Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala.

• Author: Humphrey-Skomer, Jael
• Position: Book Review

Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, by Victoria Sanford Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2003) Price: $22.05

Over 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, more than 1 million displaced and at least 626 villages destroyed during Guatemala's 36-year armed conflict according to the United Nations sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH). (1) Victoria Sanford worked for more than a decade in Guatemala--literally unearthing the country's horrific past as an anthropologist with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG). From 1994--two years before the Peace Accords--onward, Sanford interviewed more than four hundred survivors of the conflict, from massacre escapees to massacre perpetrators, from soldiers to guerillas, from locals to officials. However, it is the voices of Guatemala's majority, impoverished, indigenous population that most permeate Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. (2)

Perhaps the clearest lesson that arises from Sanford's work is that the breaking of silence and confrontation of past abuses is necessary on an individual, community, and nation-wide level if Guatemala is to move beyond its past. Sanford successfully argues not only that memory and truth are fundamental in contesting the continued effects from the army's campaign of terror, but also that truth and memory play a fundamental role in the transition from an authoritarian regime to democracy.

Sanford cautions that stories can be lost in numbers as she carefully broadens her analysis from the micro level of individual survivor stories to the macro level of categorization of shared experiences. In a phenomenology of terror, Sanford organizes the accounts of "La Violencia" (or simply "the Violence") into seven temporal categories: (1) pre-massacre community organizing and experiences with violence; (2) the massacre; (3) post-massacre life in flight; (4) army captures and community surrenders; (5) model villages; (6) ongoing militarization of community life; and (7) living memory of terror. An understanding of the violence, which extended beyond the massacres themselves, is essential to overcome its effects.

Sanford's use of testimony is extremely effective. Dona Elena's story, for example, exemplifies the extent of the violence against Mayan civilians. After the massacre in which Dona Elena lost her husband, she fled to the mountains where she gave birth to their son, endured hunger and illness, and fled...