guatemala Archives - Not Even Past

Digital Archive Review – Más de 72

by Ashley Nelcy García, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com.

What is a digital archive? I asked myself this question in the weeks before submitting this review. While digital archives are typically defined as a coherent set of digital objects that have been put online by a library or an official archival institution, Más de 72 challenges the notion of what we can identify as a digital collection of records.

Screenshot of Más de 72

Más de 72 is a digital project that collects primary sources pertaining to the massacre of 72 migrants from Central and South America and India. The documents and media shared on this site shed some light on the mass murder that occurred in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 2010, under the administration of Felipe Calderón. The collection was created by Periodistas de a Pie, an organization of active journalists that seeks to raise the quality of journalism in Mexico. The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), CONNECTAS, and journalists who were invited to participate in the project supported the development and completion of this project.

The collection is a valuable resource for individuals interested in Mexico’s recent history, memory, and human rights issues. Visitors can access primary sources such as official documents from Mexico and the United States, including some judicial records and declassified files. Testimonies from surviving family members recorded in video and audio by journalists, as well as photographs and maps are also available. Additionally, journalistic investigations and reports published by human rights entities provide context to users unfamiliar with the case.

via Más de 72

Más de 72’s primary strength is its presentation. The site contains six different tabs or capítulos (chapters) that provide different types of information. For instance, the sections titled “La Masacre” (The Massacre) and “Después de la Masacre” (After the Massacre) include official and visual documents associated the mass murder of the 72 migrants. Under these tabs, visitors can access documents like the press release from the Secretaría de Marina (Secretary of Marine) and the diplomatic cable that the U.S. Embassy sent to the Department of State. Online browsers with an interest in the role of official documents can also download more than 50 files under the tab titled “Transparencia” (Transparency). On the other hand, users interested in criminal records and procedures and migration studies can access a list of objects found in the location where the massacre occurred and the names of the victims under “Después de la Masacre.” In regard to organization, it is important to note that the names of the victims are listed under their country of citizenship and under the month and the year they were identified.

On the other hand, the tabs titled “Las Víctimas” (The Victims), “Los Culpables” (The Culprits), and “Sobre San Fernando” (About San Fernando) provide more detailed information regarding people and location. These sections can benefit visitors interested in oral history, memory, gender studies, and digital cartography. Under “Las Víctmas”, users can listen to four testimonies provided by victims’ surviving family members. “Los Culpables” has a list of the men and women involved in the mass murder; this section includes the names, the photos, the list of crimes they committed, and external links that provide additional information. The section titled “San Fernando” includes a digital map from Time Mapper that helps users identify the mass graves and the people that have been disappeared in Tamaulipas by geographic location.

Overall, the site benefits users who cannot visit Mexico or Tamaulipas. Aside from scholars, people who can potentially benefit from this repository include but are not limited to: family members of migrants and people who have been disappeared, residents from the state of Tamaulipas, people with relatives in the northern part of the Mexico, journalists, lawyers, and activists. Although the project is not affiliated with libraries, governmental, or academic institutions, Periodistas de Pie is open to working with community members. As stated in “Creditos” (Credits), users can share documents or materials by sending an email to the listed email address. In addition, the organization invites visitors to collaborate–either with skills or donations–to continue developing the site.

The website has some technical problems. It would be difficult for someone who is unable to read Spanish to understand the majority of the information included on the platform. Additionally, some links, hyperlinks, and images need to be updated. More descriptive metadata would also benefit the project and there is a need to assist with the second part of the collection titled, “Segunda Entrega: Fosas de San Fernando” (Second Delivery: San Fernando’s graves). While these are minor setbacks, they also provide an opportunity for archivists, scholars, and web developers to get involved with the project.

Capítulo 5: Sobre San Fernando (Chapter 5: About San Fernando) via Más de 72

Even though Más de 72 is not described as a “digital archive” by the journalists at Periodistas de Pie, this platform serves as a repository of digitized primary documents associated with an historical event. In this regard, it is important to consider how the digital humanities field can be co-opted by elites to control historically politicized spaces. We need to be thinking about what is at stake when the term “archive” is used to control information. The politics of archiving is especially important where journalists–the authors of many of the documents in Mas de 72–find themselves in a violent climate and are rarely protected by institutions of power.

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014)

Archives, especially state archives, have political agendas. Whether private or public, holdings of individual, institutional, and government documents can serve to invade and control the lives of citizens and societies. Their organizations shape historical knowledge and national narratives about the past. Kirsten Weld addresses these political issues of government intrusion, historical memory, and archival knowledge production by focusing on The Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives in Guatemala (The Project). Weld identifies two different political agendas structuring the National Police Archives from its professionalization in the 1950s until the state of decay in which it was found in 2005. The first agenda served the purpose of surveillance and social control, using archives as a weapon against people considered enemies of the state during the Guatemalan Civil War between 1960 and 1996. The records’ rescue gave these archives a new social purpose geared towards democratic opening, historical memory, and the pursuit of justice for victims of the state’s war crimes. The book chronicles the transition from the first political agenda into the second with the goal of capturing the process through which a new historical narrative about the war was produced.

Weld argues that how people think about archives is critical to understand their role in the generation of new historical narratives. Archival holdings are also telling about the relationship between citizens and the state in the construction of these national histories. The Project helped transform negative perceptions of archives as dumpsters that perpetuate silence and political apathy, into treasures seen as tools for democratization and empowerment. The author combines historical and ethnographic perspectives to understand how the Police Archives transitioned to a new agenda of democratic opening and citizen’s accountability for crimes perpetuated by the state during the Civil War.

Weld uses ethnography and oral histories to explore how The Project came to be, the tensions that erupted between older and new generations working at the Police Archives, and the dangerous political context in which they had to work. She shows how former guerrilla fighters began an uncertain effort to recover the police archives until the institutionalization of the initiative through foreign funding. Due to the messy and decaying state of the police documents, archival preservation required former guerillas to learn concepts of original order, provenance, and chain of custody in order to know how the National Police organized information. Therefore, the norms outlined in the International Standard for Archival Description would undergird the new organizational logic of The Project from the onset.

Working in The Project also entailed understanding the goals that drove people to get involved with the Police Archives in the first place. Weld shows that former revolutionaries were driven to work on The Project by powerful experiences of loss and militancy, fueled by the desire to restore honor and agency to the dead. The young people she studied who came from militant families saw the preservation of police documents as a new way to continue the revolutionary struggle. To those without revolutionary ties, the archives represented a way to put academic training to use and to advance in the recovery of historical memory and truth telling. These experiences will shape the legacy of the Guatemalan Civil War and the next generations’ interpretations of the past.

The growing visibility of this collaborative effort, however, made it the target of military pressures, which raised concerns about the welfare of the archives and its personnel. This threat of violence was not new and was preceded by what the author calls “the archival wars,” — battles between citizens and the state over the access and meaning of state documents. Weld presents the different strategies rulers and ruled have used since the beginning of the Civil War to limit or expand access to records. These include legislation to block or undermine the preservation of state information, the demand to know what information the state holds about a particular citizen, or the successful publication of reports about disappeared Guatemalans.

Drawing from state archives and human rights reports, Weld also focuses on the institutional history of the National Police. The restructuring of this institution from 1954 to 1974, through counter-insurgency aid from the U.S, led to the establishment of efficient record keeping systems as a means to enact effective social control. The Central Records Bureau and the Regional Communications Center are just two initiatives that helped the Guatemalan state monitor its citizens. Better archives, modern equipment, and professional personnel became synonymous with the battle against “subversion.” This counterinsurgent mentality of the police accounted for most of the urban violence in the 1980s. The transition to democracy in 1986 perpetuated the counterinsurgency approach into the post-conflict period, explaining the militarized and centralized nature of the new National Civil Police.

Finally, the author delves into the successes and risks that the new archival agenda of social reconstruction and historical revisionism faces in Guatemala today. By working toward the passage of national archives system laws, and creating archival science programs in national universities, the Project has inaugurated a new archival culture in Guatemala, one that seeks a more democratic and transparent relationship between government and citizens. But the military’s institutional opposition to The Project reveals resistance to a new historical memory that subverts old narratives of a triumphant nation against communism.

Weld combines an impressive set of written sources with an ethnographic approach and oral histories of people who worked in the Project. These sources serve her well in capturing the transition from one archival agenda to the other. The author’s writing style is clear and fluid. This is a critical study that intertwines new interpretations about urban violence in Guatemala with a growing literature on historical memory and the politics of state archives in post-conflict societies.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Civil War and Daily Life: Snapshots of the Early War in Guatemala

by Vasken Markarian

(All photos here are published with the permission of the photographer.)

Two young Guatemalan soldiers abruptly pose for the camera. They rush to stand upright with rifles at their sides. On a dirt road overlooking an ominous Guatemala City, they stand on guard duty. This snapshot formed the title page of an exhibit at the University of Texas at Austin’s Benson Latin American Collection in 2018. A collection of these and other documents by Rupert Chambers will become part of a permanent archive at the library. The photographs depict the year 1966, a time of martial law and increasing state repression of leftist movements and supporters of reform. A storm was brewing in Guatemala.

Historians can situate this collection of photographs in the context of Guatemala’s civil war. The Guatemalan military was mobilizing to eliminate leftist guerrilla armies, which had recently arrived on the scene. Leaders of these rebel armies framed their struggle in the hope of democratic reform. The Guatemalan state would not budge. The state military agenda rested on two pillars: fierce Cold War anti-communism and protection of the Guatemalan oligarchs’ monopoly on land and labor. Nearly two decades later Guatemalans would learn of the brutality of a military regime that would go to any lengths, including genocide against innocent indigenous-Mayan civilians, to suppress the insurgency.

Was this snapshot of two young foot soldiers a sign of what was to come? It is convenient to position these two soldiers as symbols of the violence that ensued in coming decades. But in 1966, terror had not yet reached its apex. The conflict was still, in part, a “gentlemen’s war,” fought between members of the upper and middle classes. At the time, foot soldiers, many of whom came from poor Mayan communities, were unaware of the military operations that would define the ensuing decades. They experienced the same ominous environment of uncertainty that most Guatemalans did.

This past February, the author of these photographs, Rupert Chambers, reflected on his work for a public audience at the Benson Latin American Collection and took time to answer my questions. He visited Guatemala in 1966 as a UT graduate student doing historical research. There, Chambers documented the streets and people of Guatemala City and rural towns. He photographed Mayan women at local markets, children selling goods, and funeral processions through the streets. The camera lens captures citizens who continued to make a living, coping through poverty, violence, and discrimination. How do these photographs help us understand the context of the civil war?

As an American in a highly fragile moment in Guatemala, Chambers reflects on the lack of awareness among Americans in Guatemala about the military and political conflict at the time. “They [Guatemalans] knew we [the U.S. Government] had overthrown their revolution in 1954; we had not yet admitted it to ourselves.” He was referring to the CIA administered revolt that replaced Guatemala’s 10-year old democratic government with a right-wing regime.

In 1966, roughly a decade into the Vietnam war, U.S. military advisers were exporting their anti-communist military infrastructure into their neighbor in Central America. Guatemalan generals obligingly received aid in the form of training, as well as technical and material support. The American military also authorized thousands of Guatemalan military commissioners to help combat the perceived communist threat. In the 1980s, the military collaboration was more obvious to American observers. In 1966, however, Americans in Guatemala were still in the dark. Chambers remembered how “few of us were aware of the full extent of U.S. support and intervention.”

An air of uncertainty occupied the minds of ordinary Guatemalans as well. Chambers spoke about this overall atmosphere, pointing out that most Guatemalans were aware of the conflict but not the extent, and no one would have used the term “civil war” at that juncture. “While not exactly the calm before the storm, the mid-1960s gave only clues and portents.”

Behind the scenes, networks of right-wing terror groups flowed in the capital city. Signs of terror reared their ugly heads. Chambers described witnessing street signs of the mano blanco (white hand). The “white hand” was a symbol for a clandestine terror organization that used death lists to assassinate democratic leaders and decorated the corpses of their victims with threatening notes. In the 1960s, Guatemala would become one of Latin America’s first settings of “forced disappearances.”

Despite this violent background, Rupert Chambers’ photographs provide an important perspective on the “day-to-day.” As Chambers states, “Guatemalans had lived in a context of violence for so long that in the mid-sixties this all appeared to them as more of the same, a constantly fluctuating level of violence, a cause for concern but not yet something very much out of the ordinary as it was soon to become.”

Chambers prompts historians to consider whether we can we document a tragedy before it happens. Photographer Sally Mann once stated that “photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” Historians may examine such photographs for clues of terror, silence, and ambiguity. There is something deceptive, however, about looking at these photographs solely through the prism of what was to come; something deterministic. The precariousness of Guatemala’s situation was as much a product of history as it was an unfortunate feature of daily life. And while Guatemalans feared the past and future, their dignity remained in the present.

Photo documentary evidence of state violence also has a history. About a decade after Chambers’ 1966 photographs, a new wave of visual records would help document the violence in Guatemala, spearheaded by the likes of Jean-Marie Simon, in her book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, and Pamela Yates, in her documentary, When the Mountains Tremble. Such visual documentation propelled human rights efforts to combat the impunity of the Guatemalan state apparatus, which was responsible for around of 90% of civilian deaths during the war.

Chambers’ photographs embodied one of the earlier stages of the documentation of the civil war. His photographs document an underexamined area of history in the ambiguities and fears of daily life under violent regimes. While photography was Chambers’ hobby, he intentionally set out to document human dignity, something he claimed to learn much about from the people of Guatemala. Chambers continues this work in his new project in Mexico.

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum by Edward Shore

Black Amateur Photography by Joan Neuberger

Media and Politics from the Prague Spring Archive by Ian Goodale

Secrecy and Bureaucratic Distancing: Tracing Complaints through the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive

By Vasken Markarian

On June 1982, two pages of official letter sized paper marked by the symbol of the Ministry of Finance made their way across a network of various bureaucratic desks of the National Police of Guatemala. A rural farmer and grandfather from Uspantán in El Quiché, Julio Ortiz (this is a pseudonym for reasons of privacy and safety) was addressing a top-level Police Chief in the capital city about his deep concern for a missing grandson. Kidnapped by a certain state authority figure under the false accusation of subversive activity, Julio’s grandson was missing and Julio had no information as to his whereabouts. The letter was Julio’s plea to the Chief to find out what happened to his grandson, pointing out that such a disappearance was “unjust.”

El Quiché department (via Wikimedia Commons).

This and many other similar complaints to authorities, called denuncias, or complaint reports, flowed into the offices of police officials and clerks at an alarming rate during the 36 years of civil war in Guatemala. They represented the responses of people in Guatemala to the widespread political agitation and repression that in some way or another affected their loved ones and friends, a pattern of repression that was the staple of successive governmental regimes with heavy anti-communist agendas since 1954. Julio’s 1982 denuncia belonged to a period in Guatemala’s history when state authorities ignored legal due process, violated civil rights and constitutional guarantees, and maintained widespread impunity for Police and Military actors.

For historians of Guatemala, a document such as this may be only one of a large number of such denuncias, yet Julio’s letter nevertheless serves to help us make educated guesses about the nature of the State Police in Guatemala, about secrecy in the structure of institutionalized violence, and about the relationship between Guatemalan society and its authoritarian figures. What stands out about this document in particular is the number of possible intermediaries involved in producing it and passing it along. To better understand such a document, we can try to recreate the course it ran, before reaching a final audience and a final verdict.

The National Palace in Guatemala City was the seat of the Guatemalan government during the civil war and the target of several attacks (via Wikimedia Commons).

As we zero in on the finer details of Julio’s denuncia, three important trends reveal themselves. First, it is likely that a lawyer or clerk, rather than Julio himself, who was a farmer in a rural town, produced this complaint. The denuncia was typed on formal letter sized paper that had to be bought from the Ministry of Finance. It uses formal language that had to be typed by someone with the resources to do so. The guidelines for what was considered a proper complaint were strict; anything that violated the guidelines would be thrown out.

A formalized complaint-making process was not the only clue that sheds light on the complaint making process. Other traces point to the intervention of a host of different offices, officers, and clerks before the letter reached its final destination. For example, certain stamps and signatures suggest its passing from a local police station or lawyer in El Quiché to the Department of Technical Investigations in the capital, Guatemala City, and then back to the Chief of Police in El Quiché. The back and forth journey of Julio’s letter from the local town to the capital and back was a reflection of the centralized but also dispersed nature of the Police bureaucracy.

Indigenous Ixil people exhume the remains of their disappeared loved ones from a killing field in Guatemala (via Wikimedia Commons).

If Julio had known about the back and forth movement of his denuncia, he still might have hoped his complaint would remain intact. What he had no control over, however, was the fact that the content of his denuncia had to be diluted as it passed through Police offices. A separate cover letter attached to the complaint appeared in front of it. The Inspector General had stamped it, and it also included many clues to suggest that it passed through the hands of one or more clerks in the Inspector General’s office. For example, a one-sentence summary of the contents of the letter appears conspicuously scribbled sideways on the margins, indicating that some clerk in the Inspector General’s office or in the Chief of Police of Quiche’s office wanted to make approaching the document more efficient for the next person who was to read it.

What do these tentative conclusions say about the ability of Julio to make his complaint heard? Efficiency and conciseness were important priorities for police clerks. The diluting of his denuncia and its passing through dispersed offices created distance between the person making the complaint and the highest office where the record ended up. This gap then, contributed to the difficulty for people like Julio to reach authorities and be heard in a more authentic way.

The Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive was discovered in 2005 (via AHPN).

Julio was not likely to receive an answer to his complaint. Like many others, it passed through a complex process of formalizing and diluting while physically moving through a network of intermediaries that was hierarchical and centralized yet dispersed and secretive. Guatemalan authorities rarely responded to inquiries about disappeared or illegally detained family members or friends. This official silence by the police was not simply the product of inaction and indifference. It depended on a concerted effort by various bureaucratic actors to process information and, in so doing, alter its meaning and significance. Over the course of the civil war, thousands of heartfelt denuncias fed an enormous police archive that represented police repression and secrecy.

In a country such as Guatemala with a legacy of state institutionalized violence and impunity, the millions of denuncias such as Julio’s letter, uncovered in the National Police archive, are important tools for seeking justice. Sometimes, they can help uncover links to other documents that serve as further evidence. Thinking about how intermediaries are an integral part of institutional secrecy, we can deconstruct the image of the police state as a homogenous entity. We can locate the responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of important actors at different levels of the authoritarian infrastructure.

Sources:

Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive. For reasons of privacy and safety, I have chosen not to cite the specific location of this document.

Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, From Silence to Memory: Revelations of the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 2013).

You may also like:

Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war.
Great Books on La Violencia in Guatemala.
Virginia Garrard-Burnett on La Violencia in Guatemala.

Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war

By Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Discovering Dominga (2003), directed by Patricia Flynn

Denese Joy Becker, a cosmotologist living in Iowa, was adopted as a child from Guatemala. Although she remembers nearly nothing about her past, a cousin from her American family realizes that Denese’s age corresponds with the period of la violencia in Guatemala. Denese and her adopted family travel to Guatemala, where she discovers she is Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor from a 1982 Guatemalan massacre in which both her parents were murdered by the Guatemalan military. The documentary recounts how Denese rediscovers her own identity as Dominga—an Achí Maya woman, and the horrendous political context that led to her being put up for adoption in the United States.

When the Mountains Tremble (1983), directed by Pamela Yates

This is a documentary about the armed conflict between the Guatemalan military and one of that nation’s most important armed guerrilla groups, the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), who in the context of this film are primarily indigenous people, the Maya. This documentary was made during the nadir of Guatemala’s 36-year long civil war, and includes remarkable footage from both sides of the conflict. It also includes narration by a very young Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Ki’che’ Mayan activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Virginia Garrard-Burnett recommends related books here in READ.

Bad Blood: Newly Discovered Documents on US Funded Syphilis Experiments

by Philippa Levine

On September 13, 2011, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its report on the syphilis experiments that were funded and conducted by the US government in Guatemala in the 1940s. Over 1300 prisoners, prostitutes, psychiatric patients, and soldiers in Guatemala were infected with sexually transmissible diseases (through supervised sexual relations among other methods), in an attempt to better understand treatments for diseases such as syphilis. The researchers also drew blood from thousands of Guatemalan children to further another aspect of the study.

The Guatemala case has close links to the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, which withheld treatment for syphilis from some four hundred black men in Macon County, Alabama, between the 1930s and the 1970s for similar reasons. Though the Tuskegee experiment had its roots in a treatment program begun in the optimistic 1920s, the depression transformed it into a study that would end only after negative publicity in the early 1970s. In Alabama, there was no deliberate attempt to infect the subjects of the study. In Guatemala treatment was the norm, but subjects were deliberately infected. In neither case were the risks, or indeed the aim, of the studies fully explained to those who participated. Indeed, the Commission’s report explicitly notes the “deliberate efforts to deceive experimental subjects and the wider community that might have objected to the work.” In Alabama the men in the study were led to believe they were being treated for what the doctors routinely called ‘bad blood.’

Both experiments were underway before the widespread adoption of the ethics code hammered out after the Nüremberg trials, the so-called ‘doctors’ trial’ of Nazi war criminals, but the code did not put an end to the Tuskegee study. There is a long history, and not just in the US, of using people without power – those considered ‘inferior,’ those in disciplinary regimes such as prisons or the military, and those regarded as less likely to protest or even to comprehend – as human subjects in medical and scientific experiments. Indeed, experiments very similar to the Guatemalan one (without the supervised sex) were carried out in the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana in the early 1940s and again at Sing Sing in New York in the 1950s.

In Guatemala and in Alabama, the idea of racial difference played a significant role in determining the shape of the studies. Scientists debated whether there were racial differences in sexually transmissible diseases. Prejudices that saw some populations as more sexual than others fuelled such ideas. The theory that syphilis may have originated in Central America made some scientists wonder if the indigenous population had thus acquired immunity. Ideas such as these made already under-privileged populations targets for invasive research.

President Obama issued an apology to Guatemala in 2010 for the actions of government officials. President Clinton issued an apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee study in 1997.

Do studies like this go on today here or elsewhere? In theory, the answer is “no,” since there are rules in place that require scientists and doctors to explain their work to subjects and because some techniques simply aren’t allowed any longer. In practice, the situation is more complex. The Guatemala research came to light only when a researcher stumbled across evidence in the papers of the lead scientist. Tuskegee was never a secret; throughout the years of the study, leading science journals openly published its results. For the historian, all this is familiar territory: the accidental unearthing of evidence, the evidence hidden in plain sight. Students often ask me: how could this have happened? How could this have been allowed? There are good lessons to learn here, and ones in which historians can play a crucial role. While it’s too late for the Guatemalan prisoners of the 1940s and the men of Tuskegee, it has nonetheless often been the work of historians that has either uncovered or kept in the public eye actions that might otherwise go unnoticed and unremarked. Better late than never.

In Spring Semester 2012, Prof. Levine will debut a course entitled “Science, Ethics and Society.”

Government documents and Media Coverage on the experiments:
http://bioethics.gov/cms/node/306
http://www.examiningtuskegee.com/
http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/medical_history/bad_blood/report.cfm
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=5544&blogid=140

Books on the Tuskegee Experiments:
James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
Allan M Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880

Photo Credits:

Doctor injecting subject, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, US National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons

Nuremberg Trials, Karl Brandt, Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, was indicted with 22 other Nazi doctors and SS officers on war crimes charges, including horrific medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. US Army. Photo No. OMT-I-D-144. Telford Taylor Papers, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University Law School

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin (2004)

by Cristina Metz

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War combines incisive analysis of Cold War repression in Guatemala with a history of the country’s century-long mobilization leading up to the 1978 Panzós massacre that resulted in the deaths of Q’eqchi’ Maya men, women, and children. The Panzós massacre launched an intense and brutal escalation of violence, the effects of which continue to reverberate in contemporary Guatemalan society. Grandin’s purpose is manifold. First, he attempts to draw connections between individual identity and political activism. Second, he refutes the North American scholarship that views the Maya as impressionable bystanders caught in the crossfire between the military and the guerrilla. Finally, he historicizes the Cold War, nullifying attempts to naturalize the violence and repression it engendered throughout Latin America.

Alta Verapaz, an important coffee-growing region in northeast Guatemala, has historically been at the center of land disputes between majority Q’eqchi’ Maya and ladino and European settlers. Through the lives of four important figures—José Angel Icó, Alfredo Cucul, Efraín Reyes Maaz, and Adelina Caal—Grandin traces the struggle for land reform there, the end to forced labor, and greater social democratization. Icó, for instance, led a “seditious life” because he rebelled against the authority of the landowning elite by not following traditional paths to male power, though acquiring it nonetheless. He held considerable rural power, stemming from much the same sources as those of the state. Icó wielded his power to weaken a system that reinforced the social and political supremacy of Ladino and foreign elites. Each of these individuals gained new insights concerning their individual roles in the world around them, due in part to their participation in mass politics. Their political development (which was not unique given that many Guatemalans, indigenous and ladino, rural and urban, increasingly mobilized around social causes from at least the 1950s on) dispels analyses that rob Maya of their agency.

Panzós, a municipality of Alta Verapaz, is the location of what Grandin dubs, “the last colonial massacre.” In 1865, a group of Maya peasants appealed to the local government of Carchá, a few miles away from Panzós, for protection against the landed elite. Their demands were met with violent repression. In 1978, a large group of Q’eqchi’s suffered a similar end when they attempted to present their demands to local administrators. Both of these events seem to be by-the-book peasant revolts, but there is something unique about what happened in 1978. This twentieth-century massacre marked the beginning of a new type of counterinsurgent violence that soon spread to other Latin American nations. In tracing the intentionality and premeditation behind Cold War counterinsurgency tactics that transformed the protective power of the state into one that suppressed an internal enemy, Grandin convincingly exposes the “Cold War’s most important legacy”: the destruction of democracy.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is its presentation of a history of individuals neither privileged in life nor in the historical record who have had a lasting effect on other politically active Guatemalans. We know from the outset that Grandin seeks to understand how Q’eqchi’ Maya reformers developed a political consciousness, an identity. This is, among many things, an exploration of how people mold ideology to fit their particular world, their struggle, and what they believe to be their role as engaged citizens.

The wealth of primary and secondary source material used is truly impressive and is another significant contribution of this work to the historiography of repression and state violence in Latin America. Notably, Grandin employs truth commission reports as proper historical sources, which does much to counter critiques of the truth commissions and their reports, Critics contend that these fell short of their lofty goals, to recover the history of state violence and to ensure that history never repeats itself. Maybe it is more precise to say that, in the Guatemalan case at least, the purpose of the truth commissions and their reports was not to ensure that “it” would never happen again; rather, that the point was to preclude a post-civil war, post-Cold War “democracy” from forgetting. The Last Colonial Massacre is a testament to many things, not least of which, is the long life and far-reaching impact of this aspect of the Guatemalan peace process.

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