Terror in the Countryside

In her recent contribution to Ohio University Press’s Latin America Series, Rachel May attempts to explain the evolution of “popular organizations” in response to political violence between 1954 and 1985. According to May, during Guatemala’s internal conflict, they evolved from vertically oriented, hierarchical and personalistic organizations into horizontally oriented, democratic movements and true reflections of Guatemala’s popular will. By focusing on the relationship between a repressive state and popular organizations, May seeks to identify these changes over time and suggest how the historical lessons of popular mobilization might aid Guatemala in building true democracy (as opposed to a mere functional democracy).In framing her arguments (apparently based on her master’s thesis at Tulane University), May seeks to explain why political violence occurred, how violence perpetuates itself and, most important, how Guatemala can “move beyond such a violent history” (p. 14). She proposes a dialectical-cyclical model for understanding Guatemalan violence, in which each cycle begins with “turmoil” among urban and rural “popular classes” and through a series of state reactions and “popular” counterreactions, ultimately culminates in state-sponsored “reactionary terror” (indiscriminate and massive violence) and genocide (pp. 30–32).Unfortunately, although May identifies the actors (the state and popular organizations) and the violent relationship between them, she fails to explain precisely how these organizations were changed by political violence. This seems all the more remarkable, given her apparent access to representatives of almost a dozen popular organizations, not to mention the wealth of published research related to Guatemala’s internal conflict. Even in a work as short as May’s, one might reasonably have expected a clear explanation of Guatemalan organizational evolution based on a few case studies. Instead, May attempts to do too much in too little space, burying both her arguments and the reader in a confusing deluge of over 100 acronyms, supported by only 161 pages of text, much of it poorly or haphazardly organized and lacking in sufficient evidence to support her claims. Ultimately, May demonstrates only that (1) over time, a repressive state carried out increasing levels of violence against popular organizations, (2) popular organizations came and went, and (3) some of these organizations were vertically organized, while others were horizontally organized. These are hardly innovative or revelatory observations. Susanne Jonas (1991, 2000), Deborah Levenson-Estrada (1994), and Jim Handy (1984, 1994), to name just a few, have all provided much more thorough analyses of how political violence has affected Guatemala’s “popular movements.”To make matters worse, May fails to explain how Guatemala’s popular organizations are a foundation for Guatemalan democracy. In fact, some observers would argue that many of their former members have become delinquents, contributing to Guatemala’s spiraling violent crime rate instead of Guatemalan democracy. Added to this, May never explains why popular organizations have failed miserably at becoming stable, democratically oriented political parties or movements, as opposed to the vertically oriented, personalistic organizations they are. Is it possible that they never were democratic, horizontally oriented, or representative of the popular will? In the end, May offers neither clues nor answers.On a final note, the overall quality of May’s text raises serious questions about the review and editorial process at Ohio University Press (Thomas Pearcy noted similar problems with this publisher in a 1997 HAHR book review). Not only is May’s text poorly organized but it also suffers from repeated and egregious source citation omissions, misspellings, mistranslations, and misplaced accents on Spanish language words, names and place-names. While such errors might be common in a graduate thesis, they are inexplicable in a published work and tarnish the reputation of both the author and the publisher

Democracy · Failed state · Framing (construction) · Genocide · Internal conflict · Latin Americans · Political economy · Political science · Political violence · Politics · Reactionary · Sociology · State (computer science) · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Politics and Society in Latin America

• Greening the Counterinsurgency

  Open Access•Nicholas Copeland•Development and Change•2012

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