Reviews
A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala by W. George Lovell, Between the Lines (Toronto, Canada), 1995, 161 pp., Can$19.95 (paper). In his academic life, Canadian geographer George...
...Rockefeller family holdings ranged from Standard Oil in Venezuela to ranches, banks, factories, mines and agribusinesses from Mexico to Brazil...
...More importantly, Wycliffe's SIL activities in the Amazon spearheaded the corporate penetration of the Amazon region...
...Nelson became Roosevelt's assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Eisenhower's liaison to the CIA as special assistant for Cold War strategy and psychological warfare, special advisor to Nixon, and finally, vice-president under Gerald Ford...
...Despite Lovell's obviously profound knowledge of Guatemala, the Maya remain, in the end, somewhat of an enigma...
...Richard Wilson's ethnography of the resurgence of Q'eqchi' identity in Alta Verapaz is a fascinating, close-up study of how the Maya people have responded to the profound social dislocations of the past two decades by attempting to revive their ancestral ways...
...Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q'eqchi' Experiences by Richard Wilson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, 373 pp., $32.95 (cloth...
...The missionaries paved the way for the discovery and exploitation of the Amazon's natural resources-from oil to hydroelectric power...
...However, he does not explain how this revivalist movement fits into the dramatic resurgence of hundreds of Maya organizations throughout Guatemala, many of which have become actively involved in politics...
...Soon however, we Vol XXIX, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1996 realize that Lovell has the wisdom and modesty to let the chasm between Maya and Western society function as a leitmotif...
...An evangelizing drive led NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS by Catholic missionaries in the 1970s sought to suppress the "pagan" earth cult...
...The expansion of capitalist-wage relations in the countryside also pushed many people off the land...
...This is a voluminous and well-documented study of the seemingly disparate, yet ultimately intertwined activities of two men: Nelson Rockefeller with his global corporate economic empire, and Cameron Townsend with his worldwide missionary organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators...
...Wilson has done a fine job of discussing the cultural and some of the organizational elements of the Q'eqchi' revivalist movement in Alta Verapaz...
...The book's middle section performs the legwork of recounting political events in the country since 1981...
...The confluence of these three forces laid waste to the planet's greatest biological treasure-the South American Amazon-and destroyed entire peoples in the process...
...For example, because Rockefeller's investments in oil and agribusiness in Brazil were threatened by President Goulart's proposed land-reform and nationalization policies, his companies helped finance the CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew Goulart in 1954...
...corporate capital provided the missionaries with military equipment and generous financial support for projects of mutual benefit...
...In the aftermath of the counterinsurgency war, a new generation of Catholic lay catechists began revalorizing Q'eqchi' language and traditions...
...Although from different walks of life, each has been profoundly affected by the violence that has gripped Guatemala since reformist President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954...
...These localized identities have facilitated Maya cultural resistance since the Conquest, but worked against the establishment of broader-based identities...
...It is that capacity to elude the penetration of outsiders-and to assimilate aspects of Western culture without fundamentally changing their identity-which explains in large part the Mayas' remarkable survival over the centuries...
...The boy's 17 years are a saga of hardship and endurance: his father's murder at the age of six, his work on a cotton plantation at the age of 10, his forced recruitment into an army civil defense patrol at the age of 13, his flight first to Mexico and then to the United States the same year, and finally his journey at age 16 to Canada where he was granted refugee status...
...The catechists spearheaded an ethnic revivalist movement in Alta Verapaz committed to renovating the traditional rituals, whose focus was not the village-specific tzuultaq'as but a broader conception of pan-Maya religion...
...Lovell uses terse accounts of murders and disappearances in the local daily papers as touchstones for his narrative...
...The most poignant story is perhaps that of the Maya refugee Gonzalo...
...In his academic life, Canadian geographer George Lovell writes about the demographic history of Guatemala during the colonial period...
...Both stories told of the same result: it was not God being brought to tribal cultures, but an alien culture of possessive individualism grown to such a giant corporate scale, with its own rapacious, competitive needs, that it could only devour them...
...The country first comes into focus through vignettes of six people...
...Guerrilla activity in Alta Verapaz in the early 1980s and the ensuing military repression resulted in the physical displacement of hundreds of Q'eqchi's...
...Colby and Dennett reveal how the corporate quest for profits, the missionary zeal for souls to convert, and the U.S...
...He details the role these tzuultaq'as play in agricultural production, health and human reproduction...
...government's obsession with preventing the spread of "Communism" wove a Byzantine tapestry of deception and destruction...
...The story ultimately concerns the intersection of power, wealth, culture and ideology in the shaping of the modern world...
...Thy Will Be Done...
...Colby and Dennett detail such bizarre subplots as the CIA's use of missionaries to identify psychotropic and toxic substances in the rainforest for Project MK-ULTRA, the agency's mindcontrol program...
...The scope of his activities, along with the access to political power and policy-making circles which his wealth afforded, gave him a key role in shaping the recent history of the region...
...The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil by Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Harper Collins Publishers, 1995, 960 pp., $35 (cloth...
...In A Beauty that Hurts, he moonlights as a journalist...
...In the final third of the book, Lovell steps back to assess "the historical forces that shape, and the cultural context that frames, current predicaments, especially those of Maya communities...
...Nelson Rockefeller was in the vanguard of U.S...
...The CIA and U.S...
...Drawing on his scholarly background, his observations from countless trips to the country, and his flair as a storyteller, Lovell has written a reliable and engaging introduction to Guatemala...
...Wilson next offers compelling details of the dramatic events of the 1970s and 1980s that undermined the relationship between Q'eqchi' villages and the tzuultaq'as, eroding traditional, community-based identities...
...Wilson's study gets at the cultural construction of a panQ'eqchi' identity, but the political implications of this emerging identity are discussed only in passing...
...Cameron Townsend's goal was to convert to fundamentalist Christianity all of the world's remaining indigenous peoples, especially the untold thousands awaiting "the Word" in deepest Amazonia...
...Rockefeller's economic activities and political dealings were inextricably linked...
...The book is filled with allusions to things unspoken, things misunderstood, things garbled in translation...
...After an intelligent discussion of different ways to theorize about identity formation, Wilson goes on to explain the mountain cultsembodied in the mountain spirits, the tzuultaq'as-that anchor each local Q'eqchi' community to a specific geographic area...
...Both methods were destructive to tribal ways of communal sharing and respect for the land...
...The same coup that was such a boon to the Rockefeller empire in Brazil also provided a boost to Wycliffe's Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL...
...Perhaps this is the real historical meaning of William Cameron Townsend's reaching every tribe with the Word and Nelson Rockefeller's reaching them with 'development,"' Colby and Dennett conclude...
...Townsend and his missionaries took full advantage of the military's open-door policy...
...As the sacred relationships with the tzuultaq'as broke down, new competing bases of identity-Catholicism, class, nation-emerged in the Q'eqchi' communities...
...The reader's first reaction is to fault the author for not digging deeper...
...As its title suggests, the book is primarily concerned with Nelson Rockefeller's relationship with evangelism in the age of oil...
...corporate "development" activities in Latin America from the 1930s...
...He explores only one concrete example of local political organizing-the group Qawa Quk'a ("our food, our water"), which organized consumer boycotts and sought to establish barter networks to protect indigenous communities from the ravages of the market...
...The reconstruction of Q'eqchi' identity transcended the local community, and reimagined a broader, panQ'eqchi' identity-what Wilson calls "cultural creation in response to ethnocide...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 5
