Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope Volume 8

In this text, Manz tells us a 30-year story beginning with the Guatemalan Civil War. Her chronicle focuses on the evolution of a small Guatemalan village named Santa Maria Tzeja. She tells the story from the sequential stance of creation, destruction, and resurrection. Within this structural narrative Manz covers an eclectic compendium of grassroot stories that range from community identity to indigenous struggles for equality, from hope to compassion, from survival to death. This review is organized as follows. First I briefly describe the context of Guatemala in the 1980s and 1990s; I describe the human casualties and national holocaust starting from a broader perspective into a narrower local angle. The second part describes the approach, methods and methodology that Manz used to tell her story. The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from 1960 to 1996. The origin of the war dates back to the U.S. intervention in 1954, when the elected government of Arbenz was overthrown. The coup was planned by the CIA to impose governments that would better serve the interests of the United States. After being run a few years by US-friendly presidents, in 1960 a group of young military officers started a revolution to depose "foreign interests" from Guatemalan territory. When they failed, several went into hiding or exile and established close ties with other revolutionary countries. This rebellious group became the nucleus of the organized armed forces insurrection against the Guatemalan government that would last 36 years. A twelve-volume report, published by the United Nations promoter, the Historical Clarification Commission, reported that about two hundred thousand (200,000) Guatemalans were murdered during this period -- 93% at the hands of state forces and related paramilitary groups. More than six hundred massacres took place across the nation. From 1981 to 1983, as many as 1.5 million people, out of 8 million Guatemalans, were displaced internally or had to flee the country. This book (Paradise in Ashes) is the story of Santa Maria Tzeja. It chronicles the exceptional moments of birth, destruction and rebirth of the small village, in El Quinche province, over three decades of authoritarian rule. Manz argues that although Santa Maria Tzeja is not a "typical village" in Guatemala, it is a place that fully embodies the forces and conflicts defining contemporary Guatemala. Furthermore, the author claims that the village has been persistently troubled since it's founding. The peasants who first arrived there had always been squeezed by the lack of land, and given the political structure of the country, had little or no chances of overcoming these difficulties. The fate of Santa Maria Tzeja was sealed in 1980, when the village was visited by a band of men that would later grow to be Guatemala's largest insurgent organization: the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP). This only brought more attention to the area by the repressive regime. In fact, the r

Beatriz Manz has written a remarkable book about Guatemala during the terrifying decades of the last century when some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, most of them Mayan Indians targeted by genocidal governmental violence. Its center is the story of a single village, Santa María Tzejá, in the verdant northern forest of the Quiché province near the Mexican border, which Manz visited repeatedly over 30 years. She situates its life and people within larger structures of power in Guatemala and beyond. The Guatemalan army and the civil patrols, the exploitative economy and racist culture, U.S. policies and the larger, changing international frame are woven through her analysis. She makes adept use of the two major projects in Guatemala that reflect on national reality during this period - the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) and the U.N. Commission on Historical Clarification (CEH) - as well as human rights reports, various other publications and a number of confidential U.S. government documents. Manz is insightful about how villagers' lives are shaped by institutions and larger structures of power but also how they are capable of finding power - in themselves and in community - and using it. She analyzes the concrete ways that the Church empowered people by engaging them in their own education into the rights they possess as human beings and the rights they had to claim and fight for. Life in the refugee camps of Mexico, which she knew first hand, enabled villagers not only to survive but also bring home new skills and a new sense of what their community could be. Villagers are acted upon in terrible ways, but they are also actors - in the old phrase of concientización and the liberationist Church, not merely objects of history but also its subjects. It is this thread running through the book that ultimately justifies the balance of its subtitle as a `journey of courage, terror and hope.' The village of Santa María Tzejá is not typical of Guatemala, as Manz is the first to recognize, and her whole book evokes its vivid, specific character. The people of the village come alive in their individuality - with their particularities and contradictions and changes wrought by experience. Some two dozen photos of them let us know what they look like (and we want to know what they look like) - Miguel Reyes, Roselia Hernández, Rosa Botón Lux and her daughter, Father Luis Gurriarán. Their words carry the broader lines of interpretation with which Manz shapes the story, but she also respects them as individuals, listening and recording, trying to discern their meaning but not judging them. Their lives convey insights about humanity as well as Guatemala and the larger world through these 30 years. Paradise in Ashes is a work of both anthropology and contemporary history, and Manz is very conscious of both sides of the work. She emerges very clearly as an anthropologist, with respect for the methods and craft of the discipline. She has a st

I bought this to accompany me on a trip to Guatemala. Although it was painful to read, it absorbed me in the country's history in a very enriching way, and altered my perspective considerably. I highly, highly recommend this book.