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The capital of the Department of El Quiche, SANTA CRUZ DEL QUICHE lies half an hour north of Chichicastenango. A good paved road connects the two towns, running through pine forests and ravines, and past the Laguna Lemoa , a lake which, according to local legend, was originally filled with tears wept by the wives of K'iche' kings after their husbands had been slaughtered by the Spanish. The Catholic church suffered terribly in El Quiche in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when priests were singled out and murdered for their connections with the co-operative movement. The situation was so serious that Bishop Juan Geradi withdrew all his priests from the department in 1981. They have since returned to their posts, but the bishop himself was later assassinated in April 1998. On the central plaza , there's a large colonial church , built by the Dominicans with stone from the ruins of Utatlan. Beside the church, the large clock tower is also said to have been built with Utatlan stone stripped from the temple of Tohil, and in the middle of the plaza, a defiant statue of the K'iche' hero, Tecun Uman, stands prepared for battle. His position is undermined somewhat by an ugly urban tangle of hardware stores, bakeries and trash that surrounds this corner of the square and the looming, spectacularly ugly market building.
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