{"id":7146,"date":"2020-08-05T15:20:22","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T23:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/?p=7146&lang=en"},"modified":"2020-08-05T21:03:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T05:03:11","slug":"the-bones-still-speak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/politics\/the-bones-still-speak\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bones Still Speak: The War in Guatemala"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a critic of the book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If the bones of the dead speak why should the living be quiet?<\/i><\/p>\n

-Humberto Ak\u2019 abal, K\u2019iche\u2019 Maya poet (1952-2019)<\/p>\n

By Jason Klarl<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s dawn, or maybe dusk.\u00a0 A young guerrillero in the EGP holds a machine gun and climbs over a wire, apparently setting a trap for the army.\u00a0 A young girl in a blue dress, maybe his sister, stands nearby with legs crossed, hands in mouth, her gaze cast downward.\u00a0 The sense of uncertainty, dread, and horror captured in this image is well preserved throughout Jean-Marie Simon\u2019s book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

The book, now in its third edition, is a collection of Simon\u2019s photo-journalism work in Guatemala in the 1980\u2019s, when the country\u2019s 36-year civil war had reached unprecedented levels of terror and violence.\u00a0 Simon spent most of the decade conducting interviews and photographing the various ways Guatemalans experienced the war.\u00a0 Her outsider status gave her access to both sides: the young boys recruited by the army, the campesinos forced into the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), nuns bearing witness to acts of torture, students, and of course combatants in the various guerrilla armies.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got used to the climate of terror\u201d, Simon writes.\u00a0 \u201cIn the country \u2018disappear\u2019 became a transitive verb: \u2018They disappeared him\u2019, it was said.\u00a0 \u2018Who knows what he was involved in\u2019 was the capital’s mantra back then.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book is important first of all for Guatemala\u2019s indegenous communities who were disproportionately targeted during the war, and who are still seeking justice.\u00a0 Indigenous people face various forms of state repression that have continued from the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 until the day I write this.\u00a0 The book also serves as evidence for anyone who has ever doubted that a civil war took place.<\/p>\n

In 1988, as the Reagan era drew to a close, and the first edition of Guatemala<\/i> was published, one LA Times critic wrote that Simon\u2019s work was almost too effective:\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat sense can we make of this? In her determination to tell the whole story, Simon hurts her cause–and the integrity of this book–by adopting a tone of aggressive sarcasm that alienates the sympathetic reader. One gets the sense that Simon has seen and heard too much and does not yet have the distance to put it all into perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

While no work of art is beyond criticism, I think this is an unfair jab at Simon\u2019s work.\u00a0 Instead I would argue, distance<\/i> is exactly the problem<\/i>.\u00a0 Distance is what removes perspective.\u00a0 If you\u2019re too far away from something it\u2019s impossible to see it clearly.\u00a0 For this critic apparently, having to see the bodies of slain campesinos, and suspected communists, or \u201csubversives\u201d is too much to ask of the (sympathetic?) \u201cAmerican\u201d reader.<\/p>\n

This does raise a good point however.\u00a0 How many of the gruesome details could have been spared in order to convey the true horror of the Guatemalan civil war?\u00a0 Simon includes several photographs of the victims\u2019 bodies in Guatemala.<\/i>\u00a0 There is one particularly disturbing image that shows a young member of the army, smiling as he pokes the corpse of one of the victims of a recent massacre.<\/p>\n

Finally, the book\u2019s value comes from the fact that it exists in the first place, as the author herself acknowledges. \u201cI got worried I was going to go back with no pictures,\u201d she says in a 2012 NY Times review. We should all be grateful that the pictures did come back.\u00a0 Simon describes the following scene in Guatemala<\/i>: \u201cThe only moment of dread happened a little later, when the bus I was travelling in was stopped by the army.\u00a0 I was carrying 10 rolls of film and I didn\u2019t want to lose them.\u201d<\/p>\n

I consider Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny <\/i>a great value for the historical record in Guatemala and a missing part of my own education on Latin America.\u00a0 Having grown up in the United States, I remember as a child hearing quite a lot about Nicaragua and the Contras on the evening news, but absolutely nothing about Guatemala.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until I arrived in Guatemala in 2017 that I even knew who Rios Montt was, or that there was a 36-year war here, or that such a crime as genocide took place in the same hemisphere.<\/p>\n

Cover photo: Refugees brought to the city by truck, after the army finished the slopes of the mountains in Nebaj, Quich\u00e9. Photography by Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Primavera, Eterna Tiran\u00eda.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a critic of the book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. If the bones of the dead speak why should the living be quiet? -Humberto Ak\u2019 abal, K\u2019iche\u2019 Maya poet (1952-2019) By Jason Klarl It\u2019s dawn, or maybe dusk.\u00a0 A young guerrillero in the EGP holds a machine gun and climbs over a wire, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7153,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[426,455,424,427,1806],"tags":[2237,2231,2232,2233,2234,2226],"class_list":["post-7146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corruption","category-pagetwo-en","category-politics","category-public-figures","category-social-situation","tag-conflict-guatemala","tag-egp-guatemala","tag-genocide-guatemala","tag-guatemala-eternal-spring-eternal-tyranny","tag-inside-war-guatemala","tag-jean-marie-simon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7146"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7161,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7146\/revisions\/7161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}