Mountain of evidence.

• Author: Stone, Alex
• Position: Book Review

SILENCE ON THE MOUNTAIN Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala by Daniel Wilkinson Houghton Mifflin $24.00

AT THE TIME IT WAS CARRIED out in 1954, the CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew Guatemala's leftist president Jacobo Arbenz was heralded in Washington as a huge success. The CIA's first covert operation in Latin America, it became a model for intervention in the region for decades to come. In one of the earliest examples of a "psywar," the U.S. team fabricated intelligence and phony news reports to convince the Guatemalan military that defeat was inevitable, bluffing Arbenz out of office with a nominal show of force. Even The New York Times agreed to keep its correspondent off the story. After it was over, Eisenhower would praise Guatemala as a "showcase for democracy."

But the inaugural ceremonies marking Arbenz's replacement with a U.S.-backed military regime had just ended when plantation workers and college students began trading their plows and textbooks for rifles and fatigues, setting out under cover of night for the hidden reaches of the mountains to prepare for the revolution.

In Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting, Daniel Wilkinson attempts to reconstruct this history, weaving firsthand testimonies with official records into an account of how U.S. intervention sparked Guatemala's brutal 36-year civil war. Although he occasionally loses focus and gets bogged down in tedious details, Wilkinson's book hits its mark more often than not.

Within weeks of taking office in the spring of 1954, Guatemala's new leader, a dissatisfied colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas, dismantled a decade of reform, outlawing labor unions and leftist political parties. Wilkinson provides an intimate description of how the U.S.-backed regimes that came to power after the coup alienated the middle class and radicalized the left, dividing the country along class lines. As outrage mounted, more people joined the ranks of the resistance, and the countryside sank into violence and chaos. The fighting dragged on, and the elusiveness of the enemy frustrated the military. As a result, they began staging increasingly brutal assaults on civilian populations, swelling the death toll.

Ultimately, Wilkinson uncovers little information not contained in sheaves of declassified documents or in the official report made by Guatemala's "Truth Commission"--which prompted Bill Clinton to issue

a formal apology. But he makes...