The land where terror won

An author and activist talks about the atrocities committed in Guatemala, the people too frightened to speak of it and America's shameful support of the perpetrators.

By Suzy Hansen

Oct 16, 2002 | On Sept. 11, 1990, a Guatemalan anthropologist named Myrna Mack was stabbed to death by a Guatemalan army sergeant. Mack had been studying the suffering of rural indigenous communities at the hands of Guatemala's brutal military regime. That day, Mack became just another casualty of the 36-year civil war that claimed 200,000 Guatemalans, many of them noncombatants.

This September, 12 years after her death and six years since the end of the war, Mack's murder went to trial again. Of the three high-ranking officers charged -- considered authors of this and other human rights violations committed in Guatemala -- one, Col. Juan Valencia Osorio, was convicted of ordering the assassination of Mack. But what's missing from many news reports about the trial is the role of a third party in Guatemala's tragic past. In 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup installed a military regime that proceeded to intimidate and kill communists and leftist reformers. The U.S. funded this government throughout the Cold War with full knowledge of the atrocities taking place there.

Guatemalans themselves are just beginning -- slowly, painfully, fearfully -- to talk about what they witnessed. To them, it's no secret that the U.S. is responsible for the destabilization of their country. But just a decade ago, silence ruled Guatemala. Daniel Wilkinson was a young human rights worker in the early 1990s when he first visited that country. Nobody talked about the war. Nobody talked about the period of reform before the war. In Wilkinson's "Silence on the Mountain," a beautiful, harrowing and comprehensive narrative history of Guatemala's coffee-producing region, he explores what happens to citizens when terror wins and provides a chilling chronicle of how America's anticommunist Cold War policies destroyed the democratic fabric of Guatemala.

Wilkinson is a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. He spoke to Salon from his office in New York.

In your book, you try to give Americans a sense of what the collective amnesia was like in Guatemala. You write: "It was as if everyone in a small town in 1950s America had told you with a straight face that nothing had happened during the New Deal and that World War II had been a nonevent." Can you explain? Were you talking about the Agrarian Reform period in Guatemala or the 35 years of war that followed?

I went into this coffee-producing region where the war had played out. I had reason to believe that some pretty momentous and horrible things had taken place in the area. I assumed people would want to tell these stories. But people said nothing happened. I could understand why they might be uncomfortable speaking with a stranger about things related to the war because the war wasn't over. But what struck me was that when I tried to talk about the history of the country that preceded the war -- the Agrarian Reform in the 1950s, the formation of the plantations at the beginning of the century -- people didn't want to talk about that either.

The Agrarian Reform was in some ways bigger than the New Deal. It was a reform that affected pretty much all aspects of economic, social and political life in the countryside. The years of political violence that targeted individuals who were in any way associated with the political left had left a mark. The mark was that if you harbored any sympathies for the left, you could be a target, not just being blackballed, but actually being tortured to death. People didn't want to talk about politics or anything that would contaminate them.

What struck me was that you also explain how these plantation workers -- mostly Mayan Indians from the highlands -- traditionally passed along their histories orally. So it seemed especially cruel that their method of keeping their history was shut down.

At first, I thought that maybe this part of the country wasn't affected. But I knew certain things had happened. The [leftist] guerrillas had burned down this plantation house so I knew that the war was taking place there. Then I had a good friend who was a university activist and had grown up on a plantation nearby. He told me about his childhood memories. So already I had reason to doubt people who said nothing had happened.

My other indication that they weren't telling me the truth about the war was that they said that the Agrarian Reform didn't take place. I met this former mayor of the town who had written a history of his hometown. He omitted the years of that Agrarian Reform. He basically wrote himself out of his history. Later on, I met this other leader who had been a mayor during the war years. He acted like a clown until he took me aside, totally serious, and explained to me that during the height of the violence of the war, he had worked to help the people. He had a lot of information. He would warn people when they were in trouble. But having information was dangerous so the way to survive was to act like a fool.

How long was the Agrarian Reform period?

Ten years. There was a 10-year period of democratic rule that began in 1944 when the dictator was overthrown. Then there was an election in 1950 and that man, President Arbenz, carried out the Agrarian Reform in 1952. It was really the culmination of 10 years of democratic reform.

Just to make this clear: Were there communists involved in this reform? What was America so afraid of?

There were communists involved and that's what the U.S. government was afraid of. There was a communist party that was pretty small -- about 5,000 members -- but very influential with President Arbenz. The president wasn't a member of the party but some of his closest advisors were and they played a role in designing this agrarian reform.

Next Page: Fighting communism by crushing the free market

• View blog reactions