Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala(American Encounters/Global Interactions)

Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were "disappeared") at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation's manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country's recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala's Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets. Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete it verges on collective amnesia.The author's great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories--dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking--that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not only to Guatemala but to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.

Table of Contents:
I. A House Burned The Owner 3 The Student 7 The Battlefield 11 Exhumation 19 II. Ashes Fell Rumor 29 Travelogue 32 Natural History 42 Bildungsroman 48 Revelation 56 Decree 65 III. A Future Was Buried A Dangerous Question 83 The Law That Would Change the World 157 Betrayal 168 Burials 180 IV. And They Were the Eruption The Savages 193 Sacuhum 199 The Guerrillas 217 The Politicians 252 The Terrorist 307 The Defeated 337 The Storytellers 350 List of Names 361 Notes on Sources 362 Selected Bibliography 367 Acknowledgments 372 Index 374

About the Author :
Daniel Wilkinson is Managing Director, Americas Division at Human Rights Watch.

Review :
Combines the probity of a serious historian with the literary instincts of a crime writer ... peeling back layers of silence and deceit in ways that are reminiscent of what Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity did for Vichy France."--Peter Canby, The Nation "Wilkinson sets out to tell the story of Guatemala's recently ended thirty-six-year internal war through the secret history of one venerable coffee plantation. The result reads like a novel narrated by a disarmingly funny, perceptive, deeply humane young American... You feel as if you are riding with Wilkinson on his beat-up motorcycle up muddy, dangerous jungle trails into the heart of a secretive country just waking up from a long nightmare... A brilliant and important book."-- Francisco Goldman, author of The Long Night of White Chickens "This is an extraordinary tale, and an extremely well-told one. Written like a modern explorer's journal, Silence on the Mountain is the account of Daniel Wilkinson's self-appointed mission to uncover dark secrets in a shady corner of Guatemala. With humility, humor, honesty ... he has given us a rare and intimate understanding of how this achingly beautiful country became one of the Western Hemisphere's most brutalized places."-- Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life "Combines the probity of a serious historian with the literary instincts of a crime writer... peeling back layers of silence and deceit in ways that are reminiscent of what Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity did for Vichy France." Peter Canby, The Nation "This is an extraordinary tale, and an extremely well-told one. Written like a modern explorer's journal, Silence on the Mountain is the account of Daniel Wilkinson's self-appointed mission to uncover dark secrets in a shady corner of Guatemala. With humility, humor, honesty ... he has given us a rare and intimate understanding of how this achingly beautiful country became one of the Western Hemisphere's most brutalized places."-- Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life "A young human rights lawyer with an eye for detail and the gumption to ride a rickety motorcycle to get to the bottom of a story until now largely untold, Wilkinson has written a book full of grim details about exploitation of coffee pickers, genocidal massacres, and frustrated leftist organizing."--Clifford Krauss, New York Times Book Review "[Silence on the Mountain] document[s] unthinkable horror, insisting as we try to turn away that attention must be paid, that what happened there must never happen again, that the past isn't past at all."--Joanne Omang, Washington Post Combines the probity of a serious historian with the literary instincts of a crime writer ... peeling back layers of silence and deceit in ways that are reminiscent of what Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity did for Vichy France."--Peter Canby, The Nation "Silence on the Mountain has the seductive allure and vivid characters of the finest fiction and the penetration of the most elegant journalism. Mr. Wilkinson's painstaking work has crucial lessons for our government's future role not only in Latin America but in the entire world. Above all, his book serves literature's deepest impulse: to bring forth truth out of silence."--The 2003 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction citation "Wilkinson's quest for information takes him from the upper to the lower to the middle classes, through the different tiers of Guatemala's dependent export economy, all the way to your morning latte."--David Stoll, New Republic "The author's style is taut and precise, but it is the Guatemalans themselves who speak with the greatest eloquence."-- New Yorker "Given the recidivist nature of U.S. policy in Latin America, Wilkinson's book [is] a well-timed reminder of the potentially devastating consequences of our successes."--Alex Stone, Washington Monthly "A series of brilliantly recorded encounters with scores of people... a well-told and often suspenseful mystery story."--Thomas Quigley, America: National Catholic Weekly "A profound book ...both easy to read and compelling."--Publishers Weekly "A page-turning work of detective nonfiction."--Diana Nelson Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette