Officially, according to the 1779 título of Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán, Nahualá and Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán share their territory according to ancient custom ("mancomunado"). Today, the vast territory of the two municipios covers 218 square kilometers, about 2/3 of which is under the control of Nahualeños (or AjNawala'iib'), the "people of Nahualá". Disputes between the two towns have been common, especially since 1999, when the government of Guatemala arranged for the cabecera of Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán to be moved to the site of Chwi' Patan (nicknamed "Alaska" by a North American Catholic priest who worked in Nahualá during the 1960s) within Nahualá's territory, after the original cabecera of Ixtahuacán in a remote piedmont site was damaged by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Publicizing photos of houses with large cracks that made homes unsafe, Ixtahuacanecos (i.e., the Inhabitants of Ixtahuacán) had claimed that the hurricane had totally destroyed their cabecera, yet in doing so, they failed to mention that most of the homes that exhibited such damage were located on unstable land within an area that had been swamp well into the 1980s.