On Sept. 11, 1990, a Guatemalan anthropologist named Myrna Mack was stabbed to death by a Guatemalan army sergeant. Mack had been studying the suffering of rural indigenous communities at the hands of Guatemala's brutal military regime. That day, Mack became just another casualty of the 36-year civil war that claimed 200,000 Guatemalans, many of them noncombatants.
This September, 12 years after her death and six years since the end of the war, Mack's murder went to trial again. Of the three high-ranking officers charged -- considered authors of this and other human rights violations committed in Guatemala -- one, Col. Juan Valencia Osorio, was convicted of ordering the assassination of Mack. But what's missing from many news reports about the trial is the role of a third party in Guatemala's tragic past. In 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup installed a military regime that proceeded to intimidate and kill communists and leftist reformers. The U.S. funded this government throughout the Cold War with full knowledge of the atrocities taking place there.
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Daniel Wilkinson was a young human rights worker in the early 1990s when he first visited that country.
"I went into this coffee-producing region where the war had played out. I had reason to believe that some pretty momentous and horrible things had taken place in the area. I assumed people would want to tell these stories. But people said nothing happened. I could understand why they might be uncomfortable speaking with a stranger about things related to the war because the war wasn't over. But what struck me was that when I tried to talk about the history of the country that preceded the war -- the Agrarian Reform in the 1950s, the formation of the plantations at the beginning of the century -- people didn't want to talk about that either.
The Agrarian Reform was in some ways bigger than the New Deal. It was a reform that affected pretty much all aspects of economic, social and political life in the countryside. The years of political violence that targeted individuals who were in any way associated with the political left had left a mark. The mark was that if you harbored any sympathies for the left, you could be a target, not just being blackballed, but actually being tortured to death. People didn't want to talk about politics or anything that would contaminate them."
informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica
Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.
Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors
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11.11.02
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