Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully
plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal
war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast
majority of whom died (or were "disappeared") at the hands of the U.S.-backed
military government.Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully
plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal
war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast
majority of whom died (or were "disappeared") at the hands of the U.S.-backed
military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker,
the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a
coffee plantation's manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions
surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution
requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country's
recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was
derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a
plantation system that put Guatemala's Mayan Indians to work picking coffee
beans for the American and European markets. Decades of terror-inspired fear
have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete it
verges on collective amnesia.; The author's great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their
stories, and it is through these stories - dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking -
that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not
only to Guatemala but to countless places around the world where terror has
been used as a political tool.
