Reviews
The Socialist Option in Central America: Two Reassessments by Shafik Jorge Handal and Carlos M. Vilas, Monthly Review Press, 1993, 143 pp., $26.00 (cloth), $14.00 (paper). The Left's record over...
...He also credits the Left for the modest social and political reforms that have been implemented...
...Handal stresses that the Left must eschew verticalism, yet the FMLN has floundered on this very point...
...While he argues that fundamental change in the relations of power did not occur in Central America, he says that the experience of collective participation will not be easily forgotten...
...Guatemalan-born writer Victor Perera returned to his country to visit some of the indigenous communities most devastated by the violence of the late 1970s and early 1980s...
...With the 1991 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, the FMLN's decision to lay down their arms in a negotiated settlement, and a protracted guerrilla war in Guatemala, progressives have been forced to rethink their objectives and methods...
...Perera sifts through the wrenching, sometimes contradictory accounts of the civil war in these remote villages, trying through the haze of memory and the distortions engendered by fear to get a handle on the extent of the tragedy and assess culpability...
...In a free-ranging 1991 interview with Marxist scholar Marta Harnecker, FMLN leader Shafik Handal ruminates about MarxistLeninist theory, Soviet socialism, and the question of what shape socialism might take in El Salvador...
...For instance, he discusses the need to permit certain capitalist forms of organization in a transition period-which might explain, in part, the FMLN's current half-hearted opposition to neoliberal economics...
...Handal's remarks reveal the intellectual premises behind some recent, seemingly inscrutable FMLN policies...
...At other times, Handal's comments and current events seem at odds...
...Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy by Victor Perera, University of California Press, 1993, 382 pp., $27.00 (cloth...
...The date of the interview-before the collapse of the Soviet bloc and a year before the Salvadoran peace settlement-presents advantages and disadvantages...
...In this absorbing account-part journalistic narrative, part personal memoir, and part ethnographic history-Perera tells the story of a people scarred by the tragedy and the divisions wrought by a brutal war...
...Never touching down in one place for long, Perera paints in a few bold brushstrokes some vivid portraits-among them, the supercilious comandante who intones about the worldwide Communist conspiracy and the flaws of Latin American literature, the wellintentioned Maya mayor of Cotzal corrupted by the perks of office, and the unassuming Oklahoman priest of Santiago Atitlin-martyred by the military in 1981whose heart and a peanut-butter jar full of his blood are buried in the church sanctuary...
...The Left's record over the 1980s in Central America has been decidedly mixed...
...In the second half of the book, Carlos Vilas, the social scientist at UNAM, weighs the Left's failures and achievements over the last decade...
...It is an ambitious task...
...This volume is part of that reassessment process...
...He doesn't succeed in pinning down reliable numbers, but he does come away with an evocative, at times chilling portrait of contemporary Guatemala...
...In the Ixil Triangle, as elsewhere in Guatemala," Perera says, "the most credible testimony may be distorted by the imperatives of survival...
Vol. 27 • November 1993 • No. 3
