Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an
agreement between Guatemala and God,' Guatemala's Evangelical
Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan
holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians
were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying,
bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst
twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most
lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what
happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and
local and international politics that made this tragedy.
Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the
least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly
written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable book. -
Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who
Killed the Bishop? "Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land
of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing
the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la
violencia - a period of extreme political repression that
overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the
myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated
political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as
secular. This book is one of the finest contributions to our
understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just
in Guatemala but throughout Latin America." -Greg Grandin,
Professor of History, New York University Drawing on
newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents,
evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US
government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa
fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman
president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests that three
decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only
vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures,
communities, religions, and even families. The book examines the
causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also
explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the
late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly,
she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction
permitted the human rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place
without challenge from the outside world.
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