"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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