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Foreword pablo piccato Prologues like this can be rhetorical obstacles to reach the substance of the book they intend to open. Brevity, therefore, is the greatest virtue of such exercises. The reader may skip these pages and come back to them after reading the book or read them now before plunging into the fascinating history that follows. My goals are simply to suggest some general conclusions around the themes of silence, justice, and the truth and to point to connections with other histories beyond Guatemala. I Ask for Justice uses judicial and administrative sources to document legal conflicts and their resolution. With the use of these sources, the book establishes the positions of the various social actors who, voluntarily or not, had to present their points of view in front of the representatives of the law who dutifully recorded their testimonies. While relations of power were not fundamentally altered in this judicial realm, they were negotiated and transformed . The law itself, its text and its interpretation, changed in the course of these transactions. Carey argues that citizens’ decisions to seek legal recourse transformed their relationships with the state, even in places and among people who had remained marginal to the project of that state. This insight requires a critical look at the received explanations it complicates , for it affects the very ways we learn about social relations. Historians of Guatemala and other Latin American countries have assumed that the hegemony of one sector of the population over another was merely an exercise of power at the expense of the truth. Social domination subordinated the rights of the less powerful members of society and undermined their words by denying them credibility and even rationality. Since Spanish arrived as the language of colonial rulers, words have had different value depending on who utters them and in what tongue. Translation, then, was not an innocent displacement of meaning from one language to another but xiv I Ask for Justice further confirmation, for those who already held such notions, of the inferiority and dissembling manners of indigenous speakers and of the need to counsel them against their voluntary ignorance of the law. Racism later reinforced these attitudes by arguing that those descending from the precontact populations had lesser intellectual abilities than those of European inheritance. The Guatemalan history of the second half of the twentieth century emerges from this narrative of power as the continuation of a series of overlapping processes of silencing the voices and claims of the majority , now most notably through the U.S.-aided repression of any attempts to assert autonomy or democracy. Exploitation of indigenous labor and the suppression of dissent, whether through colonial hierarchies or postcolonial violence, were undeniably at play in the history of the country; yet the findings in this book suggest that it is not enough to think that inequality of power effectively silenced all possibility of speaking the truth or claiming rights. When suspects or victims faced the state in court or in other situations prescribed by the law they did not willingly accept the lesser value imposed on their words. As many examples in the following pages illustrate, these men and women presented facts about their lives and deeds that their interlocutors had to accept as valid because they fit their own knowledge about reality. Testimonies and complaints were part of narratives about domestic relations, economic activity, and reputation that the representatives of the state could not just brush aside if their decisions were to have any authority . As Carey shows, the place of those representatives in the communities where they worked depended on their ability to acknowledge voices to which the national state’s ideology was not willing to grant much weight. Judicial venues, by definition, required the confrontation of multiple perspectives to build the factual or moral certainties that letrados then situated in the coordinates of the law to resolve each case. Letrados did not write a monologue: clerks, judges, and other actors with access to literacy certainly gave “political order [a] rigorously elaborated cultural expression,” yet they were constantly grappling with the need to register dissonant voices.¹ The judicial operation of recording and interpreting examined by Carey had to be repeated every time order was challenged, and it could not be completed in the absence of the subjects of that law. If not silence, it could instead be claimed, hegemony produced truth; by dictating the rules to generate valid statements about reality, “power,” variously...

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