[Nasional-e] Silence On The Mountain Stories of Terror...

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Silence On The Mountain Stories of Terror, Betrayal and Forgetting in
Guatemala by Daniel Wilkinson
Houghton Mifflin 373pp $24
 The Blindfold's Eyes My Journey from Torture to Truth
by Sister Dianna Ortiz with Patricia Davis
Orbis 484pp $25
 Reviewed by Joanne Omang

Now that the United States has declared war on terrorism, it is useful to
ask just what it is we are fighting. We want to stop people who steer jets
into skyscrapers, of course, and people who wear bombs into crowded places,
and those who spread anthrax, or nerve gas, or radioactivity. And the
governments that support them, clearly. And the governments that terrorize
their own people, like Saddam Hussein's.Does the list stop there? What about
stopping the governments that support the governments that terrorize their
own people? Governments like ours, for instance? Oh, but that was in a good
cause - fighting communism. Before El Salvador, before Chile, even before
Vietnam, there was Guatemala - yes, a bit extreme, but that's all over. No
point in dredging it all up again. Nothing we can do about it anyway.
Daniel Wilkinson's Silence On The Mountain and Sister Dianna Ortiz's The
Blindfold's Eyes bear comparison to Holocaust literature, essential works
that document unthinkable horror, insisting as we try to turn away that
attention must be paid, that what happened there must never happen again,
that the past isn't past at all. And if compassion fatigue has set in before
you start reading, that's only because you think you already know all about
it. You're wrong. Responsible pundits  are now floating the idea of
authorizing torture in certain situations as part of our war on terrorism.
These books demonstrate that we have been there, done that, albeit through
proxies. They show us that in Guatemala, torture did work. But what did it
cost? What does winning look like?
Of the two books, Wilkinson's is the easier read, for his reporting on
Guatemala's half-century of U.S.-sponsored agony is broad and analytical.
The account of the American nun, meanwhile, is a personal testimony that
illustrates almost too vividly Wilkinson's subtitle: the terror, betrayal
and forgetting that torture inflicts not only upon its victims but also upon
those who survive. Wilkinson was a Harvard scholar doing ethnographic
research in Guatemala in 1993 who became curious almost by accident about
one small event, the burning 10 years earlier of a coffee plantation house
called La Patria. He visited and asked around. Why had that particular place
been torched? Had the fighting come there? "Who knows?" the locals said,
smiling cheerfully. "Nothing happened here."
Wilkinson pieced together the story over seven years and several trips, one
halting conversation at a time. Wilkinson lets us listen to Sara Endler, the
landowner whose family came from Germany in the 1890s to carve a new life
growing coffee. He has found for us the old men and women, close to death
now, whose parents worked in near-slavery for those landowners, and who
believed that when they elected the reformer Jacobo Arbenz in 1952, their
lives would change for the better. Wilkinson shows us the documents that
labeled Arbenz a communist and justified his U.S.-sponsored overthrow; he
finds the labor organizers and the agrarian reformers who were targeted for
death, both in those days and more recently. He tells of the death threats
he received as he was doing his research, and how he reacted just as the
locals had first reacted to him: "smiling a dopey smile and saying dopey
things," trying to be insignificant. He goes on, however, and gives us the
widows and the orphans, !
the former guerrillas and the former soldiers, and even the general who ran
the pacification program, and he lets them all tell their own stories.
The book's most wrenching scene is in the hamlet of Sacuchum, where
villagers gather to describe, one by one, the January day in 1982 when
soldiers massacred 44 people. "And the newspapers and radio said that the
dead were all guerrillas who had died in combat," one tells him. "Were you
ever able to tell the true story?" Wilkinson asks. "This is the first time."
That is the real horror of torture and terrorism, Wilkinson notes - the fear
it brings to the survivors, and the silence that follows, and the forgetting
that follows the silence, which lets it happen again. Sister Dianna Ortiz
gives a detailed anatomy of the process. She opens with a novelistic account
of her abduction from a  Guatemalan garden one morning in November 1989.
This can't be happening - I'm an American, she thinks. Her fear grows as she
staggers around the dark cell where she is taken: "I begin to lose control
of my knees." One of her torturers tells her about murdering villagers,
killing babies, and asks her to forgive him. When she is speechless in
horror, he leaves. "I could have saved you," he says.
Then we flash forward to when Ortiz cannot remember her family, her former
home, her own life, and she cannot bear to think, much less talk, about what
happened during her 24-hour ordeal - and afterward. A fragile, naive and
waifish young woman before these events, she has flashbacks in which the
rapes and torture seem to recur. She is wracked by survivor's guilt and a
sick belief that the torturers are inside her, able to hurt others through
her - classic symptoms of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
She cannot eat, for that would feed the evil inside.
Ortiz slowly comes to terms with events over the course of the very long
book, but it is clear she is not  healed yet. Her lawsuits continue -
against the U.S. government and the military officers and leaders of
Guatemala at the time - and her book is a cry of fury and frustration. If it
often feels self-indulgent and self-obsessed, as well as exaggerated and
neurotic, that is evidence of what torture can do to a person. And she
suffered for only a single day.
The real cost of terrorism is its afterlife. Wilkinson points out that after
September 11 Americans "were able to denounce the killing, honor the dead,
support the bereaved, mobilize to rebuild, and, in the process, overcome our
fear. If we didn't do these things, we told ourselves, terrorism would have
won." In Guatemala, none of those things was possible, because the terrorism
continued for more than 50 years, with U.S. support and official silence.
The result? "Guatemala was a place where terrorism did, in fact, win."
Read these books as a lesson on ends and means as we take up arms in our
newest wars. What kind of weapons shall we use? What kind of victory do we
want?

The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0123, page 34