The land where terror won

So people knew that the U.S. was behind this. But how did we keep the press out of Guatemala? You say that the New York Times really didn't report on this until the 1990s.

There was some coverage of Guatemala through the years. In terms of the 1954 coup, the New York Times pulled its correspondent.

According to the truth commission there was something like 200,000 people killed in Guatemala. In many ways it was the most underreported conflict in the region. The U.S. government did not tell the world what it knew about what was taking place there. This was most pronounced in the early '80s when the government carried out a scorched-earth campaign. The truth commission determined it was genocide. And we know from declassified documents that the U.S. government knew what was going on.

So what was going on? You tell the story of a village called Sacuchum. You were the first person to talk to them?

At the coffee plantations, if people didn't want to talk about the war, they would say something bad happened at Sacuchum. I managed to connect with someone from there and went up to the community. I expected people there to be as reluctant to speak as everywhere else. Instead, they arranged this open community meeting so people could recount what had occurred. Basically, the army had arrived one day and rounded up over 40 people and taken them off into the woods and killed them without firing a bullet -- meaning that they strangled them, they cut them up.

At first people were hesitant to speak but once they started, it was an outpouring of really horrible details. I asked, "Have you been given the chance to denounce this publicly?" and they said no.

Why did they decide to speak to you?

I think most people who suffer these sorts of abuses feel a strong need to denounce them publicly. The difference here was that the people in Sacuchum weren't paralyzed by fear the way the people in the plantations were. And I think the reason for this was that in the village, unlike in the plantations, there still existed the sort of community institutions and support networks that could help people process their fear and trauma.

Why did the army pick this village?

This village had supplied guerrillas with food. There were a lot of collaborators in this village. In 1980 and '81 the guerrilla movement had been growing in numbers and the military government had been losing its credibility throughout the country. It seemed like there might actually be a revolution. At some point, the Guatemalan army realized that the only way to stop the guerrillas was to go after their supporters. Sacuchum was one of hundreds of examples of massacres where the army just went in and rounded up the people they suspected and killed them.

And it was very brutal and bloodthirsty. Where did this army's hatred come from?

I don't think you understand it in terms of hatred. It was pretty systematic. What the army engaged in was a massive campaign of terror.

Was killing them in that manner part of their psy-war tactics?

I'd assume. They don't leave a paper trail saying, "this is the way to terrorize people." Look, 200,000 people were killed and there were never more than 10,00 or 15,000 guerrillas. Why did they kill so many people? The army's target was the civilian population.

This is the thing about terror. What distinguishes terror from other types of violence is that the principle target is not the person who is killed but rather the ones who survive. The purpose of this type of violence is to instill this intense and overwhelming fear in people. That's clearly what happened in Guatemala.

And so how do you measure fear? How do you explain its impact on people's lives? You can't do it through a body count. You need to gauge what's going on inside people's heads. One measure is to look at what they say and what they don't say. Or look at a local historian who can't talk about what happened in the 1950s because it turns out that his own son was tortured by the army. That's the legacy.

Once I got closer to people the emotions would come out. Now that the war's over people are starting to open up. People were facing this really terrible heart-wrenching conflict -- they'd been carrying around this rage, sorrow and need for denunciation for years, but they were still scared. Some still can't talk even though the war's over.

Now, the guerrillas were terrorizing people as well. Who did they target mostly?

There were several guerrilla organizations and they changed over the years. For the most part, when the guerrilla movement got strong in the early '80s, their method was to attack military targets. But as the army succeeded in isolating them from the local population and their supporters, they became increasingly desperate. I described the incident in the book where they burned down the plantation house, an act aimed at generating fear among the plantation owners. In that sense, it's an act of violence aimed at generating fear. Different guerrilla organizations committed human rights violations and there were a few massacres committed by the guerrillas. Some pretty awful things. Early on in the 1960s there were assassinations.

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