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Silence
on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
by Daniel Wilkinson
Book Description: Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting
and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's
thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more
than 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were "disappeared")
at the hands of the U.S.-backed military goverment.
In 1993 Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, begins to investigate
the arson of a coffee plantation's manor house by a band of guerrillas.
The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery
that compels Wilkinson to seek out an impressive cross-section of the country's
citizens, from coffee workers to former guerrillas to small-town mayors
to members of the ruling elite. From these sources he is able to piece
together the largely unwritten history of the long civil war, following
its roots back to a land reform movement derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military
coup in 1954 and, further back, to the origins of Guatemala's plantation
system, which put Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American
and European markets.
Silence on the Mountain reveals a buried history that has never been
told before, focusing on those who were most affected by Guatemala's half-century
of violence, the displaced native people and peasants who slaved on the
coffee plantations. These were the people who had most to gain from the
aborted land reform movement of the early 1950s, who filled the growing
ranks of the guerrilla movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and who suffered
most when the military government retaliated with violence.
Decades of terror-inspired fear have led Guatemalans to adopt a survival
strategy of silence so complete it verges on collective amnesia. Wilkinson's
great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories,
and it is through these stories -- dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking --
that we come to see the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that is relevant
not only to Guatemala but to any country where terror has been used as
a political tool.
Hardcover from Houghton Mifflin Co
Book Published: 26 September, 2002 |
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Guatemala
Rainbow
by Gianni Vecchiato
Paperback from Pomegranate
Book Published: January, 1990 |
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Guatemala:
Never Again!
by Archidiocese of Guatemala, Thomas Quigley
Paperback from Orbis Books
Book Published: December, 1999 |
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Guatemalan
Journey
by Stephen Connely Benz
Paperback from Univ of Texas Press
Book Published: 1996 |
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The
Guatemalan Tax Reform
by Roy Bahl, Sally Wallace, Jorge Martinez-Vazquez
Paperback from Westview Press
Book Published: December, 1996 |
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