| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal and Forgetting in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press 2004)

IN LATE JANUARY 2005, six Mayan campesinos were killed on a Guatemalan plantation; the campesinos said plantation guards had kidnapped a campesino for stealing fruit from shade trees. A few days later his tortured corpse was found. The class hatreds embedded in this event, captured on the evening news with police kicking corpses, are as old as the history of capitalist agriculture in Guatemala. They can be found in abundance in the documents from the 1870s forward, in the brief flowering of farmworker organizing in the 1920s, in the epic dictatorship of the 30s. Eating the fruit of the rich was legalized during the nation's only progressive era of the 20th century, the October Revolution, before the rule of the planters reasserted itself with a vengeance in the US-engineered coup of 1954 that opened the door to decades of death squad terror. After 1954 planters and guerrillas alike took these class relations as their guiding logic. Daniel Wilkinson's acclaimed Silence on the Mountain unlayers this history, succeeding beautifully on some counts, while on others it remains a better reflection of Wilkinson's journey than the journey of those with whom he spoke.

Wilkinson, the Harvard graduate with a scholarship to travel, is warmly embraced by a family of German forbears who own a plantation in the heart of the coffee belt. The author skilfully captures the Guatemalan elite, secure in their conviction that they have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to become the guardians of the nation's prosperity —"omitted from the story were the many ways the government intervened in the economy to help industries, companies, and even wealthy individuals." (78) The woman who has inherited the plantation is troubled by the contrast between her father's mares who give birth in well-lit luxury and the field master's wife who goes into labour in misery, darkness, and filth. Yet her sense of solidarity only goes so far. "Tell them about cars," she says referring to her father's workers, or "the simplest story, maybe just a story about buying a dress in the city, they would be in awe." (93) When those workers tried to claim some of her father's land under the agrarian reform of the October Revolution, and in a later generation when some joined the guerrillas, she believed that the leftists had unleashed a reign of terror. And she found it hardly credible that the military would commit atrocities. In her dual life as the wife of a North American professor she defines herself as a liberal, and in fact most liberals in the US respond in similar fashion when invited to trust in the respectability of the US war machine. Says a more crass member of the planter elite, "What are we to do with all these inditos blowing up bridges?" (214) The question is only rhetorical; as he spoke, the military was wrapping up the closing stages of its genocide in which 83 per cent of the estimated 200,000 civilians killed were Mayan.

The author of Silence on the Mountain explains in his courtesy call to the local military camp, "I'm working with the permission of the plantation owners." It is an entrée that amazes the son of a plantation book-keeper, who says of the owner, "she would never talk tome. "This book-keeper's son plants what becomes the book's central question — what exactly happened on this plantation during the October Revolution with the partitioning of the land in 1952, two years into the presidency of Jacobo Arbenz? To pursue the answer the author shows up unannounced to gather revolutionary history and finds, "Here there was no excitement, no nervous laughter, no glimmer of hope. There was just fear." (136) Those who enter the Guatemalan countryside differently of course find a very different countryside, but Wilkinson discovers, "Whatever they were hiding about the plantation, it couldn't help that they saw me staying in the house of the owner or showing up at their homes in her truck." (57) Wilkinson's book will have made an important contribution if young readers with the same inclinations think twice about how they enter warscapes. "Are you related to the family?" the plantation workers wished to know. (61)

The author offers a wonderful portrait of the distance that separates the Germans from their illegitimate progeny with Mayan women. Though one would have wanted more from the perspective of the children and their mothers, he garners from his elite sources that the unrecognized offspring cast their lot with the poor during the Arbenz era. In retaliation the planters generated vicious and baseless accusations against them. They sexualized these accusations — castrating a bull, raping women — in effect assigning their own aggressions to those who challenged their patronage. In miniature it mirrors the manufacture of racist stereotypes by the elite to vilify their mestizo relatives, a practice in which they have been engaging since the 1500s.

The book is a sort of coming-of-age story, and early in his pilgrim's progress Wilkinson visits the US embassy for a security briefing because his scholarship requires it. He leaves appalled by their lack of concern for his safety. Though the narrative doesn't mention it, the embassy in those years was being pilloried by a group of US citizens for backing Guatemala's military command in torturing themselves and their loved ones. As Wilkinson documents, it is an army that massacres civilians in revenge for its inability to win battles against the guerrillas, (250) an army that, to cite just one example, had one of the people he interviewed "beaten and interrogated, then left overnight in a tank of water. He had been able to breathe only by standing on his tiptoes until morning, struggling against fatigue and fending off the bloated corpses in the water around him." (127) Wilkinson went to Guatemala precisely because he knew of such things, yet in one of the opening vignettes the author and another foreigner strike up a friendship with a soldier. They join the soldier for a visit to his hometown at the beach, which turns out to be an island where the villagers thought they had come to steal children. The soldier pulls his gun and saves the gringos from being lynched. The author's choice of company strikes an odd note, as does his eagerness to see rebels erupt from the landscape, but perhaps these doubts say more about my suspicions of government soldiers and Rambo scenarios than Wilkinson's judgement. "From some wealthy Guatemalan businessmen" he gets the idea of interviewing a fellow Harvard graduate, General Hector Gramajo, which leads to another well-drawn sketch, this time of the small-town elites who have bilked the poor, and in the case of some like Gramajo, scaled the ladder of class via the military.

Self-discovery takes a new turn when his motorcycle enters the picture, echoes of Che but with a difference. Wilkinson's retreat is the plantation house — the owner never seems to be there since like most, she has another home — and there he is free to sip beer on the patio while someone prepares his meals. His motorcycle becomes a protagonist — "no nature walk could give me the same rush I got charging through on my bike, reducing the continent's roughest terrain [this is literary embellishment] to a joy ride." He goes on, "Just the man and his machine against the mountain. It was the thrill of ... well ... conquest." (ellipses in the original, 153) He had just interviewed a slimy character named Mario who talks revolution and is rumoured to be a military intelligence officer. Offering to show the author poverty, Mario had barged into a campesino home with Wilkinson in tow, interrupting the parents, half-clad, to inspect their malnourished child; Mario pulls out tufts of the child's hair as it wails and the mother stands by paralyzed. (138–139) Wilkinson beats his retreat to the plantation porch to reflect on the events of the first half of the book. "They had refused to tell me how the agrarian reform had affected lives in their plantations. And by now I had grown tired of trying to make them ... when I saw Mario tugging at that kid's hair, it had occurred to me that my tugging at people's memories was not so different." (149) From this point the book hits its pace. Wonderful insights follow, though the author still approaches interviewing as a one-size-fits-all activity.

Another Harvard graduate, also a lawyer, who follows many of the same questions but does so more perceptively, is Jennifer Harbury, one of the US embassy's unwelcome guests. She married a guerrilla (a campesino from the coffee region) and unmasked CIA support for the Guatemalan military in her efforts to locate her husband's tortured corpse. Harbury sees the human weave of collective struggle. For example where Wilkinson argues "Here in Guatemala's coffee fields, employers met practically no resistance," (144) Harbury understands that workers in the coffee groves have never been sheep and their resistance would fill books; Jennifer Harbury's are available in English. Perhaps what distinguishes the two is Harbury's essential empathy with the poor, whereas by contrast Wilkinson seems appalled in the face of poverty: "we would forever be foreigners in one another's world." (347) He erects this barrier one suspects for purposes of protection, and remains very much within the traditions of his mentors. "What did remain strong among young Americans from expensive schools, however, was a faith in knowledge — that it was attainable and that attaining it was good — that a person could go anywhere, get to know the people there, document their situation, and so help improve it." (197) Such a stance — essentially it is charity — is of course offensive to many. For example in the immigrant and refugee rights organizing of the 1980s, Latino and African American organizers would often comment on white university youth who risked their lives documenting human rights violations in Central America's wars, but whose efforts frequently failed to lead to any genuine reckoning with issues of race and class in their own lives. In labour and the non-profit sector, the phenomenon led to a host of do-gooders; in academia the graduate schools produced hundreds of young scholars who recast their forbears' more evident allegiance to empire, shifting the focus from US responsibility and the ravages of inequality to the realm of personal morality. While Wilkinson is wary of cross-border slumming, often he seems a prisoner of his training, firmly lodged as it is in European traditions that have guided generations of colonizers and settlers. He says, "a talisman of sorts for me in the years when I was first discovering the appetite for exploration" was a family heirloom, a coin from the "World's Colombian Exposition" with "a detailed engraving of the explorer's ship, the Santa Maria." (196) Apparently his education didn't broach the acts of sadism that characterized the command of that particular explorer. More surprisingly, the oversight was not corrected by years of visiting Guatemala, a majority Mayan nation which served as the continental headquarters to protest the power relations unleashed by the conquistadors; that campaign was in full swing during the 90s when Wilkinson was discovering racism in the coffee zone. Alongside his Santa Maria talisman he possesses others of similar provenance such as "Marlow on his famous quest into the heart of darkness. Marlow hated lies. He hated lies, he said, not because he was holier than the next guy, but because they possessed a taint of death. Telling history is always a political act." (305) Indeed. However we are in the presence here of a story line that requires a white hero against a backdrop of natives. Exotic and dangerous lands. The formula trumps reality. The German-Guatemalan planter saw savages when Mayan workers danced. Wilkinson sees "a circus in a horror movie" when students burn tires at night to protest bus fare increases (119) —the image diffuses the horror, confuses it with the popular protest, when the nightmare lies in the paramilitary response to that protest. By this point the author has already proposed that the foreign human rights community is the seminal force capable of achieving justice in places like Guatemala, on the basis of his experience documenting the army massacre in Sacuchúm, San Marcos. He believed he was the first to record those testimonies, and while his presence was deeply appreciated, local organizers had in fact collected voluminous detail. In the book's closing pages he revisits the idea: he says about a community that waged a successful land struggle, "The key to Cajolá's victory" lay in the fact "they had been able to access people like me." He is dead serious. He has told us how he came to understand "the leaders of Cajolá had been guerrillas," (357) and one would hope this realization would invite a more nuanced reading of the role of guerrillas in social movements, as well as the relation between leadership and rank-and-file, but this is not Wilkinson's strength.

In the riddle he is trying to unravel — the years of the agrarian reform on his hosts' plantation — Wilkinson leaves out some of the more damning evidence from the archives that he read. I had published it several years earlier in a book on campesino organizing in that region during the October Revolution only because it was so dramatic, but almost excised it when I realized the family in question was joined by marriage to the most senior US academic writing on Guatemala, a gentleman known for his irascibility who inspired a Guatemalan intellectual to coin a term based on his surname — Adamscismo — in reference to "the anthropology of imperialism" which a number of Guatemalan scholars as well as Mayan leaders charge Richard Adams with cultivating. These are Wilkinson's hosts. While the author mentions the dirty work of the Central Intelligence Agency in bringing down the regime of the agrarian reform, (181) he does not mention that the host professor's arrival in Guatemala involved providing his services to the US government as their mercenary army was mopping up after the 1954 coup; the US anthropologist interviewed jailed organizers. His future wife's family were staunch opponents of the ousted Arbenz and the agenda for democratic reform. Such affiliations are the soil in which political loyalties take root. Inexplicably, Wilkinson gives the couple pseudonyms, although they are instantly recognizable and have never shunned the limelight. In the end I can't help but wonder whether Wilkinson's gratefulness for their hospitality didn't silence him on that same mountain. Often when I was waiting for the bus in coastal towns I would see Wilkinson and his motorcycle; once when he was walking he mentioned that a reliable source had told him torture was conducted by the military on his hosts' plantation and his quandary was how to inform the owner. The fact was not unusual; probably all of the plantations in that region functioning as military posts practiced torture. But he chose not to include this finding in his book. For an anglophone audience he has consciously or unconsciously whitewashed his host family and their property in order to paint them as planters caught in the crossfire —another common trope that extracts the good fortune of the wealthy from the nexus of class relations he had earlier described so well.

In Latin America, even a significant portion of the centre believes there is dignity in people taking up arms to end tyranny. Yet many on the left in the United States argue there is never any justification for violence. Perhaps pacifism offers comfort in the belly of the beast, a disavowal of complicity. Wilkinson finally finds out who among the guerrillas burned his hosts' original plantation home in the years before he arrived. "Silverio may have been fighting for the welfare of Guatemala's poor when he set the house on fire. Yet, to the extent that this act of violence was intended to terrify the landowners in the region, it should be considered an act of terrorism." (351) If writing history is a political act, here he joins the Guatemalan right in one of its favourite arguments. The issue is reduced to individual morality: burning planters' homes causes them anguish. Guatemala's landowners are a tough crowd and I would argue neither the rebels nor the planters thought burning the big house would sow terror; rather, as a guerrilla strategy it communicated revenge and among the elite it caused outrage. Aside from this question of interpretation, Wilkinson's empathy for his host family pushes him to a more startling claim — the decision to turn to revolutionary violence is terrorist. Context is everything: the guerrillas wilfully destroyed property in a state that tortured hundreds of thousands of campesinos in order to preserve the planters' interests, a state that burned thousands of campesino homes with people in them. Wilkinson invites us to equate state terror and rebel violence in Guatemala.

Along the road that Wilkinson traveled there lives a catechist nearing 90 years old who never took up arms, though most of his family did. He pushes us to question the book's understanding of fire. "They kidnapped eight catechists. The military commissioners would get an order from the army and they would pull them out of their homes at night. For a year we slept in the underbrush, leaving at dusk with the whole family, the children were still little. One day we had just left and hidden, just that far away, when they arrived, they thought we were inside and they doused the house with gasoline then set it on fire, yelling — They're all going to die, they're dead! — You know something, we were nothing more than animals for them, that's right, animals" (my taped interview).

The author does not really touch the issue of killing in the name of revolution, clearly a distinct order of violence from torching property; the one example he lays out at length is told as a tragic love story. Three per cent of the civilian dead were military commissioners or people involved in the death squads who were executed by the guerrillas. Some 93 per cent died at the hands of the right. The man he calls Silverio who burned his hosts' plantation turned to clandestine organizing years before the war started because the army had unleashed a wave of assassinations, and in particular, tortured the director of the local school for "calling a meeting to raise the level of education" (my taped interview). During this period — which the planters remember as a time of peace — hundreds of labour organizers were systematically kidnapped, then left with their eyes gouged out or other unspeakable injuries. Many of their children embraced armed resistance. Those who subscribe to the mainstream of human rights discourse would say that by doing so, the guerrillas became the evil they deplored.

At the risk of raising hackles, I would suggest this is a more elegant and evasive rendering of David Stoll's famous thesis that criticizes armed actors on the left (he singles out Che, Nelson Mandela, and Rigoberta Menchú). Stoll argues that the turn to arms by campesinos was and always will be flawed, and that it is, unavoidably, the work of elite ideologues. Both of these propositions crumble on closer inspection — of the archives, of the memories of campesinos who dared organize, and of the record of actions taken from 1944 forward, the year in which the poor began to dismantle the injustices that find their symbol in the burning of plantation houses. Their organizing in San Marcos long preceded the agrarian reform. Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini underlined the point recently when he said to thousands of campesinos gathered to protest open-air mining in San Marcos, in reference to those on the right who are accusing him of inciting the Indigenous to violence, "The politicians haven't realized that you are the ones making the demands. Hear me well, the day that we are not walking alongside the poorest among you, the humblest, the canecutters who right now are working with your children in the harvest, on that day you have the right to say to us, — Bishops, you have turned traitor to the faithful. —" Where David Stoll gives voice to Guatemalan campesinos recruited by the military project, Daniel Wilkinson tries but fails to see the collective struggle named by the bishop. Wilkinson tells us, "It took four decades of violence to stamp out what the Agrarian Reform had created — the commitment to the future that those men had shared, the belief that they could transform their nation." (344) As a symbol of this hopelessness he paints a bleak future for a cooperative of former guerrillas who had just bought an abandoned plantation. (349) That community has since built houses and infrastructure collectively, and won fair trade contracts for organic coffee in the thick of one of the worst downswings in world market prices in modern memory (my interviews). Through their fair trade ties, they are building a marketing network for other campesino producers and in the meantime they have provided schooling for youth from neighbouring plantations as well as their own children, in a nation where public schooling is more an aspiration than a reality. Perhaps Wilkinson's point of departure prevents him from trusting the insane determination that has always informed the collective actions of the poor. To offer another example, the faceless wife of one of his main sources (a former guerrilla commander running a restaurant) is now organizing Mayan and campesina women across the region to end violence and build a livable economy (my interviews). In the book her husband mentions she was the first female combatant to join the rebels, but the author does not pursue the clear invitation to hear her story — it would have taken him to the murder of her father for campesino organizing in the 1960s, the murder of union organizers in the factories where she worked in the capital in the 1970s, the founding principles of anti-racism in the nascent guerrilla struggle led by her uncle, and her understanding as a mother of three daughters that "We were trying to change things not just for our own children, but for all children." In conversation she is an utter cynic — about gains in women's rights for example — but her actions have led to such changes as the criminal prosecution of guerrillas who beat their wives, joint male and female title to property, and an equal wage for women coffee pickers in the community of exrebels (her name which she is happy to have known is Aurora Gives Tambríz).

The elderly campesino who escaped death by fire (he requests anonymity) describes what he understands to be the abiding dilemma in a way that would surely annoy Wilkinson's hosts. "Our cooperative was born out of the work of the church to end poverty in the early 1970s. I saw the homes of the rich there in Guatemala City, you can still see them. Twenty-story buildings for the politicians, the government employees, while for us [gesture for nothing]. One starts to see why we live like we do. So God said one day, in Beatitudes, — That's enough, no more! They've eaten the fattest sheep of my people, they've taken the best milk. No more! My poor little sheep are coming, and the rich, just wait [gesture that they will be attacked with rifles]. — Ahh, it's written, it's the word of God. And what are those in power going to do? They rule, they rule. As for us, for talking a little, they want to take our lives. Allah, they want to [gesture for slit our throats]." The catechist is describing the present as well as the past. Across Guatemala, organizers are insisting that the homicides of today bear everything in common with those of the 1970s — that they are not the work of common criminals. Since 1999, over 50 human rights defenders have been killed. In this regard Wilkinson fails us. Silence on the Mountain, a book of frequent beauty, renders invisible ongoing histories of organizing on Guatemala's plantations — campesinos who continue to act in "the belief that they could transform their nation," even while the author insists that such ideas have vanished and moreover, he charges the guerrillas with contributing to their demise. As so often happens in the analyses of US intellectuals, they obscure as much as they reveal.


Cindy Forster Scripps College, California

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