Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala.

• Author: Robertson, Ian
• Position: FURTHER READING - Book review

BURIED SECRETS: TRUTH AND HUMAN FRIGHTS IN GUATEMALA Victoria Sanford (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 307 pages.

It is a sadly common history: a poor indigenous population caught between a revolutionary guerilla movement and a national army devoted to its eradication. Technologically incapable or morally unwilling to make the proper distinctions between combatant and non-combatant, the state errs on the side of over-inclusion, which sometimes results in what the international community later calls genocide.

For Guatemala's Mayan population, La Violencia began in 1978 under the authoritarian regime of General Lucas Garcia and, depending on the metric used, lasted between four and twenty years, accounted for over 200,000 violent deaths and displaced approximately 1.5 million people, almost exclusively at the hands of the state.

In addition to providing a detailed history, in Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, anthropologist Victoria Sanford endeavors to distill from this gruesome record a discussion of general truths about the nature and character of mass violence and terror. At times she...