Guatemala: Eternal War, Eternal Struggle

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17750155
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 165–170

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17750155

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

165

Book Review

Guatemala

Eternal War, Eternal Struggle

by

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval

David Carey Jr. I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–

1944. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

Jason M. Colby The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central

America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.

W. George Lovell A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala. 2d revised edition.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson (eds.) War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-

Genocide Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Nicola Short The International Politics of Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Guatemala. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Timothy J. Smith and Abigail E. Adams (eds.) After the Coup: An Ethnographic Reframing

of Guatemala 1954. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

The war is over, but it continues, as does resistance, struggle, and opposition. When

did the war begin, and when will it end? These questions lie at the heart of these six

volumes on Guatemala—land of “eternal spring, eternal tyranny” (Simon, 1987). In

After the Coup, Timothy J. Smith and Abigail E. Adams, reviewing the U.S. ethnographic

literature on Guatemala from the postcoup (mid-1950s) period to the present, contend

that three interesting trends appeared: a) the exclusive description of the coup as

CIA-or U.S.-enacted; b) the description of the coup as either ending or beginning cer-

tain histories, rather than as a major event in longer durées of social-historical develop-

ments; and c) the documentation of one or more of those very sociohistorical

developments in their ethnographies, despite their invocation of either trope a or b

above.

In other words, they are suggesting, somewhat heretically perhaps, that the events

of 1954 have been overemphasized to the neglect of cycles of violence and resistance

that occurred both before and after the CIA-backed coup that ousted democratically

elected President Jacobo Árbenz (ending the “Ten Years of Spring”—the social-dem-

ocratic policies, including agrarian reform and the right to organize, that largely ben-

efited indigenous and Ladino workers and other marginalized social groups). Indeed,

as the historian Greg Grandin’s opening chapter in Carlota McAllister and Diane M.

Nelson’s War by Other Means demonstrates, the “war” in Guatemala can be traced

back more than 500 years, to the Spanish Conquest, and although the civil war that

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval is a professor of Chicana/o studies at the University of California,

Santa Barbara, and an associate editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author of Starving

for Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity (2017).

750155LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17750155Armbruster-Sandoval / Book Review

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