Land of Beauty and Barbarity

...The Guatemalan Army, fearing it was about to lose its power, demanded that Arbenz publicly dissociate himself from Communism...

...The hood makes your eyes burn, you feel asphyxiated...

...But the hysterical martinet valued his life more than the welfare of his country...

...Would Guatemala if we had not supported for so long the alliance of business, government and military that has kept the Mayan Indians—who make up half the country's population—in a state of virtual slavery...

...They cut his throat slowly...

...On the other hand, the Administration was sufficiently impressed with Cerezo's transfer of the brutalizing police from the military to the Interior Ministry to continue supplying "the most pressing needs of the Guatemala Armed Forces...

...Coincidentally, I myself visited and photographed this village in blackand-white 20 years ago, while on assignment for the New York Times...

...The polite response from the various officials I spoke to, both in the office of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams and at the Guatemala desk, was that the relevant information was "classified," and that time would prove Simon's picture " exaggerated...

...He fled, accompanied by most of the Communist leaders—including Che Guevara, whose days of fame lay ahead of him—and Castillo Armas was welcomed in Guatemala City as a liberator...

...Then they threw all the bodies in a heap...

...Arbenz' Teutonic arrogance made him hated even by his fellow officers, and his deceitful charge that the U.S.wasusing bacteriological warfare in Korea was winning him few friends abroad...

...Material subsequently mailed to me from Washington confirmed one of Simon's charges, namely that the committee set up by President Cerezo last year to investigate disappearances has filed no reports and indicted no one...

...Four years later, when the Army returned the buildings to the Church, clergy found hand prints of blood on the walls and 12-foot pits in their backyards...

...Yet Simon presents him as a good gray Socialist possessed of the fortitude to stand up to the combined indecencies of the United Fruit Company (ElPulpo, "the Octopus") and the Dulles brothers—John Foster and Allen W.—heading the State Coming Next Barry Gewen on Jerry Bledsoe's "Bitter Blood" Lowell Cauffiel's "Masquerade" Steven Naileh and Gregory White Smith's 'The Mormon Murders' Susan Crain Bakos' "Appointment for Murder" Christine McGurie and Carla Norton's "Perfect Victim" Department and the CIA, respectively...

...But few Americans have had the chance to visit Guatemala's remote highlands to see with their own eyes the spectacle of women thus arrayed...

...Moreover, her publisher deserves special credit for presenting the 131 plates in the generous format of an art book, with a fidelity to color that is exemplary...

...Is Simon's litany of mass kidnappings, mass rapes and mass murders over the last two decades more credible...

...Or take her account of the military's efforts to intensify its presence in the countryside and eliminate religious influences: "Throughout rural Guatemala, the Army had established permanent outposts in virtually every Indian town, occupying convents and parish houses abandoned shortly before by the Catholic clergy, after Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera had gone into hiding and ordered the Diocese closed in July 1980...

...Arbenz could still have rallied the Guatemalan people to support the kind of economic reform that had been overdue for over a century (and remains overdue to this day...

...It struck me that one State Department official I talked with kept referring to countries like Haiti and Guatemala as "basket cases...

...They give vivid expression to virtually every aspect of life in the Central American country, no larger than Tennessee...

...They dragged people by the feet, as if they were animals...

...We give them the hood with Gamezân [insecticide] and they let it all out, against their will...

...The chief Guatemala officer had Simon's book in front of him on his desk, but said he hadn't had time to read it...

...The way she reports these incidents, in no particular chronological order and without chapter headings to relate them to ongoing regimes, is confusing to say the least...

...Arbenz was also moving to arm the Communist-led unions...

...They threw me on top of the dead bodies...

...They stabbed and cut them as if they were animals, and they were laughing as they killed them...

...Certainly the author's simplistic account of the abortive 1951-54 Presidency of Jâcobo Arbenz Guzman does not inspire confidence...

...It ran all over me...

...Here, for example, is how a soldier stationed in the town of Chajul (also part of the Ixil Triangle) responded when she asked him about the methods used by the Army to interrogate Indians suspected of subversion: "Well, they're brought in and they give, little by little...

...In 1952 Arbenz tried to ram through Guatemala's Congress an agrarian reform law that was supported neither by the middle classes, the military, nor the landless peasants themselves (who under the law were to receive no titles to their new holdings...

...On May 15, 1954, a Swedish freighter supposedly carrying a cargo of agricultural machinery from Poland instead unloaded at Puerto Barrios 2,000 tons of Czechoslovak weapons that filled 119 railroad cars...

...Is this the whole truth...

...The Indian women in their queenly garb were friendly, there was no discernible antiAmerican sentiment, and the guerrilla activity that had beset the country since the early 1960s was at the time confined to sporadic encounters in the far-away capital...

...previously furnished, shot up last December's free elections...

...Pursuing my doubts, I called the State Department in Washington to see whether the Administration's case that there is a brighter side to this tarnished coin could be documented...

...At least 50 such atrocity stories are recounted by Simon in Guatemala...

...They killed them with a machete that had no teeth...

...Arbenz refused...

...It's effective...

...Would Haiti fit that description if we had not stood by passively while the military, armed with weapons the U.S...

...Church pews were replaced with Army cots, and convent chapels became torture chambers...

...In 1981 five priests, as well as dozens of Protestant pastors, were forced to flee the country...

...The nearest thing to a positive note comes when she observes that a mutual support group for the families of the "disappeared" has been allowed to function periodically under Mario Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, Guatemala's current Armybacked President...

...It burns your nose, you can't take it, you feel almost dead...

...He was suffering a lot...

...Jean-Marie Simon's pictures in her Guatemala must rank among the finest in the history of photojournalism...

...That much of the background to the story told in Guatemala I knew, and it was enough to dispose of the author's scenario, which has been a staple liberal fairy tale for more than three decades...

...Nebaj, the largest of the three villages constituting the so-called Ixil Triangle in the province of Quiche, is the scene of most of the photographs in the book...

...Otherwise there is nothing to dissuade one from the conviction that U.S...

...Then they fired at the remaining people in the courthouse...

...They were cutting people under the ribs, and blood came rushing out and they were laughing...

...Finally, consider this testimony concerning an Army massacre of 350 people shortly after the 1982 military coup of Brigadier General José Efrain Rios Montt: "[The soldiers] dragged them out and knifed them...

...officials who optimistically claim Guatemala is advancing toward democracy are either knaves or fools...

...State Department, soon turned the country into the torture chamber and slaughterhouse for Indians that she describes so relentlessly in the text accompanying her photographs...

...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "The Guatemala Traveler" It is no secret that the Mayan Indian women of Guatemala still weave their blouses and headbands on hand-looms as they have for centuries, and that there has been nothing so dazzling in feminine attire since the Renaissance...

...A dictatorship of the Left set in when Arbenz dissolved the Supreme Court before it could act on the expropriation by March 1954 of some 30 estates...

...How the blood ran...

...On June 18, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas and 300 poorly equipped soldiers straggled across the Honduran border and stalled there as three small planes, presumably piloted by Americans in the pay of the CIA, dropped a few bombs on the capital without doing substantial damage or killing anyone...

...They put one old man on a table and cut open his chest, the poor man, and he was still alive, and so they started to cut his throat...

...And no book of photographs has been able to do justice to this beauty—until now...

...They tell the truth in the middle of torture...

...She scornfully describes Castillo Armas, who had tunneled his way out of one of Arbenz' prisons to recruit opponents of the regime outside the country, as a " furniture salesman in Tegucigalpa," and falsely asserts that he was flown back into Guatemala in the American Ambassador's private plane...

...According to Simon—a consultant to both Amnesty International and Americas Watch—Guatemala's string of Right-wing military-backed governments, abetted by the U.S...

...During 1980 alone, three priests were killed, another 'disappeared,' and three Protestant pastors and one evangelical deacon were gunned down...