Murder, Memory, and the Maya

May 2013 was a historic month for Guatemala. After months of testimony and numerous legal delays and disputes in a landmark trial, a Guatemalan court convicted the country’s ex-president General Efraín Ríos Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the country’s poor during his fourteen-month presidency in the early 1980s. Though Ríos Montt’s defense team argued that the general was protected from legal action by a clause in the country’s 1996 Peace Accords¹ granting amnesty to those who conducted “war-related crimes” during the country’s thirty-six-year conflict, a judge ordered Ríos Montt to stand trial. The genocide trial of the former dictator, alleged to be responsible for the deaths of 86,000 Maya, began on March 19, 2013.² His subsequent conviction on May 10, 2013, offered Guatemalans a glimpse of the justice that had eluded them for decades. Ten days later, however, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court overturned the trial’s verdict based on a procedural concern, annulling Ríos Montt’s sentence and invalidating all trial proceedings after April 19.³ When a new court postponed Ríos Montt’s retrial indefinitely (at the time of the writing of this review, it has suggested January 2015 as a potential date for the new trial), it left the fate of the former president, and the future of the country, in limbo.

Though Ríos Montt’s presidency ended nearly thirty years ago, it remains one of the darkest periods in Guatemala’s history. Life in Guatemala has been forever marked by the violence and oppression of the civil war, lasting from 1960 to 1996. Recent scholarly publications on Guatemala explore the roots of its present-day challenges and inequalities. The works reviewed here contextualize Guatemala’s contemporary circumstances in the defining moments of its history: the 1944 October Revolution, the 1954 coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz, the ensuing decades of military repression, and the emergence of the Pan-Mayan movement. These works explore how Guatemala’s long history of corruption, instability, ethnic discrimination, slow economic development, and systematic violence prompted the formation of indigenous political movements and impacted the experiences of its residents. They suggest that although Guatemala’s civil war ended more than fifteen years ago, the country is not at peace. Peace, they show, is more than the mere absence of war; to achieve peace, Guatemala must confront and resolve the inequalities deeply rooted in its society. By documenting the atrocities of the last century and the cultural responses to them, these works enhance our understanding of how the legacy of Guatemala’s past defines the realities of its present.

In 1954, a coup overthrew the government of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, ending the period that Guatemalans identify as the Ten Years of Spring. In 1944, Árbenz helped to overthrow the repressive dictator Jorge Ubico, who regarded rural campesinos as an obstacle impeding the country’s modernization (Way, 37–38). Known as the October Revolution, the 1944 movement to overthrow Ubico espoused freedom and equality for all. Among the changes introduced following the October Revolution was President Árbenz’s radical agrarian reform legislation. Árbenz’s administration confiscated more than four hundred thousand acres of unused agricultural land from the United Fruit Company, which received $1.25 million dollars for its loss (Lovell, 134). The...