Years of Terror, Decades of Denial

Guatemala’s history slips at times into magical realism. In 1902, President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, a character who might have been contrived by Isabel Allende, issued a decree denying the eruption of the Santa Maria volcano, which was at that moment raining ash and flaming debris on the capital. Rather than alarm European investors, Estrada Cabrera sacrificed truth to power, an option exercised again half a century later, this time by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which announced by radio to the Guatemalan people the existence of a civil war that did not, until then, exist.

The imaginary war soon became real enough, and by the 1980s, the Reagan administration was officially denying massacres perpetrated by the Guatemalan army in return for the army’s help in lying to Congress about illegal arms shipments to Nicaraguan Contras. Prisoners of the tales others told about them, Guatemalans expressed dissent by inventing dark legends of robachicos, gringos who came to steal the kidneys of children for sale in American hospitals. With history splintered into a thousand private memories, stories could no longer explain, only conceal.

In 1996, as part of a peace agreement between the Guatemalan resistance and the government, the Comision para el Esclarecimiento Historico, sanctioned by the United Nations, began a search for the “authentic truth” of Guatemala’s dirty war amid the debris of deceit and betrayal dating back to 1954. Daniel Wilkinson, a Harvard law student, volunteered to gather stories from La Igualdad, a town in the coffee piedmont surrounded by plantations where the dark glossy beans are harvested and sent north to fill the bins at espresso bars in the United States.

Wilkinson had tried for several years to break the barrier of silence surrounding the community’s past. Harvard connections had opened the doors of generals and landowners, but workers and ordinary townspeople deflected his questions with evangelical slogans. The act of storytelling required a trust that years of psychological warfare had systematically broken. “No one believes in anyone anymore,” one woman explained.

The silence was thickest around the years immediately before the 1954 coup. During the preceding decade, presidents Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz attempted to modernize the Guatemalan state. In the early 20th century, law and repression had built the coffee economy, displacing Mayan peoples and binding them in debt to plantations owned by German immigrants.

Arevalo and Arbenz set out to replace this feudalism, instituting a minimum wage and banning compulsory labor. In 1952, Arbenz issued Decree 900, a land reform that might have made Guatemala’s social volcano disappear. Leaving the coffee and banana groves intact, it gave workers just enough property to change them from dependents into consumers. It changed the world of La Igualdad, but few would speak of it to Wilkinson. An ex-guerrilla could only recall that his parents had told him “about how for a short time we had been able to live with dignity.”

In 1954, the CIA, in one of its first successful covert actions, overthrew Arbenz and his reforms, and Wilkinson’s research reveals how thoroughly the counterrevolution stripped away 10 years of progress. Workers were told that the sewing machines and motorbikes bought with their earnings were not theirs and had to be “returned” to the landlord. Plantations expelled workers who had unionized or accepted property under the reform. And there were arrests and executions. Guatemalans learned to fear “politics” that could make jobs, homes and people disappear, and so the memory of what was once hoped for vanished instead.

After a peace settlement ended the civil war in 1996, fragments of the past returned to La Igualdad. Lists of the disappeared emerged from hiding places. Guerrillas came back from the mountains, and the army’s presence became less threatening. Wilkinson writes after the manner of Philip Gourevitch (“We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families”), although somewhat less sparely, describing interviews but also the motorcycle ride to the interview, the sudden tropical cloudburst afterward and the hotel rooms to which he arrived, muddy and discouraged, at the end of a long day. Gourevitch’s account of the Rwandan genocide asks how a nation heals from the shared memory of trauma; Wilkinson wants to know where the memories come from and who fills the silences in the aftermath of a national catastrophe.

Resistance to the government, repeatedly frustrated by rigged elections in the 1960s and 1970s, erupted in guerrilla war in the 1980s. In that conflict, the behavior of soldiers on both sides was shaped by stories: One of Wilkinson’s informants explains that the rebels mounted revenge attacks on landlords and police posts until Rodrigo Asturias, son of the Nobel prize-winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, assumed their leadership. Asturias taught them their struggle was for “identity” and refashioned them into “a real guerrilla army.” Leaving the plantations, they spread across the chain of volcanoes stretching between the capital and the Mexican border and mounted bold attacks on army garrisons. Identifying themselves as the army of the poor, they were stunned when the poor occasionally resisted their help.

The sweep of the rebellion threw the army off balance until the army itself achieved a narrative breakthrough. Under the guidance of Hector Gramajo, the army rewrote the war as a struggle for its own professional identity. To become a real army, it stopped answering to landowners, politicians or even the United States. With U.S. supplied firepower, soldiers emerged from guard posts around plantations and clinched the guerrillas’ base areas in surround-and-destroy operations. Terror, including death squads and the massacre of whole villages, severed the link between the rebels and the people. The war had been effectively won by the early 1990s, but it was unclear who the army had won the victory for. Neither story proved salable to the electorate, and both Gramajo and the rebels lost at the polls to Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen, who belonged to neither faction.

Beneath these shifting representations is the reality of the global market, whose temper and moods are familiar to Central Americans. In a Guatemalan town, Wilkinson observes, “you could watch the world economy chugging away, like an engine with its casing off.” Coffee and bananas are unforgiving commodities, imposing a cycle of bonanza and debt deadly to workers but hard also on their employers. Liberal landowners who resolved after the war to offer minimum wage and benefits found they had to evict half their employees to make it work. The 1996 treaty brought peace but not redemption. Guatemalans continue to live among enemies and with the knowledge that a blip on the Chicago exchange or a strategy shift in Washington could begin it all again.

When the Comision para el Esclarecimiento Historico (Commission for Historical Elucidation) arrived in La Igualdad two years after the truce, it came close to igniting a new war. The town’s rival political factions, seeking to control the inquiry, each enlisted families of the dead to appear at separate hearings. As the town arrayed its memories for combat, Wilkinson dropped his observer’s neutrality and tried to bring the groups together in the face of intimidation by anonymous goon squads. He had struggled earlier with doubts about the value of truth under the shadow of destruction. In school, he had believed in knowledge, “that it was attainable and that attaining it was good.”

La Igualdad’s impenetrable mystery had shaken Wilkinson’s faith, but now a collective assertion of truth seemed the only escape from the culture of fear. As he vividly captures the emotion of the community’s terrifying struggle toward that exit, he ultimately suggests that safety for ordinary Guatemalans will depend on their skill at putting stories before global audiences through the media and the human rights organizations. At the book’s close, however, we do not know if the self-knowledge La Igualdad gained brought more security or less.

The truth commission’s final report made front page news in February 1999. The report cataloged the eradication of 400 Mayan villages and 200,000 deaths or disappearances, but refrained from assigning blame to specific individuals. It laid heaviest responsibility on the army and the United States, which had acted to maintain, the commission chairman said, an “archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure.” At its Langley, Va., headquarters, where an inscription in marble reads “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” a CIA spokesman observed that it would be inappropriate to comment.