Guatemalan Civil War Research Articles

Kemenik le Ch’o’b’oj / Tejiendo Historias / Weaving Histories/Stories: Creating a Memoria Histórica of Resistance through Maya Backstrap Weaving Rhetorics

In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory, both individual and collective,” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide. In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.

How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the 2013 trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

AbstractThe 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt cemented Guatemala's reputation as a land of genocide. Most of the survivors who testified about army crimes during his 1982–1983 regime came from the Ixil Maya town of Nebaj. Oddly, some Nebajenses credit Ríos Montt with ending army massacres and saving their lives. This article focuses on the genocide debate in the municipio of Nebaj. It concludes that command responsibility for war crimes would have been a more effective indictment than genocide.

Psychological Experiences of the Guatemalan Civil War and postwar Violence on a Kaqchikel Community:An Exploratory Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT The Kaqchikel are an indigenous population who experienced political violence during the civil war and postwar conflict in Guatemala because their political ideology was in opposition to the military government. This formative study explored their trauma experiences and coping skills. We used a community member to recruit our small sample (N = 18) through convenience sampling. Participants expressed anxiety, depression, sadness, fear, and distrust stemming from incidents of trauma and violence and the loss of loved ones. Many participants identified family and community members as their major source of support. Positive coping strategies included having a strong religious faith and work ethic that helped them cope with distress. However, some participants resorted to negative coping behaviors such as alcohol abuse or knew of others who did. Our findings provide useful evidence to develop culturally-sensitive mental health services for this specific indigenous community.

Voting for a Killer: Efraín Ríos Montt's Return to Politics in Democratic Guatemala

From 1982 to 1983, General Efraín Ríos Montt presided over an especially bloody period of the Guatemalan civil war. Under Ríos Montt's watch, the state killed approximately 75,000 of its own citizens. Yet less than a decade later, the former dictator emerged as one of the most popular politicians in newly democratic Guatemala. How did a gross human rights violator stage such an improbable comeback? Using process tracing, I argue that Ríos Montt's trajectory is best explained by his embrace of populism as his core political strategy. This analysis deepens our knowledge of an important case, while shedding light on broader questions about how and when actors with profoundly undemocratic values can hijack democracy for their own ends.

Eduardo HalfonCanción

0 independence of thought. Among the rarely discussed historical facets Ābele’s novel illuminates are the deportation of “undesirable ” Latvians by secret KGB operations, the intricacies of social relationships for those outside the government under USSR rule, and the regional differences within Latvia and Latgale, both historically and today. Where both Ābele’s writing and Moseley ’s translation shine are in the seamless flow between plot and imagery. Sentences like “The girls’ faces become translucent, illuminated by the sap of life as if by oranges cast in bronze” are apt to catch readers by surprise amidst paragraphs of realistically rendered desolation. This is also where the novel reveals its necessity for some prerequisite understanding, however: images like this can be obtuse, and very little of the book’s length is given to scene-setting, so those unfamiliar with Latvian geography or language will likely get lost in the unusual turns of phrase and extensively researched details. It is also worth noting that neither Ābele nor Moseley flinches from using period-accurate language that not infrequently includes slurs and bigoted generalizations. As the narrator, Andrievs, notes in a rare moment of interiority, “History is as secure a refuge as a hay-rack in a storm, and yet, it is a refuge.” The refuge of World War II–era history, so long confined to anglophone experiences, is being brought into the light by Ābele and Moseley in this volume, in all its grit and complexity. Linda Stack-Nelson Minneapolis Eduardo Halfon Canción Barcelona. Libros del Asteroide. 2021. 128 pages. EDUARDO HALFON’S LATEST novel explores the power of naming and appearance and what they conceal, and the vulnerabilities experienced by those who reach beyond them. Its narrator calls his grandmother’s cousin Uncle Salomón even though he’s not his uncle. The story opens with the narrator’s arrival in Tokyo for a conference dedicated to Lebanese writers even though his Lebanese grandfather wasn’t Lebanese; he was forced to leave before Lebanon was a country bearing that name. The deceptively pretty title alludes to a killer known for his singsong voice. Salomón reads the future in Turkish coffee grounds. When the narrator is a child, he witnesses his uncle’s last reading , the session interrupted by the arrival of soldiers to his grandfather’s Guatemala City mansion, an enormous house that, the narrator recalls, suddenly felt very small. The soldiers are there to tell the grandfather they’ve located one of the men who kidnapped him in 1967. Their visit brings no solace, their news no closure. The fear that caused the house to shrink put an end to Salomón’s interpretive efforts, but it is at the heart of the narrator’s lifelong search to understand his grandfather and Guatemala ’s puzzling and frightening pasts. Openness to uncertainty and an acknowledgment of shifting origins permit affinities that others, like the writers in Tokyo who contest the narrator’s Lebanese heritage, would prefer to regulate and even disqualify altogether. The narrator’s changing position along multiple ambiguous geographical, social, and cultural crossroads —he’s Jewish, Guatemalan, of Syrian or Lebanese descent, of a privileged economic class, and a writer who once studied engineering—mirrors this extraordinary novel’s combination of lucidity and structural sophistication, moving subtly as it does back and forth through several moments and places, from the room where the grandfather’s kidnappers held him to the bar where, decades later, the narrator met a woman whom, years earlier, the narrator’s father identified as one of his father’s kidnappers. When the narrator meets her, she says, “Tú eres Halfon,” at once enmeshing him in the murky world of the Guatemalan Civil War’s aftermath and establishing an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions. Canción’s portrayals of social and political complexity avoid easy judgment. The text’s insistence upon facing instead of concealing difficult truths about affiliations and origins makes plausible and important that which in the hands of a lesser writer would risk being trite—for example, the narrator’s attraction to and conversations with an organizer of the conference in Tokyo, whose grandfather was maimed when the...

‘It's Not Gossip, It's True’: Denunciation and Social Control during the Guatemalan Armed Conflict (1970–85)

AbstractPractices of denunciation are at once ubiquitous and marginalised in literature on the Guatemalan armed conflict. Meanwhile, ordinary Guatemalans who spontaneously denounced neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers have largely escaped scrutiny in scholarly work on low-level perpetrators. Departing from untapped confidential documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, this article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). This contribution reveals both the strategic considerations that spurred state intelligence apparatuses to elicit civilian information as well as the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that drove civilians to denounce. The case study questions scholarly consensus on the spontaneous and voluntary character of denunciation by arguing that besides providing novel pathways for opportunistic action, denunciations also opened up new strategies for survival in the face of a civil war that structured available choices.

Ixil Maya Resistance against Megaprojects in Cotzal, Guatemala

Ixil Maya Resistance against Megaprojects in Cotzal, Guatemala Giovanni Batz (bio) Due to an increasing global demand for natural resources coupled with neoliberalization, there has been a significant growth in infrastructure and extractive industries which have negatively affected indigenous communities.1 These demands for electricity and metals are often to the benefit of foreigners living in developed nations and people living outside of the affected communities. However, the cost of covering such demands has also meant displacement and conflict for those living near these projects. Since the end of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Ixil region (consisting of the municipalities of Chajul, Cotzal and Nebaj), has witnessed the arrival of international corporations that have constructed (or are in the process of obtaining licenses to build) megaprojects such as mines or hydroelectric dams. By May 2018, the Ixil region had two operational hydroelectric projects (the Hidro Xacbal Dam in Chajul and the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant in Cotzal), another under construction (the Xacbal Delta Dam in Chajul), and three amparos (legal protection for constitutional individual or community rights) involving hydroelectric dams (all in Nebaj). An amparo in these cases has prevented companies from building their projects until the legal matter of consultation has been resolved by the judicial system. Furthermore, a mining project to extract barite (a mineral used in fracking) in Salquil Grande, Nebaj has also generated tensions and potential conflicts.2 Despite the discourses of development associated with these megaprojects, they have produced little or no benefits to surrounding communities where they operate. Instead, these projects have generated community conflicts, social divisions, evictions, arrest warrants for community leaders, and environmental degradation, as well as remilitarization through the establishment of army garrisons and states of siege. In Cotzal, the arrival of these foreign companies and megaprojects was referred to as the "new invasion" or "fourth invasion" after the first, second and third invasions of Spanish colonization, the creation of the plantation economy between the 1870s and 1930s, and the Guatemalan Civil War, respectively.3 This article examines a movement in Cotzal against the construction of the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant built by the Italian company Enel on the finca (plantation) San Francisco from 2008–2012.4 Palo Viejo includes four [End Page 1016] separate concrete diversion dams (Presa Cotzal, Presa Chipal, Presa El Desengaño, and Presa El Regadío), and a reservoir.5 The struggle was characterized by peaceful resistance, a four-month blockade, and the arrival of the military, as well as the creation and breakdown of a roundtable dialogue between the company and local communities. The Ixil region has a history of foreign intervention and extraction, externally-imposed forms of development, state-sponsored violence and resistance. During a dialogue meeting between Enel and the communities of Cotzal, an Ixil leader recognized these cyclical forms of invasion, drawing parallels between Enel's arrival and the Spanish invasion: There is no recognition here of Indigenous Peoples, because you [Enel] come like the god, you act like the god among our communities, because you are the ones who will give gifts… 500 years ago you came with a mirror… Now you want to give away other things… You always want to be above the Indigenous; if you have your say, the Indigenous have to accept what comes from above, that's racism… That's how I feel it, because I'm Indigenous and I feel it that way… You continue to view us like you are used to seeing us, as indios.6 The Alcalde Indígena of Cotzal, Concepcion Santay Gomez, equates the arrival of the Brol family—who displaced the Ixil over a century ago to create the finca San Francisco—with the arrival of Enel: "the arrival of the Brols is equal to the arrival of Enel now, they arrived offering things to our people. Our grandfathers and grandmothers had to leave their lands back then, [now Enel is] constructing the dam on the land where they used to be."7 I argue that the arrival of megaprojects, such as Palo Viejo, continues the history of a colonial logic of extraction, and is an extension of the historical tensions between the communities of Cotzal, the...

Ni de aquí ni de alla: A Mythohistoriography of Growing Up In-Between

Abstract Using Aurora Levins Morales’ concept of “medicinal histories,” and Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” this mythohistoriography weaves together multiple histories of the Guatemalan Civil War, Indigenous stories of resistance in Guatemala, queer and trans presences and erasures, the author’s family stories during this time, and the author’s upbringing as this armed conflict was supposedly ending. Through a Two-Spirit critique this layering project calls for different types of historicizing practices and methodologies for queer and trans studies to focus on in order to do responsible decolonial work. Ultimately, this project is part of a healing praxis meant to deal with generational traumas forged through forcefully forgotten and erased historias and memories of queer and trans Indigenous Guatemalans.

Cartographies of Justice and Rights in Ronald Flores's Último silencio

Published in 2000, Ronald Flores’s Ultimo silencio has yet to captivate a criti-cal audience even though it was awarded the Premio Mario Monteforte Toledo. The novel recounts the return of a psychiatrist who had fled to the United States during the thick of the Guatemalan Civil War, where he earned accolades for his treatment of torture victims. Back home, he sets up a clinic to help the vic-tims of the war. His plans, however, are complicated when he unintentionally secures a notorious military leader known for committing atrocities as a client. In a fast-paced and polyphonic style, Flores explores the ethics of culpability, the concept of evil, and the politics of human rights and justice in post-war Guate-mala. Of interest to me in the discursive and thematic trajectory of the novel is the mapping of these concepts onto the space of the city and nation. Basing my analysis on ideas by Ileana Rodriguez, Jean Franco, and Edward Weisband, the following pages trace the relationship between cartography, ethics, and human rights in Ultimo silencio. Ultimately, I argue that the novel is only capable of arriving at a just conclusion through a spatial displacement away from the city and the crafting of a counterhegemonic, counterpublic sphere.

Israel, Guatemala, and the agricultural roots of an authoritarian internationalism

On Christmas Eve 2017, less than a month after President Donald Trump unilaterally announced his decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Guatemala announced that it would become the second country in the world to make the same move. This article locates the historical background to the recent embassy move in the building of model villages throughout Guatemala during the height of the Guatemalan Civil War. Throughout the early 1980s, Israeli agricultural and military advisors helped to militarize the Guatemalan highlands by training Guatemalan police and military to construct plantation-style model villages. Employing the language of rural development, these model villages became a core counterinsurgent tactic for former General Efrain Rios Montt’s infamous “scorched earth” policy. The article concludes by discussing how we practically cross our own mental barricades to refocus Palestine/Latinx solidarity movements toward agriculture. What possibilities are opened up when we stand from our grounded solidarities and commit to refuse exceptionalist narratives and single-issue organizing, particularly in our shared commitments to more effectively combat the ongoing practices of war-making and imperial violence?

Killing Democracy: United States Imperialism, Civil War and Genocide in Guatemala 1954-1996

The United States in 1954, under the thin veil of fighting communism and defending “American” interests, led a coup d’etat in Guatemala to overthrow democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz and his immediate predecessor Juan Jose Arevalo initiated substantial social programs that brought needed and popular changes to a rising urban working class and rural peasants that for 133 years were ruled by paternal autocrats that in Latin America were called caudillos. Beginning in the twentieth century Guatemalan rulers encouraged foreign corporations, enticed with generous governmental inducements to plunder the nation and keep labor costs at rock bottom. By 1944 the Guatemalan people began to pushback against the caudillos who ruled for benefit of the oligarchy and US corporations. The US onslaught against the Arbenz government set the stage for US imperialist interventions throughout Latin America for the next 65 years. Indeed, for the US Central Intelligent Agency (CIA), the operations in Guatemala and Iran (1953), served as a blueprint for CIA led interventions around the globe. During the four decades subsequent the US-led destruction of the ambitious Guatemalan 1944 Revolution, Guatemala was once again beset with vicious and corrupt dictators. The dreams of the poor and working class of a liberal government in Guatemala were violently swept away and replaced by four decades of Civil War and governmental policies of scorched earth cruelty and genocide under the guidance, military training and acquiescence of the highest reaches of the US government. These horrors, that claimed more than 200,000 lives, 93 percent of the deaths at the hands of the Guatemalan military, culminated in the 1996 peace accord under the auspices of the United Nations. The peace accord ended a horrific and sustained wave of repression and slaughter and established a Commission on Historical Clarification to study the atrocities and their causes. This paper examines the US-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected government at the behest of corporate profits and the decades of savagery that supported tyrants who unleashed unspeakable horrors against their own populations during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War.

THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT’S TWO FRIENDS AND ARTURO ARIAS’ TOWARD PATZUN

This paper compares and contrasts two short stories, Guy De Maupassant’s Two Friends and Arturo Arias’ Toward Patzun. Both stories have the same thematic structure as the harshness and brutality during wartime situation is a similar concern to the aforementioned writers. Although both writers foreground the savagery of war, the different cultural background, nationality, literary tradition cause differences in the way both writer narrate their short stories. While De Maupassant depicts the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Arias squares his narration in the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996). The differences of canonical status between De Maupassant and Arias is also scrutinized in this paper. While De Maupassant is a household name in Western literary tradition, the popularity of Arias remains obscure. This paper argues that the differences in canonization is linked also with the status of Two Friends in the hypercanon, on the other hand Toward Patzun is located in the countercanon. It is hoped that this paper can contribute toward questioning the privileged status of Western literary works compared to the non-Western author.

Invisible Threats: Online Hate Speech Against Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala

Invisible Threats documents a coordinated campaign on social media to defame, harass, intimidate, and incite violence against human rights defenders in Guatemala. Social media users with formal and informal connections to the government, military and the business community, routinely characterize human rights defenders as criminals, terrorists, and communists. Using rhetoric from the thirty-six-year Guatemalan civil war and genocide, the coded speech of state-aligned actors often evades scrutiny under the content moderation policies of social media companies (SMCs). These campaigns create the conditions in which physical attacks on defenders are not prevented, investigated, or punished by the state. The report makes two primary recommendations. First, SMCs must take measures to prevent their platforms from being used to target, harass, and intimidate human rights defenders, or they risk being complicit in any resulting harms and injuries. Drawing on international law that prohibits states from targeting individuals for serious harm based on their political opinion, the report recommends that SMCs designate defenders as temporarily protected groups in contexts like Guatemala characterized by coordinated state persecution. Second, we recommend that social media platforms engage in context-specific content moderation, which implies dedicating more resources to distinguishing the coded meaning of speech and understanding the differential impact of the same words in distinct political settings. Companies might create interdisciplinary teams that draw upon the expertise of academics, linguists, and lawyers. Such efforts should focus first on hate speech in countries with weak rule of law and a history of violent aggression against protected groups. SMCs should provide heightened scrutiny of content in “critical countries,” engage localized personnel and guidance, and consider the greater impact of the speaker in monitoring and possibly de-platforming high profile accounts. SMCs can also improve flagging processes to facilitate the gathering of context-specific information by utilizing verified users as endorsed content moderators, creating and implementing online and social media literacy training programs, and creating appeals processes. These recommendations, when taken together, will increase protection for human rights defenders on the platform — both online and offline.

Mopan in Context: Mayan Identity, Belizean Citizenship, and the Future of a Language

Mopan in Context:Mayan Identity, Belizean Citizenship, and the Future of a Language Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar (bio) and William Salmon (bio) mayan communities in belize have been largely excluded from the linguistic inquiry into Mayan languages that began in the late nineteenth century, as well as from the grassroots movements that have promoted the revitalization of Mayan languages in Guatemala more recently.1 In the absence of academic interest, limited attention to grassroots activism, and a lack of publishing opportunities for authors, the issues affecting Mayan languages in Belize have been relegated to the periphery of larger discussions about Mayan languages in Mesoamerica.2 Even as attention turns to speakers of Mayan languages living in the United States, Mayan migrants from Belize continue to be absent from research on the Mayan diaspora.3 As such, the study reported on in this article is the first to look in depth at the ecology in which the Mopan language resides.4 Significantly, it is also the first study to consider the implications of a young generation of ethnic Mayans growing up as native speakers of Kriol. Our findings in this article suggest that a language shift from Mopan to Kriol is underway among the younger generations of Mopan speakers and that if its use among this demographic is not revitalized, it could lead to Mopan's endangerment in the near future. The larger discussion focuses on geopolitical and socioeconomic factors that influence language attitudes toward Spanish, English, and Kriol in Belize, contributing to an ongoing body of work on Belizean languages in general.5 The Mopan Language Family and History Mopan belongs to the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan language family, which also includes Yucatec, Itza', and Lacandón. Yucatec and Lacandón are primarily spoken in Mexico, with the former having an estimated eight hundred thousand speakers and the latter seriously endangered, with approximately one thousand speakers. Itza' is spoken in the Petén region of northern Guatemala and is also severely endangered. Mopan is one of two Yucatecan languages spoken in Belize, and it is believed to have approximately ten thousand speakers.6 There are an additional five thousand speakers of Mopan in [End Page 70] Guatemala; they are concentrated in in San Luis and in the Lake Petén Itzá road area (an enclave between Dolores and Poptun) within the department of Petén.7 Both of the Mayan languages spoken in this area of Guatemala, Mopan and Itzá, have been identified by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG) as endangered languages and have been targeted for revitalization efforts.8 Over the last few centuries, speakers of Mayan languages in Guatemala, including Mopan, have been subjected to a process of castellanización, or Hispanicization, that parallels the experiences of speakers of indigenous languages in other former Spanish colonies.9 Unlike Guatemala and the rest of Central America, however, the official language of colonial British Honduras (now Belize) was standard British English. Speakers of Mayan languages were subjected to a process of Anglicization. This process has continued since Belize gained its independence in 1981 and become increasingly complex: the American English standard variety has overtaken British English in terms of overt prestige, and Kriol now holds both covert and overt prestige as a lingua franca qua national language.10 Political Setting While most former English colonies obtained their independence from the British Empire in the 1960s, Belize had to assess three interrelated factors before claiming its independence. It had to consider first the threat of a Guatemalan invasion of Belize during the former's civil war (1960–96); second, the brutal genocide against Mayan populations across the border in the Petén region; third, the ongoing territorial dispute between the countries over the existence and precise location of the Belizean-Guatemalan border.11 The factors remain salient, as their potential threat has not attenuated in the years since the end of the Guatemalan civil war. The territorial dispute is still very much alive, with the territory involved including the southern section of Belize District, most of Cayo District, and the entirety of Stann Creek and Toledo Districts, which are home to the Kekchi and Mopan...

The old militarized humanitarianism: contradictions of counterinsurgent infrastructure in Cold War Guatemala

ABSTRACTDebates about the ostensibly new militarized humanitarianism engage narrowly with historical and geographical precedents. Rarely taken into account is Kennedy-era counterinsurgency in Latin America which had much in common with the whole-of-government approach of the United States and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. This article addresses this gap in the literature by documenting counterinsurgent nation-building promoted by the US government in Latin America during the Cold War. Specifically, this article examines the tensions and contradictions that emerged as US and Guatemalan military and military-led organizations opened an agricultural frontier through the elaboration of infrastructure. Diplomats, army officers, and politicians organized a transnational institutional infrastructure that redirected flows of resources and knowledge. Military experts harnessed these flows to create development infrastructure – roads, hospitals, schools, airstrips, and more – that provided settlers with conditions to invest in land and rendered landscapes and populations legible to the state. Finally, a promotional infrastructure was created to persuade Guatemalan and international publics of the military’s contributions to national development at a time when counterinsurgency itself threatened national stability. This article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this racialized counterinsurgency for analysing contemporary imbrications of humanitarianism and militarism and for reckoning with histories and legacies of the Guatemalan civil war.

Literary-Legal Representations: Statelessness and the Demands of Justice in Héctor Tobar's <em>The Tattooed Soldier</em>

Scholars such as Arturo Arias, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, and Claudia Milian have brought to light the importance of the historical specificity and traumatic experience of the (largely undocumented) Guatemalan diaspora in the US in the wake of the Guatemalan civil war. These and other scholars have generally used a trauma studies framework to read Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998/2000) and Central American migrant characters in Latinx literature in general. This article focuses on the novel’s deployment of human rights language and categories, particularly refugee-ness and statelessness. I argue that the novel, through the representation of refugees, homeless people, and a child soldier, critiques the narrow definition of statelessness provided by governmental bodies and instead reveals the experience of statelessness shared by migrants and other marginalized citizens. In addition, I assert that the novel critiques commonly offered modes of justice in the wake of human rights violations, a topic undertheorized in human rights and literary studies, and encourages new models of justice for victims of state violence.

The socialization of civilians and militia members

When the Guatemalan civil war ended in 1996, the Peace Accords required the demobilization of the civil patrols. Yet, nearly two decades after the end of the war, the ex-patrollers remain organized and active. At first glance, the persistence of Guatemala’s civil patrols sounds like a triumph of socialization: the men enrolled in the civil patrols were effectively socialized during the war, so they continue patrolling today. This argument is seductively simple, but it is incorrect. Using process tracing to analyze historical documents and interviews with former civil patrollers, I show that the military did not succeed in socializing most of its patrollers. The military was, however, remarkably successful at socializing civilians in conflict zones. After enduring a ferocious scorched earth campaign followed by re-education, civilians either learned to fear and comply with the military and the civil patrols, or they internalized the military-promulgated narrative that repression is necessary to guarantee security. Both these outcomes facilitate patrolling in postwar Guatemala, where many civilians in war-affected areas either embrace or tolerate extralegal security patrolling as a means of preventing crime from spreading to their communities. Theoretically, the case of Guatemala’s civil patrols expands our knowledge of socialization in militias and civil defense forces. Mass socialization of group members is not necessary for an armed group to retain its influence in the long term, even after a conflict has ended. Additionally, socialization occurs not just within groups, but also dynamically and interactively across group boundaries. To fully understand the trajectories of armed groups, it is important to analyze both socialization within armed groups and the socialization of the broader civilian population.

Explaining State Violence in the Guatemalan Civil War: Rebel Threat and Counterinsurgency

AbstractLiterature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat-response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.

Explaining State Violence in the Guatemalan Civil War: Rebel Threat and Counterinsurgency

Abstract Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat-response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.

Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives eds. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Petersen

Reviewed by: Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives eds. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Petersen Sandra García Sanborn Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives. Ribas-Casasayas, Alberto, and Amanda L. Petersen, eds. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. Pp. 260. ISBN 978-1-61148-736-7. A consistently illuminating collection of essays, Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives is the first critical anthology about the figure of the ghost and the aesthetic of haunting to focus on narrative, film, and photography produced in Latin America, Spain, and the Latino Diaspora. The twelve chapters that make up this volume take on the challenge of exposing the disruptive power of spectral theory, anchored in the Derridean concepts of the specter and hauntology, while reconsidering traditional readings, providing new concepts and associations, and reassessing cultural production. The collection begins with an introduction by Ribas-Casasayas and Petersen that establishes a lucid and persuasive theoretical foundation, which moves away from solely Euro-American conceptualizations. Organizing their discussion around principles elaborated by prominent specialists in Hispanic cultural studies, such as Nelly Richard's aesthetic of the fragment and rupture, Cristina Moreiras's theory of interstitial residues, and Jo Labanyi's aesthetic of haunting, they effectively elucidate how these approaches offer a platform to assess spectrality in the specificity of the Transhispanic context by challenging the limits of politics and symbolic representation. Following the general introduction, the volume is divided into four sections. The first section, "Ghostly Encounters: Haunted Histories," examines the various ways in which the traumatic past of post-dictatorial societies haunts their present. In chapter 1, Megan Corbin studies the powerful presence of the brutal past in contemporary Argentina through objects—several shown in photographs—left behind by prisoners in illegal detention centers. With the same sensitivity and critical insight, she also analyzes the Chilean documentary film Nostalgia de la luz, showing how the haunting presence of material objects interpellates any attempt at forgetting. In a similar vein, in chapter 2, Isabel Cuñado describes how Javier Marías's novels unveil the politics of memory in relation to justice and ethics through the presence of the ghost, the double, and the particular objects haunting these narratives. In chapter 3, Susana S. Martínez examines the impact of trans-generational trauma in two novels about the Guatemalan civil war, which put emphasis on absence as a source of a ghostly presence. Martínez complements her readings with a poignant analysis of Jonathan Moller's black and white photographic collection about mass-graves exhumations. The inclusion of several of these images underscores the terror of the past, the overwhelming need for justice, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead. The second section, "The Persistence of Violence: Trauma as Haunting," addresses the concept of "retraumatization," as past trauma affecting a second generation in relation to the theme of los desaparecidos. With keen perceptivity, in chapter 4, Karen Wooley Martin assesses [End Page 309] the figure of the phantom as a metaphor for the missing and the psychological wounds of those searching and grieving in two novels: Perla and Purgatorio. In chapter 5, Charles St-Georges discusses the film Aparecidos, stressing how its cinematography borrows from the aesthetic of horror films to develop an allegory of the Dirty War. In chapter 6, Sarah Thomas exposes a theme often neglected, as is the systematic abuse of children of Republican families during the Franco dictatorship, by studying the trope of the child, the orphan, and the ghost in two films: El espinazo del diablo and El orfanato. Disclosing a shift in aesthetic practices, in chapter 7, Juliana Martínez explains how two novels by Evelio Rosero and two recent films avoid violence as a mere spectacle and, instead, resort to strategies that emphasize a topography of ambiguity and desolation, a "spectral spaciality," that brings to the forefront the predicament of the disappeared in Colombia. The third section, "Still Images: The Living and the Dead," is composed of two chapters and discusses the interaction between photography, death, and narrative. In chapter 8, N. Michelle Murray deconstructs Ramito de Hierbabuena calling attention to the trickery a spectral representation grounded in the paradoxical field...