Mayan Strength in a Macabre Land : UNFINISHED CONQUEST: The Guatemala Tragedy, <i> By Victor Perera, with photographs by Daniel Chauche (UC Press: $27; 382 pp.)</i>

Guatemalan-born but now residing in the United States, Victor Perera is a journalist in the style of Tom Wolfe. To be sure, the subject of this dramatic book--the attempted destruction of the Mayan people by the Guatemalan Army--couldn’t be further from Wolfe’s. But the comparison holds when you look at style: Interspersing personal memoir with political history, Perera is able to imbue even the most Dantesque scenes with tenderness and warmth.

Perera tells us, for example, that while writing about the little-known Mayan holocaust, he worked at the Central American Research Center in Antigua, located in one of the most magnificent 17th-Century buildings in that equally splendid rococo city. There, Perera discovered a hummingbird nest in one of the bougainvillea and honeysuckle plants that draped the patio’s columns. He visited them daily, wide-eyed as a child, and watched with utmost fascination as the miniature birds learned to fly and disappeared in the silvery, thin air around the majestic Agua volcano.

By leavening the narrative with optimism, Perera’s romantic sensibility helps us confront the bleakness that is part and parcel of daily life in Guatemala City. We see how the thousands of people who live inside the city’s main dump eke out a living by fighting with vultures and bulldozers for scraps of plastic and rotten food. The denizens of the dump feel that life is safer there than in their original villages, most of which have been ravaged by the army.

Perera vividly brings home the heinous nature of the army’s crimes. We see Marina watch a soldier bayonet her aunt in the stomach, remove her 4-month-old fetus, and smash it against a house post. With such macabre scenes, it would be easy for an author to tumble into righteous indignation or syrupy melancholia. But Perera never gets lost in the sordidness of his subject.

Perera’s dilemma, whether he is recounting the military training of a comandante or the political evolution of a mayor, is more of a philosophical and moral nature. Marina’s forgiving words could just as well be Perera’s: “I have looked in the eyes of the soldier who raped and stabbed my aunt and killed her unborn child, and I know he is a child of the Mayas who lives in Christ as I am. Is it for me to pass judgment on him? Is it not for the soldier, driven by his superiors to commit these senseless atrocities, to seek forgiveness?”

What emerges clearly from “Unfinished Conquest” is the passionately committed love Perera has for his native country and its Mayan peoples. He desperately wants to tell the Maya’s story not only to bring home its holocaust proportions (Perera is Jewish), but because the enduring violence has compelled him to search for positive values in his culture.

He finds them in the Mayas’ courage. In a fiesta held in Joyabaj, a village in southern Quiche, Perera observes a variation in the monotonous Dance of the Conquest that he had recently seen elsewhere in the Guatemalan highlands. When a dancer disguised as a Spanish conquistador lifted his long sword to smite a brown-masked dancer representing a Mayan, the Mayan, rather than retreating, lashed back with his chain, forcing the conquistador to his knees.

The Mayas, Perera implies, have much to teach Westerners. We meet Benito Ramirez, for instance, a native from Todos Santos, the Mayan village that “civilization” had passed by until the intrepid Western traveler Maud Oakes discovered it in 1945. Famous for the two crosses in the main plaza that are an icon of the region’s mixed Catholic and Mayan religions, the town has now added a third cross, planted in the old Mayan ruins above the town, to commemorate the todosanteros killed in the violence of 1981 and ’82.

Visiting New York City in his first trip anywhere outside his village, Ramirez is impressed with the city’s ethnic diversity, but troubled “that he had hardly seen any birds other than his hostess’s Thanksgiving turkey, which he found too bland for his palate. . . . Unlike Todos Santos, he discovered, no two people in New York ate the same thing or lived in the same way. There was no accepted way of doing things.

“Ramirez concluded, ‘We have many problems in Guatemala. The violence has turned neighbor against neighbor, and the army continues to control us through the civil defense patrols. Our costumbres are dying, and we are forgetting the wisdom of our ancestors. But after visiting New York, I realize our Mayan communities have more culture than I had thought.

“North American evangelicals come to tell us what to believe in, but their own people do not know what to believe in. Their anthropologists come to study our customs, but don’t seem to pay any attention to the homeless people in their own cities. North Americans should work to save their own culture before they come down to Guatemala to pretend to save ours.”