Guatemala is one of the Central American countries thar for some years
now have been participating in a regional program for natural hazard
assessment and disaster reduction, funded by the Nordic countries and
coordinated by a regional institution (CEPREDENAC). Recent work relat
ed to seismic hazard has included the standardization, reporting and p
rocessing of seismicity data across the borders, followed by regional
hazard modeling. The work presented here for Guatemala City represents
a step from a regional to a more local level, based on reevaluation o
f historical seismicity, geological data related to active faults, and
attenuation relations recently derived from analysis of strong motion
records from the region. The site specific hazard calculations indica
te that expected values of peak ground acceleration are ranging from l
ess than 2 to more than 6 m s(-2), corresponding to annual exceedence
probabilities ranging from 0.1 to 0.001, respectively.