Chronicles of a Guatemalan Genocide Foretold: Violence, Trauma, and the Limits of Historical Inquiry

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH). Memoria del silencio. 12 vols.. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Oficina para Proyectos de las Naciones Unidas, 1999

In February 1999, the Guatemalan truth commission, officially known as the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), released the results of its investigation into over three decades of political repression. The CEH ruled not only that the state bore overwhelming responsibility for the more than two hundred thousand political murders, but that during a particularly brutal period between 1981 and 1983 it had committed acts of genocide. About a month prior to the release of these findings, anthropologist David Stoll published his exposé of Rigoberta Menchú. His book and subsequent press coverage kicked off a controversy that is still reverberating in the pages of U.S. newspapers, conferences, journals, and universities. What follows is less a review of these two investigations than a consideration of the ways in which both use historical inquiry to come to terms with criminal responsibility. (Full disclosure: I worked on the CEH and have already reviewed Stoll’s book [Grandin and Goldman 1999].) Even though the CEH and Stoll provide starkly different reasons why Guatemalans have suffered from such intense state violence, a comparison of the two highlights some of the promises and difficulties presented by the use of history to explain political repression.

The Return of the Repressive

If the CEH’s report, Memoria del silencio, has a philosophical predecessor, it is not one of the many similar investigations conducted by previous Latin American truth commissions. Past commissions in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador focused exclusively on a juridical interpretation of human rights violations—inquiries that limited themselves to asking who did what to whom and how. Why—a question that haunts Memoria del silencio—is hardly broached.

The CEH’s impassioned search for the meaning of Guatemala’s seemingly chronic violence, one that goes beyond a simple tallying up of responsibility for violations, suggests that Memoria del silencio’s more direct, if unacknowledged, precursor is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many have read the novel as a condensed version of Latin American history. The rise and fall of the fictional town of Macondo, as told through the fortunes of the Buendía family, is often interpreted as a parable of imperialism. The community is formed in a maelstrom of political, economic, and cultural change, only to be destroyed after it dares to challenge the dictates of a U.S. fruit company.

Lately, however, García Márquez has been taken to task for unwarranted literary exaggerations. Historian Eduardo Posada-Carbó (1998, 395), for example, criticizes the novel’s fictionalized account of the 1928 killing of Colombian workers striking against the United Fruit Company, noting that “only a handful of people” were murdered in the actual event—not the three thousand reported by García Márquez. He calls for a new inquiry, one with a “more balanced view of the nation’s history, less apocalyptic, without heroes or villains, and a better understanding of the conflicts faced by Colombians in their past” (414).

Catherine LeGrand has attempted to do exactly that. LeGrand (1998) identifies One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its tales of erased memory and shattered communities, as the cultural correlate to dependency theory, which tends to assign near-omnipotent power to international economic and political interests. The arrival of the foreign fruit company in Macondo “spells the end of the familiar world, and it destroys the capacity of communities to draw on their past so as to create new visions of what the future should be” (333). But LeGrand points out that although the novel ends with the destruction of Macondo, “in reality the United Fruit Company did not obliterate” (333) the Magdalena banana zone, the region on which Macondo...