Terror in the land of the Holy Spirit : Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983
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Bibliographic Information
Terror in the land of the Holy Spirit : Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983
（Religion and global politics）（Oxford paperbacks）
Oxford University Press, 2011, c2010
- : pbk
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"First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2011"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-253) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God,' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying, bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid
historical account and analysis we yet possess of what happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly
written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable book.
- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
"Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributions
to our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America."
-Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University
Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even
families. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction permitted the human
rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world.
Table of Contents
- 1. Rios Montt Earns His Place in the History Books: Debates about la Violencia
- 2. Guatemala's Descent in Violence
- 3. Rios Montt and the New Guatemala
- 4. Terror
- 5. "Los Que Matan en el Nombre de Dios": Rios Montt and the Religious Question
- 6. Blind Eyes and Willful Ignorance: U.S. Foreign Policy, Media, and Foreign Evangelicals
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
by "Nielsen BookData"
