Terror in the land of the holy spirit: Guatemala under general efrain rios montt 1982-1983

Between 1982 and 1983, the military government of Guatemala waged a scorched-earth campaign of terror against largely Mayan rural communities. Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides a fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efran Ros Montt. She suggests that three decadesof war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even families. "Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God,' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General Ros Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives intothe horrifying, bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid historical accountand analysis we yet possess of what happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the leastcomforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly written andargued, this is a necessary and indispensable book."-- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?"Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression thatoverwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad waysChristian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributionsto our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just inGuatemala but throughout Latin America."--Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York UniversityDrawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efran Ros Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and evenfamilies. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also explores the long dure of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction permitted the humanrights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world. 1. Rios Montt Earns His Place in the History Books: Debates aboutla Violencia2. Guatemala's Descent in Violence3. Rios Montt and the New Guatemala4. Terror5. "Los Que Matan en el Nombre de Dios": Rios Montt and the Religious Question6. Blind Eyes and Willful Ignorance: U.S. Foreign Policy, Media, and Foreign EvangelicalsEpilogueNotesBibliography

• ISBN: 978-0-19-984477-7
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 288
• Fecha Publicación: 24/10/2011
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés