|
Have you ever been to Guatemala? For decades, tourists and gringo travelers have known the place as a peaceful, colorful, natural wonderland. Dig the scene: short, stocky highland farmers in brightly colored hand-woven shirts, overstuffed, careening buses on spaghetti-strand dirt roads, Mayan temple ruins rising out of jungle mists.
But that is not the Guatemala author Francisco Goldman presents.
On April 23, 1998, the Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights (ODHA) released “Guatemala: Never Again,” a 1,600-page report documenting the massacres, torture, and state terrorism conducted by the Guatemalan military since the early 1960s. The Church had initiated an accounting, as Goldman explains, “that was crucial for repairing the country’s shredded social fabric and for ensuring that human rights abuses would no longer be protected by an official culture of silence and lies …” Three days later, Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, ODHA’s founding director, was beaten to death in the garage of his parish house in Guatemala City, just blocks from the National Palace.
All of the people who labored over that Human Rights report knew what they were in for. The Guatemalan military had been running the show there ever since the American government helped orchestrate the 1954 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. Something about fruit. United Fruit.
And then the Guatemalan military waged bloodthirsty war in the Mayan highlands for decades, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, living large on the largesse of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, the U.S.: that is, you’n’me, the taxpayers. Plus drugs, probably, prostitution and other organized crime, all orchestrated by the Guatemalan Presidential Guards. Imagine the Mafia in uniform, hundreds of them with pretty good weapons, a vast criminal conspiracy with unchecked power from the President’s residence to the daily newspapers to the street people paid with free chicken to spy on everything that moved.
The Art of Political Murder tells the whole eight-year story: the murder, the investigation, the trial, the post-trial (the “Third Stage,” as Goldman calls it) and finally, the likely truth. Francisco Goldman is a terrific writer (The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband) who has lived for long periods in Guatemala – his mother was born there. To write this book, Goldman interviewed everyone he could reach and charted the stories and the tracks of all the dozens of players. He doesn’t just weigh the evidence, he sifts it before our eyes, mixing and re-mixing until the truth — or shadows of the truth — begin to rise.
“They [the investigators and Chex, a mysterious eyewitness] met in a Pollo Campero fried-chicken restaurant in the municipal capital of Chimaltenango, on a corner of the tree-shaded central plaza. Chex’s condition was that they buy him a meal and soda, so that it would look as if they were just meeting for lunch,” writes Goldman.
It shouldn’t be that fascinating, but somehow this sordid tale captivates, even though Goldman’s snaking storyline, long list of characters, and obsessive details are hard to follow. The Art of Political Murder chronicles a different sort of war, a gritty struggle between opposing visions of Guatemala – Satan triumphant or the Devil driven down?
“For half a century the military’s clandestine world had seemed impregnable. The Gerardi case had opened a path into that darkness,” Goldman writes. And the story continues even after the last page. Francisco Goldman appeared in Seattle on Oct. 25, 2007 at Seattle University. A few weeks later, the papers reported the results of Guatemala’s presidential election: businessman Álvaro Colom had just defeated retired army general Otto Pérez Molina, who had served as head of the Presidential Guards from 1993-96. In his victory speech, Mr. Colom described the vote as, “A no to Guatemala’s tragic history.”
If so many heroes battled to make that hopeful statement possible, who are we to doubt?
|
