Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

"Silence on the Mountain- Stories of terror, betrayal, and forgetting in Guatemala" is a book written by Daniel Wilkinson who is a graduate from Yale Law School who works for Human Rights Watch. It chronicles his journey through Guatemala on a motorcycle trying to find out what happened there after the CIA coup in 1954 in which the democratically elected government was overthrown. What he meets is a type of collective amnesia. Most people will not speak to him about what went on because they fear repression. This eventually changes when he gets one entire village to open up to him and share their collective stories of a massacre that had occurred there. He talks to people who tell him about the guerilla movement that grew in opposition to the US backed government. They tried to give back the land rights to the peasant population that had been taken away from them.

The Guatemalan government never really had a chance in implementing the agrarian reforms that they planned to pull through in the 1950s where peasants where to get their own land. Much if not all of the land in the country was owned by private land owners. When the president Arbenz said that he would give some of the land back to the workers a plan was set in motion to take him out. The working system was structured in the following way in Guatemala. Germans had come there in the late 1800s and started coffee plantations. Here people got jobs but where always immediately put into debt. This debt became a trap that they usually ended up paying off the rest of their lives meaning that they where more like slaves. This indebted servitude was something that Arbenz wanted to stop with his land reforms in the 1950s. But with the CIA's help a man called Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas overthrew Arbenz in the operation PBSuccess. Creating a reign of US backed rightwing dictators that ruled the country for 40 years. The amounts of repression that the people of Guatemala lived through during these regimes was immense. It reached its peak in the early 1980s. Then the army started to use its "scorched earth" methods to fight the guerillas. This meant that often whole villages where erased of the face of the earth with their entire populations being ruthlessly killed. Most of these villages where Mayan Indian villages and the contained mainly innocents. About 400 villages where eradicated under this campaign and the genocide was in effect. It is said that 200,000 civilians lost their lives in total during these years. And this is truly the dark side of a guerilla war. That the army has no idea of where he enemy is or what they look like since they are not wearing uniforms and therefore attack civilians as a way of influencing, intimidating and hurting the guerillas as well as the locals. The same thing is starting to happen now in Iraq. That more and more reports are coming in that American soldiers are wounding and killing civilians. But Guatemala is truly a very graphic example of state sponsored terror where rape, violence against women and children, and slaughtering of innocents was used as a weapon.

This was all done by a government that had full American support and even trained its soldiers at the now infamous School of the Americas(which has now changed its name). America was complacent in the bloody history of Guatemala. On the contrary to Ronald Reagan who gave the most oppressive dictator in Guatemala, Hector Gramajo, his full support, Bill Clinton fessed up and gave the Guatemalan people a formal apology in the late 1990s for his countries involvement in the genocides and bloody history of this poor country. Not that this changes much for the people of that country because as Daniel Wilkinson writes: "For Guatemala was a place where terrorism did in fact win."

Now the situation in Guatemala is starting to gradually change. With globalization more and more people have started take an interest and see what is happening within the country. Many more human rights activists are working there and it is not possible for the government to implement the same brutal techniques they did before without having an outcry from the international community. The Mayan indians have managed to get an agarian reform where land has been granted them but they are far from finished. They are still working to see that more land is given to them. After reading this book I was both shocked, angered and felt sick. I had always been fascinated by the Mayan indians and loved their art. I even went with my friend to a Mayan art exhibit in Helsinki in the late 90s. Its only now that I realize their history is closely interlaced with American foreign policy. And its only now that I realized how much these people suffered. These types of human rights abuses are unacceptable.

A balanced & well-written chronicle of state terror (11/11 people found this helpful)

Daniel Wilkinson's "Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala" is a balanced and well-written chronicle of State terror. The author dedicates many years, abandons law school and runs up credit card debt to research and write a glaring historical account of the struggle between large landowners and the poor in Guatemala.

Wilkinson's early focus is on the 1950 presidential victory of Jacobo Arbenz GuzmÃ¡n. He then explains the daring 1952 implementation of a far-reaching Agrarian Reform law called Degree 900. The author reaches out to Guatemalan students who favored the reforms and declared that peace, "required greater equality and greater equality required a redistribution of land in the countryside."

Wilkinson then flashes back to 1892 when twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Endler leaves Germany for Central America. Endler eventually becomes a large coffee plantation owner and it is through him the author explains the historical struggle with poor illiterate workers who provide the labor that builds a coffee nation.

From there Wilkinson flash forwards to 1954 and the carefully choreographed CIA overthrow of democratically elected President GuzmÃ¡n. Shortly thereafter agricultural students protested, "We who receive an education paid for by the people have a debt to the people! We who have the power to analyze have the responsibility to criticize! An agronomist should carry, in one hand, a machete...and, in the other, a machine gun."

The remainder of the book is a painstaking tale of documenting the State terror of the 1980's when 200,000 Guatemalans perished. Quite frankly, parts of this book are brutal. Nevertheless, the author must be commended for risking his life and traveling to the interior and urging the poor to testify before the Guatemalan Truth Commission that officially investigated the atrocities of the armed forces.

In conclusion, Daniel Wilkinson courageously points a finger at Washington for being so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that they rationalize away qualms and uneasiness. He even quotes an American embassy official who was uneasy with early military abuses and wrote in 1968, "the record must be made clearer that the Untied States Government opposes the concept and questions the wisdom of counter-terror; the record must be made clearer that we have made this known unambiguously to the Guatemalans; otherwise we will stand before history unable to answer the accusations that we encouraged the Guatemalan Army to do these things." Unfortunately, no one in Washington was listening. This is a tier-one book...buy it.

Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

Daniel Wilkinson

Reader Reviews:

Excellent book about Guatemalas dark past (0/0 people found this helpful)

A balanced & well-written chronicle of state terror (11/11 people found this helpful)

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