalities.

Huehuetenango (Spanish pronunciation: [w̝e.we.t̪eˈnãŋ.ɡo]) is one of the 22 departments of Guatemala. It is located in the western highlands and shares the borders with the Mexican state of Chiapas in the north and west; with El Quiché in the east, and Totonicapán, Quetzaltenango and San Marcos in the south. The capital is the city of Huehuetenango.

Huehuetenango's ethnic composition is one of the most diverse in Guatemala. While the Mam are predominant in the department, other Maya groups are the Q'anjob'al, Chuj, Jakaltek, Tektik, Awakatek, Chalchitek, Akatek and K'iche'. Each of these nine Maya ethnic groups speaks its own language.

San Marcos is a department in southwestern Guatemala, on the Pacific Ocean and along the western Guatemala-Mexico border.

The department's capital is the city of San Marcos.

Qʼeqchiʼ (/qʼeqt͡ʃiʔ/) (Kʼekchiʼ in the former orthography, or simply Kekchi in many English-language contexts, such as in Belize) are a Maya people of Guatemala, Belize and Mexico. Their Indigenous language is the Qʼeqchiʼ language.

Before the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in the 1520s, Qʼeqchiʼ settlements were concentrated in what are now the departments of Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz. Over the course of the succeeding centuries a series of land displacements, resettlements, persecutions and migrations resulted in a wider dispersal of Qʼeqchiʼ communities into other regions of Guatemala (Izabal, Petén, El Quiché), southern Belize (Toledo District), and smaller numbers in southern Mexico (Chiapas, Campeche). While most notably present in northern Alta Verapaz and southern Petén, contemporary Qʼeqchiʼ language-speakers are the most widely spread geographically of all Maya peoples in Guatemala.

The Río Negro massacres were a series of killings of villagers by the government of Guatemala between 1980 and 1982.

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government undertook voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by paramilitary and military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone. The string of extrajudicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities – although local church workers, journalists and the survivors of Rio Negro deny that the town ever saw any organized guerrilla activity.

Sololá is a city in Guatemala. It is the capital of the department of Sololá and the administrative seat of Sololá municipality. It is located close to Lake Atitlán.

The name is a Hispanicized form of its pre-Columbian name, one spelling variant of which is Tz'olojya. The urban center has about 14,000 people, but the municipality also includes four village communities — Los Encuentros, El Tablón, San Jorge la Laguna, and Argueta — as well as 59 smaller rural communities.