Guatemalan authorities said Friday, August 11, they are looking for four French tourists, including a six-year-old child, who have gone missing in the northern jungle near the border with Mexico and Belize.
The family, including two women and a man, was last seen on Wednesday in the Tikal National Park, the Guatemalan Tourism Institute said on social media.
The alert has also been sent to the diplomatic corps in the country.
The Tikal park houses Guatemala's main Mayan archeological site, comprising pyramids and temples. It is more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the capital, in the remote province of Peten, where drug trafficking gangs are known to operate.
In early January 2022, a 53-year-old German tourist was found dead in the same park, two days after having been reported missing. He had separated from the group with whom he was visiting the site to explore different paths of the archaeological park before disappearing. Also in the same park, in 2001, several tourists were attacked by hooded gunmen who killed a park ranger trying to defend them. A Honduran tourist living in the United States was raped.
Guatemala, a country of almost 18 million inhabitants, is plagued by 36 years of civil war, organized crime and corruption. The country is one of the most violent on the continent, with a homicide rate of 17.3 per 100,000 inhabitants by the end of 2022, according to the UN, half of which is attributed to criminal gangs and drug trafficking.
Central America's largest economy remains one of the continent's most unequal countries, with a poverty rate of 59.3%, according to the World Bank. Guatemala welcomed a peak of some 2.5 million foreign tourists in 2019, leaving revenue of nearly $1.3 billion.