| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 629 words from this article are provided below; about 559 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Daniel Wilkinson. Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala. (American Encounters/Global Interaction.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. 375. $19.95.
With the words "All I knew when I began was that a house had burned down" (p. 3), Daniel Wilkinson opens this beautifully crafted account of his journey to find out why the house, which belonged to a planter and sat in the midst of a lush coffee plantation called La Patria, was burned in 1983, a year of military massacres and guerilla defeats. To figure out this one fire, Wilkinson needed to understand the local history of the soil-rich department of San Marcos and, as it turned out, decades of Guatemalan history.	1
In 1993, ten years after the fire and three years before the Peace Accords, Wilkinson set out to interview La Patria's owner and its workers. Wilkinson had befriended the patrona and she was forthcoming, but to Wilkinson's surprise, the plantation workers were silent. The son of La Patria's bookkeeper suggested that what first needed to be unearthed was information about the years preceding and following Jacobo Arbenz's 1952 land reform. Heeding this advice, Wilkinson bought a used motorcycle, dubbed it La Poderosa, and went off to interview an older generation scattered throughout San Marcos. He did find out that a union existed in La Patria between 1944 and 1954, but generally his questions were, again, met with silence.	2
A historian directed Wilkinson to the archives of the Instituto Nacional de Transformación Agraria (INTA), where he discovered a letter dated January 1, 1953, from the workers' union at La Patria to President Arbenz. Requesting that the government intervene to stop the owners of La Patria from parceling out their unused land to "anticommunist reactionaries," the union demanded that the government instead give this land to the workers and halt the suspension of their employment (p. 159). This level of engagement with the Arbenz reforms is also documented in Cindy Forster's well-researched study of San Marcos from 1944 until 1954, The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala's October Revolution (2001).	3
For Wilkinson, the document constituted a denouement. Looking over the letter's many signatures, he recognized the names of the same people who had responded with silence to his questions. With this material evidence in hand, Wilkinson found it easier to go back and speak with ex-union members. They told him how the union, which was led by the patron's illegitimate son, took the land, started a cooperative, and lost everything when the United States placed dictator Carlos Castillo Armas in power in 1954. A few years after the 1954 coup, military officers "upset when their government gave the United States permission to train for the Bay of Pigs invasion on Guatemalan soil" (p. 222) initiated a guerrilla group that became four different ones by the 1970s. These combined with mass struggle in Guatemala City, towns, and the countryside to yield a national, broad-based popular movement for revolutionary social change. By the late 1970s, a civil war had broken out that lasted until the 1996 Peace Accords. Was there a relationship in San Marcos between the 1944–1954 activists and the guerrillas in the 1970s and 1980s? Did the workers, peasants, and especially the Mayans of San Marcos support the guerilla movement that had operated in that area, La Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA)? Wilkinson found evidence to answer the first question in the affirmative; in fact, the first guerrilla leader in San Marcos was the son of the well-known founder of the 1944–1954 national peasant organization. Wilkinson's investigation of the second question led him high up in the mountains to the Mam-speaking town of Sacuchum.	. . .

There are about 559 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.