REVIEWS: A Little Bit of So Much Truth, To Save Her Life, and more
Reviews: Books & More A LITTLE BIT OF SO MUCh TRUTh a documentary film (dvd, 93 minutes, Corrugated Films, www. corrugate.org) in recent years, grassroots media have been critical to...
...reward the Guatemalan army for its anti-drug work—became the subject of confusion, trust, and ridicule...
...Once in office, URO, among other things, orchestrated the closure of a newspaper, siphoned $8 million from public coffers to an ally’s presidential campaign, and spent $175 million remodeling tourist zones, damaging historic areas on the UN’s list of World Heritage sites in the process...
...CYCLES OF CONFLICT, CENTURIES OF ChANgE: CRISIS, REFORM AND REvOLUTION IN MExICO edited by Elisa Servín, Leticia Reina, and John Tutino, Duke University Press, 2007, 406 pages, $24.95, paperback for the past three turns of the century, Mexico has experienced economic growth combined with “social dislocation and calls for political change...
...She’s right...
...Saxon never names the captors but strongly suggests that the men were affiliated with Guatemalan army intelligence...
...TO SAvE hER LIFE: DISAPPEARANCE, DELIvERANCE, AND ThE UNITED STATES IN gUATEMALA by dan saxon, university of California press, 2007, 306 pp., $19.95 paperback maritza urritia’s story began on an early July morning in a middle-class neighborhood in Guatemala City...
...Martiza was abducted that day in 1992 by men who later identified themselves to her as members of “a very secret organization . . . that was not part of the army, but pursued any person who endangered the security of the nation...
...they, in turn, encouraged foreign investment and closer integration into world markets...
...Yet the subject is no less dramatic...
...In particular, Horst argues, they “challenged the regime’s economic policies with their own vision of independent, subsistence-based production,” and they—with some success— demanded “greater respect for ethnic plurality and the natural resources that made their lifestyles viable...
...To regain her world,” Saxon pontificates, “Maritza would have to speak out...
...The first, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Paraguay’s “Supreme Dictator” between 1816 and 1840, maintained “the special status of the indigenous people,” strengthening their landholdings and ties to the state...
...Maritza’s secret—that her former common-law husband was up in the mountains with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, and that she herself was leading the propaganda arm for the umbrella group of the leftist rebels in the capital city—made life more difficult for her brother and, ultimately, for Saxon, as they raced against time to save her life...
...The 60,000-strong Section 22 of the National Teachers’ Union would take over Oaxaca’s central plaza, or zócalo...
...It was the population in general...
...Although Saxon makes clear from the beginning that he and Maritza eventually married, he only alludes to the romance later by saying, “After Maritza suggested that we become romantically involved, I reacted in my typical, earnest way...
...They all agree that media failed to go beyond their most immediate role of alerts and calls to action...
...The short-lived coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez would have turned out quite differently if not for community outlets breaking the information blockade imposed by anti-government corporate media...
...But noon never came...
...Saxon’s close attention to narrative detail works well in illustrating Maritza’s torture...
...But the use of media in the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, stands apart...
...More than 90 people were injured...
...Maritza’s brother Edmundo René, a former leftist with a political science degree from the University of New Mexico, began publicizing his sister’s disappearance to everyone he could think of in both Guatemala and the United States...
...She is the author of Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced (Seal Press, 2004) and Una gringa en Bogotá (Aguilar, 2007...
...And if she did that, she would put her own life and that of her family in danger once again...
...Temporal demands of contradictory United States policies hung like a stone on the U.S...
...As the government began amassing a huge contingent of police to dislodge the encampment from the zócalo, the news shows on Mexico’s TV duopoly (Televisa and TV Azteca) immediately began demanding a “restoration of public order,” calling the teachers “vandals...
...The APPO, with the help of the radios, called for mass civil disobedience, seeking to demonstrate that the state was not being governed, which was the only way for the Mexican congress to legally intervene and depose URO...
...This kind of liberalism is, of course, recognizable today...
...We don’t see Maritza...
...In contrast, Francia’s successor, General Carlos Antonio López, “declared all people in the 21 native pueblos to be citizens of the republic,” and in doing so he “divested pueblos of their special status...
...But amid the crackle of gunfire three weeks later, security forces destroyed the station’s transmitter...
...Radio Plantón alerted its listeners to the attack, and by daybreak, despite the corporate propaganda against the teachers, practically all of Oaxaca flooded into the streets...
...Such omissions are, however, understandable in light of security concerns...
...By then, the uprising had reached its cusp...
...Whereas in the earlier part of the book, we can feel Martiza’s fear and rejoice in her astuteness, here we are merely told, “After interviewing Maritza the previous Friday, [embassy officials] believed Maritza was sincere about her reasons to go to the United States...
...As with all tragic characters, Aristide’s rise and fall was of his own doing, but abetted by circumstances far beyond his control...
...lawyer who was then the “international presence” in the Archdiocese of Guatemala’s Human Rights Office...
...That part of the story, including her subsequent exile, is a complicated one...
...She never noticed the second man, who almost simultaneously rushed up behind her and grabbed her arms...
...He argues that the internal frustrations generated by this exacerbation of inequality, a process that deliberately sets limits to the possibilities of social transformation in very poor, peripheral countries like Haiti, played no small part in stalling and reversing Aristide’s original transformative project...
...In September 2006, around the same time Radio Universidad came back on the air, the government launched an anti-movement pirate station called Radio Ciudadana, marking the definitive inversion of the newly established order in Oaxaca...
...It not only controlled the virtual space of the airwaves, but it also had the city under its territorial control through its occupations and road blockades organized by neighborhood...
...It’s as if he ran out of time...
...A Little Bit of So Much Truth, a new documentary produced by Corrugated Films and Mal de Ojo TV, reveals the symbiosis between grassroots media and the popular movement...
...He is honest about his relationship with her and her involvement with the guerrillas, but his brilliant rendering keeps him from becoming self-indulgent...
...ThE PROPhET AND ThE POWER: jEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE, ThE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY AND hAITI by Alex Dupuy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 239 pages, $29.95, paperback this well-told account of the rise and fall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide is set in two broader contexts: the profit-driven creation of a new transnational order (hence the play on the words profit and prophet in the book’s title), and the violent and cynical exercise of political power in Haiti over the past half-century...
...seized all their cattle, goods and properties...
...Indeed, it would be impossible to tell the story of one without the other...
...The police stormed the plantón at about 4 a.m...
...Through Maritza’s story, we develop an understanding of the conflicting concerns that shape humanitarian policy...
...The negotiations were indirect...
...government mirrored that situation...
...Plus, you were a guerrillera.’ Fortunately, Maritza fought as hard for love as she did for life, and we were married in 1999...
...He details how the interests of the press, various governments, the church, and human rights organizations can sometimes collide, even when they share the same ultimate goal of saving lives...
...Through the radio, people who were on the front lines of the movement could hear exactly what the people really wanted...
...The book is not lacking in academic context, either...
...There, activists didn’t just use the media...
...To Save Her Life thus joins the ranks of recent books that examine particular cases, rendering the horror of the U.S...
...Paradoxically, as indigenous groups became less self-sufficient under Stroessner, they turned to participation in broader markets and to increasingly sophisticated modes of political resistance...
...Maritza spent a week in captivity, blindfolded and chained to a bed, enduring harsh interrogations on her political activities...
...Unfortunately, in the last third of the book, the tone becomes more distant and less compelling...
...The film uses several recordings of the grassroots radio broadcasts, which demonstrate an impressive breadth of participation from all sectors of the population in the programming through call-ins...
...Even though we know what happened next, Dan Saxon, author of To Save Her Life, creates suspense with vividly rendered detail through her eyes: “ . . . Maritza never saw the large man who fell on her and covered her mouth with his hand and held her arm against her ribs...
...Likewise, after her arrival in the United States, we are told that she could not stop crying, and then that she went to Mexico to be closer to her revolutionary colleagues...
...The media counterinsurgency had begun...
...A journalist based in Colombia, he edited, with Vijay Prashad, Dispatches From Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism (South End Press, 2006...
...In August, when a group of women marchers were denied airtime on Canal 9, the state TV channel, they peacefully occupied it and began broadcasting for the popular movement...
...Jill Friedberg, the director behind Corrugated Films, also produced This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000) about the 1999 protests in 2 Seattle and Granito de arena (2005) on the 25-year history of the teachers’ movement in Mexico...
...This is a book of thoughtful history and warm humanity...
...Oaxaca belonged to the people...
...With the attack looming, Radio Plantón, a station established by the protest camp, began receiving calls from listeners pledging their solidarity with the teachers...
...Beatriz Manz’s Paradise in Ashes...
...Three days after the attack, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) was created as the movement’s main organization, adapting consensus-style decision making from the state’s indigenous groups...
...A guard—the “fat man,” as she dubs him—gave Maritza a plastic bag filled with Pepsi and a straw, the kind found in any Guatemalan mom-and-pop store, and eyed her lasciviously...
...At a time when terrorism is very much on our minds, Saxon offers us insights into the very nature of what it means to care...
...The APPO organized a protest vote, and for the first time in the state’s history, the PRI lost in all but two of the state’s 11 electoral districts...
...Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain...
...Grassroots radio has served as the central nervous system of Bolivia’s massive rural-urban uprisings, and Ecuador’s call-in radio station Radio Luna was instrumental in the overthrow of former president Lucio Gutiérrez...
...Through most NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 reviews of the book, these explanations are fluidly interspersed with Maritza’s tale and the negotiations for her release...
...0 ThE STROESSNER REgIME AND INDIgENOUS RESISTANCE IN PARAgUAY by René D. Harder Horst, The University Press of Florida, 2007, 225 pages, $59.95, hardcover horst assesses the “dialectical relationship” between the Paraguayan state (with a particular focus on the Stroessner dictatorship of 1954–89) and the indigenous population of modern Paraguay...
...The inconsistent policies—punish the Guatemalan army for its human rights violations...
...on June 14, firing tear gas from helicopters into the slumbering tent city...
...First, Dupuy argues that neoliberal globalization, “rather than eliminating the historical division of the world into core, semi-peripheral and peripheral states . . . exacerbates this division...
...That would be highly improper,’ I insisted, ‘and a violation of my professional ethical obligations in attorney-client relations...
...To his credit, Saxon, now Maritza’s husband, keeps the focus on her ordeal and the extraordinary “human rights machine” that saved her...
...There are no branding irons, no dunking in water, no electric shocks...
...Dupuy’s main argument is that Aristide, over the course of his two presidencies, was transformed from a radical priest, willing to fight the good fight alongside his flock, into a standard Haitian politician, willing to make deals with all sorts of dubious allies in order to acquire and maintain political power for himself and his Lavalas movement...
...initially popular . . . the regime tended to grow more elitist with time, parvenu generals were replaced by civilians and technocrats...
...After interpreting the brutal legacy of the Duvalier dictatorships, Dupuy turns to the Aristide presidency, telling his tragic tale in a series of chapters...
...Once we took Radio Universidad, it’s like we finally had the media in our own hands, which is how it should be,” says schoolteacher Beatriz Gutiérrez Luis...
...The phone rang off the hook,” radio host Fernando Lobo remembers...
...If the confession story was to be believed, they would have to release her...
...Martiza had been coerced into asking for amnesty, but if she did not manage to get out of the country in time, she would be forced to testify in court regarding her disappearance...
...Resulting radical change took the form of the independence movement of 1810 and the popular revolution of 1910...
...After Maritza’s release, Saxon seems to pull away the close angle of his camera and views the situation with a cloudy lens...
...It wasn’t just the teachers who took back the zócalo,” recalls schoolteacher Eduardo Castellanos Morales...
...A Little Bit of So Much Truth begins with shots from the May 2006 teachers’ strike, which had become an annual ritual...
...Radio Plantón was destroyed in the attack—a main police objective, according to Lobo—so college students took over the local college station, Radio Universidad, and seamlessly filled the void in the airwaves...
...As Maritza dropped off Sebastian, her four-year-old son, at the Walt Disney nursery school, she kissed him goodbye, telling him she would pick him up at noon...
...Also, some of the leading radio activists are noticeably absent, like Bertha Muñoz, known as La Doctora Escopeta, who makes brief audio cameos from the broadcasts but never appears directly...
...The state responded ferociously...
...He writes in his preface: “I hope this book will provoke more discussion about what it means to be involved, from Guatemala to Guantánamo to Iraq, in that spider web of values and interests known as human rights...
...Saxon explains how torture works and precisely what disappearance means...
...Reviews: Books & More A LITTLE BIT OF SO MUCh TRUTh a documentary film (dvd, 93 minutes, Corrugated Films, www...
...Despite this, the federal government refused to step in...
...It also raised the stakes for Martiza, constantly fearing that she would break under torture, becoming responsible not only for her own death and the orphaning of her child, but also for the probable capture and death of her comrades...
...Yet they could also maintain her under their control as an informant...
...This is an enormous leap in the right direction, and it was brought to you by the brave people of Oaxaca’s popular media...
...Both Radio Plantón, which came back on the air with the elections, and Radio Universidad, still under the movement’s control, were instrumental in this...
...Meanwhile, the human rights wheels had begun to turn on the outside...
...This unrest stemmed from a long list of grievances against Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, known by his initials as URO...
...Combating drugs—with the Guatemalan government as a staunch ally—had overtaken human rights as the principle U.S...
...legacy in Guatemala: Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre...
...But Radio Plantón returned to the airwaves three months later...
...In his dealings with Paraguay’s indigenous population, Stroessner walked in the very different footsteps of two former dictators, the first populist, the second liberal...
...Maritza was chained to a bed and sleep-deprived while a radio blared incessantly...
...The broadcasts were multidirectional exchanges, a kind of public forum, united in one resolution: URO must go...
...But he ceases to let us glimpse her world...
...Maritza’s captors wanted to make it seem as if she had not been captured but was voluntarily confessing to guerrilla involvement to obtain amnesty from the government...
...Maritza’s fear of rape intensifies for the reader through the ordinary touch of the soda and straw...
...And he is unafraid to take on what he calls “the complex and often cruel politics of human rights...
...Radio is helping people shed the fear once again,” says activist Aline Castellanos Jurado...
...Nevertheless, Saxon leaves us with a mostly dramatic tale and some valuable insights that extend far beyond Guatemala...
...The film shows masked gunmen, including on-and off-duty police, hired guns, and PRI henchmen riding in pickup trucks, indiscriminately shooting into the darkness of night...
...A longtime member of Mexico’s traditional ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), URO took power in 2004 after an election widely considered fraudulent...
...After the movement failed to pressure the police to leave the city the following November, many leaders and media activists were either detained or went into hiding amid mass arrests...
...Still, the federal government refused to intervene and remove URO...
...and subjected the native inhabitants to military service and taxes,” payable in kind...
...Undaunted, oaxaqueños went beyond standing their ground and took the offensive, occupying reviews some 12 commercial radio stations...
...docility, chaos and stability...
...Embassy, impeding the efforts of foreign service officers to act quickly and decisively...
...corrugate.org) in recent years, grassroots media have been critical to social uprisings throughout Latin America...
...The government later succeeded in blocking Radio Universidad’s signal, and the movement turned over its last radio station to the authorities...
...It’s the same description: “a period of prolonged political stability, in which a distinctive political regime, born amid civil war and conflict, managed to consolidate itself...
...and my own Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced...
...But this time the demonstration quickly snowballed into a full-blown popular revolt...
...then, after a few days, the Oaxaca State governor (the state and its capital city share the name) would agree to some demands, and the teachers would pack up the protest camp known as the plantón and leave...
...He continues to provide information NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 article id about Maritza, her stay in the back of the cathedral and then in the United States and her subsequent move to Mexico...
...The people alone governed the city, while the local government was reduced to starting an illegal radio station...
...He eventually made contact with Saxon, a young U.S...
...Maritza’s captors repeatedly forced her to film a statement to make it sound authentic, but she convinced them she usually used garish makeup, signaling to her friends and family that she had been coerced...
...Whatever the regime’s success, Knight argues, its economic model “tended to generate greater inequality,” while “a few radical groups launched quixotic uprisings [and] a more vigorous electoral opposition emerged,” leading, in 1910, to armed revolution...
...Linking the city with outlying rural communities, radio made possible the coordinated occupation of all of the city’s main government buildings and about 25 municipal palaces throughout the state...
...Social unrest in Oaxaca is once again bubbling to the sur-face—proof that, as many speakers in the film predict, “things in Oaxaca will never again be the same...
...policy concern,” Saxon observes...
...Shortly thereafter came the fraudulent July 2 general elections, which in Oaxaca became a plebiscite on the PRI...
...A poignant moment in the film comes in a series of brief statements by participants about how the radios fell short...
...Although the film’s purpose is to explore the role of the media in the movement, viewers might also wonder about the internal dynamics of the APPO...
...June Carolyn Erlick June Carolyn Erlick is publications director at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies...
...The Guatemala Saxon evokes is a country hovering between war and peace, fierce nationalism and pro-U.S...
...Two branches of the Guatemalan government (her shadowy, army-linked captors and the attorney general’s office) seemed to battle each other, and divisions within the U.S...
...The radios, they argue, served a pivotal role but did not provide the movement with longer, more in-depth analysis of the crisis, which in their view was a symptom of a much larger, deep-seated decay in the political system...
...Historian Alan Knight, in one of the book’s most provocative chapters, gives us a credible description of the tail end of the dictatorial rule of Porfirio Díaz in 1900, and the tail end of PRI hegemony in 2000...
...they expropriated them...
...As Oaxaca activist David Venegas Reyes notes, “It’s impossible for an assembly [the APPO] to function efficiently, so radio played that role...
...The book had worked previously so well on two levels, the intimate and the political, that I felt cheated toward the end...
...None of the authors in this timely essay collection predicts a similar upheaval for 2010, but the broad historical similarities are striking...
...Even in the United States, Latino media have been key to filling the streets...
...He shows us how humanitarianism is politics...
...Teo Ballvé Teo Ballvé is NACLA’s Web editor...
...President Felipe Calderón won an election widely considered fraudulent, so his party, the PAN, needed the PRI’s support in Congress, which it offered in exchange for the PAN’s help in blocking efforts to unseat URO...
...One of its propaganda broadcasts warned the public that the APPO was using AIDS-infected men to rape young girls...
...Meanwhile, Section 22 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 demands for scholarships, school improvements, student breakfasts, books, and shoes, as well as a modest salary raise, were simply ignored...
...Through a detailed examination of one case history, Saxon, a prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal, skillfully connects Maritza’s story with the broader implications for Guatemalan history and politics, as well as international humanitarian policy...
...human rights groups, the church, and government civilians used publicity to force her captors’ hand...
...Only the punch line is missing: “in 2010...
Vol. 40 • November 2007 • No. 6
