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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| W. George Lovell, A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000) |
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IN A BEAUTY That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala, W. George Lovell illustrates well the consequences for everyday life of more than four decades of state repression and the militarization of Guatemalan society, where life and death, joy and terror go hand in hand as unbelievable paradoxes. By including the voices of Mayan survivors along with archival and other documentary data, Lovell presents a balanced portrait of the contemporary Indigenous peoples of Guatemala as active and dynamic actors of change despite the unspeakable ordeals they have been forced to live through since the European invasion and subsequent colonization. Lovell writes easily and creatively about a reality that is cruel and bitter, the reality of organized state terror carefully acknowledging the sociopolitical agency of Mayan people and Ladino/Mestizo activists. Lovell also offers some historical background focusing on the official colonial period, 1524–1821. |
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The most interesting parts of this book are chapter eighteen (which focuses on the colonial experience) and the epilogue. The colonial history serves as a well documented background to today's social relations, outlining the politics of land expropriation of Indigenous lands by Spaniards and the emergent embryo of the Ladino (Spaniard-Indigenous-African people) élite and the different processes through which local Indigenous communities resisted and negotiated with hegemonic powers. This ability of Mayan peoples to resist, Lovell argues "is an important indication that Guatemala supported sizeable, well-organized populations when the Spaniards first invaded," (113) challenging a common idea in much of the Western scholarship that Indigenous peoples of the Americas were "uncivilized" and "primitive" because, among other things, they did not have social organizations. Lovell also shows that not all Mayans resisted the European invaders: some, like the Kaqchikeles, allied with the colonizers. This is important considering that some scholars tend to romanticize Indigenous peoples either as "perfect subhumans," essentially born to struggle for social justice, or as "barbarian savages," living in unchanging traditional communities. |
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In the epilogue, Lovell critically examines the pitfalls of a negotiated peace signed in 1996 by Guatemalan state representatives, the military, and the insurgent forces of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). His focus is on the Accord on Socioeconomic Issues and the Agrarian Situation, which does not address the structural problems that are the causes of the bloody conflict, whose victims are the majority Mayas (83.3 per cent), without forgetting the pain and suffering of Ladinos/Mestizos, who account for 16.5 per cent of the total deaths. Lovell is prudent not to dismiss the negotiated peace, an important step towards demilitarization in Guatemala, at least in theory. Nonetheless he shows how the culture of terror and silence persists. One clear example is the assassination of Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi, responsible for the coordination of the project the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI), whose results were made public on 24 April 1998 in a four-volume report entitled Guatemala: Nunca Más — Guatemala Never Again. Exactly two days after the presentation of the human rights report, Bishop Gerardi was brutally killed. The fact that Lovell knew Gerardi enhances the author's analysis. Lovell says that for some people it is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, for others the car crash that killed Princess Diana that will mark their lives forever. For him it is the murder of Bishop Gerardi that he can anchor in the nexus of time, place, and memory like no other death, save his father's. (139) In the epilogue Lovell also addresses one of the key pillars of the exploitation and sociocultural exclusion of Mayas and poor Mestizos/Ladinos in Guatemala: the unjust land tenure system. Here he draws extensively on Guatemalan scholar Mario Monteforte Toledo, who pointedly notes: "There appears to be a consensus not even to raise the matter of the most flagrant deformity in our country. The only explanation I can offer for this act of concealment is the fear to sound like a 'communist' and not compromise oneself with respect to solutions should one's party afterwards become the government." (136) |
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With all its enticing analytical and informative points A Beauty That Hurts has considerable shortcomings. First, Lovell does not offer a substantial analysis of the structural causes of how Guatemala came to be governed by state terrorism after Criollos (Spaniards born in America) decided to break official ties with the Spanish Crown in a move known as the Independence. Structural and historical causes are spread out in different parts of the book but they are insufficiently examined. Especially disappointing is Lovell's minimal treatment of one of the turning points in Guatemala's history: the October Revolution (1944–1954) and the agrarian reform launched by the government of Jacobo Arbenz, one of the few democratically elected presidents in Guatemala. Even though there are disagreements about how to interpret this revolution particularly in the areas of Mayan peoples' and women's rights, no one can deny that in terms of mass murder and the imposition of the culture of terror, the CIA-local élites intervention of 1954 is a fundamental starting point in justifying state terrorism as a national security policy. This in the name of "progress, democracy, and development," but really to defend the capitalist interests of a local minority and transnational corporations especially from the US. Lovell recognizes the importance of the October Revolution and the CIA intervention but dedicates only two pages to their analysis. |
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Finally it is difficult to understand the author's motives in affirming that Mayan peoples from Guatemala — whom he insists on naming Indian without acknowledging how problematic this term is for the majority of Mayas — are living and dynamic subjects unlike the rest of Indigenous peoples in the Americas whom he claims have vanished or are vanishing. How would other Indigenous peoples of the Americas take Lovell's statement in which he argues that: "Unlike native peoples elsewhere in the Americas, whose memory belongs to history, whose trace on the earth is faint, the Mayan of Guatemala are very much a living culture." (113) What are the author's objectives in making such a misleading comparison? To recognize a people's extraordinary resilience one does not need to diminish other peoples' struggles, more so if those peoples are part of vibrant, complex living cultures. |
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Despite this book's shortcomings, I think it presents a good overall portrait of the paradoxes, complexities, and contradictions of life and death in Guatemala. Death becomes not a natural stage in the passage of a life but rather a well orchestrated plan of state terror, genocide, and torture. This book includes a powerful set of pictures of survivors, workers, the militarization of society, and of the powerful hegemonic men. For instance, there is a photograph of a poster done by the UN mission in Guatemala, in which a Spanish conquistador orders two "Indians" to "Work faster!" Lovell shares with us, that after protests from the Spanish Ambassador to Guatemala, the poster was withdrawn, another irony in a beautiful human and biophysical landscape. I would have preferred a more meaningful book cover, one that would convey more directly the paradoxes of life and death in Guatemala. |
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Egla J. Martinez
York University
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