The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (review)

In The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy, Harvard anthropologist Jennifer Schirmer examines the role of the military during Guatemala’s civil war and the so-called transition to democracy that, in her eyes, never happened. Her central question is the following: “how [implacably] antidemocratic are the Guatemalan armed forces, and what hope is there for a genuine guarantee of human rights projections in the near future?” ¹

Schirmer refines traditional characterizations of the military-state structure in Guatemala and shuns facile explanations of the violence. The aim of her study is “to expand the evaluation of human rights beyond [body counting] and the exercise of rule of law . . . to one that examines the structural nature and logic of repression.” ² Thus, she examines national security as “an integral part of traditional democratic and legal structures and discourse.” ³ And as such, she helps to fine tune conceptions of the state and its purported democratizing processes.

Schirmer’s perspective “stands in contrast to many political science studies of the military that have focused . . . on the strategies of state actors” ⁴ from the outside looking in. Her ethnographic method allows the author to capture military thinking from the inside—from what anthropologists call the “native point of view.” Schirmer produces an institutional ethnography from hundreds of qualitative interviews, conducted between 1983 and 1996, with military personnel and others involved in Guatemala’s Proyecto Politico-Militar (politico-military project). She places a deliberately heavy emphasis on interviews with Colonel Gramajo, a major player in military intelligence, whom she calls the “granddaddy of the G-2,” ⁵ perhaps due to his cooperation for many years with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). She sees his career—and his words—as “a window onto the political mentalit[y] and cultural logics” ⁶ of the military elite.

Moreover, Schirmer’s grim, methodical style is well matched to the subject matter of the book. There is an elegant logic and military-like precision to her writing. Like her highly disciplined research, her book is thorough in its analysis. Her dissection of the anatomy of the Guatemalan military is superb and stands out as a much needed chapter in an understanding of Guatemala’s recent history.

Schirmer does not portray the military as a poorly equipped, unprofessional, reactionary institution, beholden to the US, and desperately responding to domestic threats to its hegemony—as is typical of the institution’s Central American counterparts in other studies. ⁷ Rather, what Schirmer reveals is a deliberate and strategic Proyecto Politico-Militar, which became institutionalized over time. The author carefully reconstructs the military’s rise to power throughout the 1960s and its current octopus-like hold on the Guatemalan government. Her examination of the internal logic and structure of the military, the political-military complex, and the state’s national security doctrine are outstanding.

According to Schirmer, El Proyecto Politico-Militar consisted of the following: Stage 1: pacification by way of massacre; Stage 2: restructuring by way of party politics and elections; and Stage 3: reconstituting civilian society by way of education, persuasion, and long-term crisis management of conflict that includes selective repression and killing. What becomes clear is that repression is viewed by officers as an intrinsic and inevitable part of the twenty to twenty-five year transition to democracy. Schirmer reveals the key role that military intelligence played in directing the illegal detentions, torture, forced disappearances, and executions of thousands of Guatemalans, a position supported by the report of the independent Historical Clarification Commission, released 25 February 1999. ⁸ Her evidence also corroborates the Commission report’s demonstration of the key role played by the CIA. Unlike the Historical Clarification Commission, however, Schirmer stops short of calling this period of violence a genocide.

The book is an excellent complement to other analyses of the Guatemalan Military. Schirmer argues that the military rise was the result of the elite’s desire to maintain the country’s archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure. Guatemala’s...