UNDERSTANDING POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN GUATEMALA

UNDERSTANDING POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN GUATEMALA

Sanford, Victoria. Buried secrets, Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 313 p.

May, Rachel. Terror in the Countryside: Campesino Responses to Political Violence in Guatemala, 1954-1985. Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2001. 234 pp.

McCleary, Rachel M. Dictating Democracy: Guatemala and the End of Violent Revolution. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999. 197 pp.

Studies and research on Guatemala have relatively decreased in the last years. Nevertheless, the shuddering brutality of the violence experienced by this country in recent years still draws the attention of foreign scholars, and especially those from the United States. Nowadays, it can be ascertained that the slaughter of Guatemalans executed by the National Army of Guatemala is unprecedented in any country and at any time in Latin America. Of the three books reviewed, two contribute new data to the information about the tragic originality of this political violence. The third book refers to problems in the construction of democracy in a society that was shaken by prolonged internal conflict. As a result, the three books share common themes: the political crisis, the violence, and the role played by military actors.

Even as the three texts refer to the same Guatemalan reality, the thematic particularities that they analyze gives each a unique informative and analytical value. Thus, Victoria Sanford's book is, in part, a chronicle of the horror, with more than four hundred interviews with indigenous women, widows of the war who relate what they saw and what they now feel. The central argument of her work is the confirmation that, in its terror spiral, the Guatemalan state violated the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (U. N. Assembly, 9/XII/48). Genocide is the application by the state of a sustained policy of destruction, aimed at a national group, for ethnic, racial, religious, or political reasons. It is a controversial topic that goes beyond the criminal destruction of more than 626 indigenous villages,1 200 000 people murdered or disappeared, and the physical, cultural and emotional destruction of entire communities.

In her extensive work, Prof. Sanford presents a testimony of genocidal brutality that can only be explained by the depth of the prevalent racism. In the phenomenology of terror that she traces, she recurs to ethnographic and anthropological tools that embody-as she explains-a heterodox methodology that includes both the qualitative and quantitative, and moves between the micro and the macro levels. She does not analyze the violence as a living act, but instead focuses on the effects that it produces, and she draws on the experience of numerous exhumations that have taken place (by the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala) since 1994. The act of looking for dead bodies, exhuming them, and delivering them to their kinsmen constitutes an arduous political, historic, legal, and psychological process. The process of exhumation also raises the question of "how silent are silences?"

Buried secrets is made up of an introduction and ten chapters in which the description of the author's findings constitutes an ascending trip up to the moment when the military violence reaches a genocidal level (Chap. 6). The first chapter is titled, more than symbolically, "Bones Don't lie," and the last one "Excavations in the Heart," because amid the anxiety and the pain of the moment, the indigenous peoples stir the soil, and they are still able to recognize among the bones some familiar details. To identify in such a way a loved one brings great relief and confers the certitude that the corpse will have at last an everlasting rest (descanso eternO). It is difficult to summarize an extensive book, full of details, which shows the state to be responsible for numerous crimes. Sanford's text is yet another contribution to the elucidation of what truly happened in the 1980s, and it is also a silence-breaking cry, a legal testimony, a pressing request for justice.

The culprits, military or civilian, are still there, enjoying absolute impunity which will only come to an end when the victims or the humanitarian organizations find a response to their requests from the democratic state that is in construction. Until the present day this is still a difficult task. One decade later, and the counterinsurgents still hold substantial power and strength.

In Terror in the Countryside, Prof. May analyzes another period of Guatemalan history, and she also takes an interest in another topic related to the same victims of state violence. She is interested in the peasant organizations and the repression to which they were subjected during two historical periods that she has delineated: from 1954 to 1972, and from 1972 to 1985. We are, in fact, dealing with two cycles of violence, which correspond to two distinct organizational periods of the peasant sectors. Thus the author establishes the dilemma in which numerous scholars are trapped in their attempts to explain the violence and the organization of the rural actors. The relationship between these phenomena has been explained in causal terms, postulating that violence was a reactionary response to the political demands of the popular sectors, fueled by anticommunist ideology; or in more dialectical terms, contending that popular movements are one aspect of an economic and political disequilibrium that always erupts in violence.