Did Tecum Umam Exist?

From Citizendium we get:

`` Did he ever actually exist?

Tecum Umam's status as either a man or a myth is a topic of lengthy and ongoing discussion. Historical research has demonstrated with some degree of surety that the man celebrated as a national hero of Guatemala probably did not exist quite as he is presented in the legend but there is also strong evidence to suggest that this character was not simply dreamed up. Ruud W. van Akkeren[4] defines two important questions that must be addressed on this issue:

* How does Tecum Umam fit within the K'iche' power structure?
* Was there really a historic duel between Tecum Umam and Pedro de Alvarado?

The evidence

One piece of evidence about Tecum Umam the historical person comes from Alvarado himself in a letter written to Hernán Cortés. The letter is quite sparing in details, however - the legend in its current form appears to have come down to us indirectly from indigenous documents that were produced some years after Alvarado's conquest through Francisco de Fuentes y Guzmán, who recorded the legend toward the end of the 17th century.''

Alvarado's letter to Cortés is the only contemporary documentation of his possible meeting with Tecum Umam that is available to us (the earliest indigenous documents that have been discovered date to 1550 or 1560). The letter doesn't reveal very much, however. In his description of his army's arrival in K'iche' territory and the first battle that ensued, Alvarado mentions that "in this affair one of the four chiefs of the city of Utatlan was killed, who was the captain general of all this country."[10] Alvarado does not provide a name for the K'iche' captain general; nor does he mention how or by whose hand the man was killed.

The K'iche' document cited by Fuentes y Guzmán, the Titulo del Ahpop Quecham, is now lost, but several other indigenous documents describe the arrival of Alvarado in what would become Guatemala. Prominent among them is the Título K'oyoi which describes the battle between the Tecum Umam and Pedro de Alvarado in terms very similar to the modern legend. This document also contains the earliest known reference to the K'iche' leader as "Tecum Umam."

I have a document by Ruud W. van Akkeren, from Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam, with claims to the historical exstence of Tecum Umam.