Guatemala’s Colonial Identity Crisis: Comprehend or Collapse

Let us speak plainly: Guatemala is suffering from a colonial identity crisis so severe that it blinds the nation to reality. To press territorial disputes today, rooted in the shadows of Spain’s empire, is not an act of sovereignty, it is evidence of a fundamental incapacity to comprehend what independence actually means and the regions shared lived experience.

Guatemala puts out map in 2025 that includes the sovereign, independent territory of Belize

What Guatemala exhibits is not strength, but a deficiency of judgment. It reveals an alarming inability to process history, law, and collective identity. To fight for Spain’s old claims in the 21st century is not only legally untenable, it is a collapse of intellectual rigor and a betrayal of your own people.

Because here is the undeniable truth: Guatemalans are not Spaniards. Mexicans are not Spaniards. Belizeans are not British or Spaniards. None of us are our former colonial maters! We are the descendants of indigenous nations fractured by conquest and Africans forced into bondage to build lands not their own. That is our shared history. That is our shared inheritance.

So when Guatemala attempts to re-inflict colonial trauma, when it insists on resurrecting Spain’s old vendettas, it demonstrates not sovereignty, but servility. Shameful that an older independent nation has to be schooled in though by a younger peer. Is Guatemala not turning two hundred four years old? This exposes a colonial dependency of thought: a refusal to break the chain that was supposedly shattered at independence. This is not nationhood. This is a legal and moral incompetence masquerading as nationalism or a dispute exploited by proxy for enemies of the United States?

And let us be clear: we are not going anywhere. Indigenous resilience runs through our veins. African endurance is written into our survival. We built, resisted, and endured. To imagine that some colonial border dispute will erase us is to confess a categorical incapacity to see the present.

This is Guatemala’s problem: an unresolved identity crisis. You cannot decide whether you are the descendant of the colonized or the executor of the colonizer’s will. And until you do, you will remain a client of a dead empire, dragging your neighbors into a fight that has no meaning or place today, no justice, and no future.

So hear this well: Y’all need to get that identity crisis worked out over there and leave Belize out of it.