Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala

In the early 1990's, I prepared political asylum petitions for numerous Mayan Indians that had fled the killing grounds of Guatemala. The single thing that surprised me most, were their stories of atrocities committed by the Guerillas. I had thought the "Army of the Poor" were fighting on behalf of the Mayan Indians against the Army and Guatemalan State. However, many of the stories I heard had to deal more with communal land struggles than Revolution against the State. I soon realized that the situation was vastly more complicated than I had thought. Soon after the worst of the killings were over, the anthropologist David Stoll was doing fieldwork in one of the areas most devestated during the War. What he found is a more nuanced story than many of the accounts outsiders were hearing during this time period. By looking at revolution and counter-insurgency on a village by village, hamlet by hamlet basis, Stoll paints an extraordinary complicated picture of an Indian peasantry caught between a brutal Army and its own violent history of intercomunal conflict. More than any other type of warfare, revolution and counter-insurgency lends itself to the analysis of micro-history. This book is an extraordinary account of a War that devestated Guatemala's indigenous people. David Stoll is to be commended for his personal bravery in gathering the local details of the War and his commitment to the unvarnished truth. One has to wonder how many more years it will take for the first anthropologists to be doing this same work in Iraq. Highly recommended.

I have spent the past several years of my life living and working in the Ixil region of Guatemala. During this time I have traveled to nearly all the places described in this book. I HAVE lived and worked with many former guerrillas and memebers of the "comunidades en resistencia" and I found Stoll's analysis of the Ixil region and its recent history to be both enlightening and accurate. His conclusions concerning the nature of the armed conflict in this region correspond very closely to my own experiences interacting with the people here. Those who criticize Stoll are generally people who have only a very superficial knowledge of Guatemalan reality or those who try manipulate the country's history to confirm their own political fantasies of third world "noble savages" carrying out poplar utopian revolutions. The only criticism I would offer to Stool is that he should have been much more vocal in his denunciations of the army's disgusting genocidal campaign against the Ixiles and the other indigenous peoples of Guatemala. By characterizing the army's campaign of mass murder as a simple reaction to a percieved threat, Stoll almost sounds as if he is excusing or rationalizing the unthinkable acts of this most horrible national institution.

I happen to have had him as a teacher in the early 90's. I also happen to have lived in Guatemala the whole of my formative year's. Fact is that his view's of why and how of that period, in this and other books about Guatemala, corelate with both my and my friends experiance in Guatemala. I highly recomend this and other books of his both for their informative value and their basic readability.

This study of how Guatemala's civil war impacted the lives of everyday campesinos is one of the best and most realistic studies of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) politics since Forrest Colburn's Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua. Stoll shows how both the guerrillas and the Guatemalan government share blame in putting peasants in the cross-fire of a war they didn't want. This book is sure to draw the ire of "romantic" revolutionaries that only see the Guatemalan conflict in terms of "good" vs. "evil."