Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala is the second of two books about Guatemala that I have read over the past two months. I prefer the first book, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala, which I read in August shortly after returning from that country. Although a non-fictional account of life in Guatemala in the years following “La Violencia,” Silence on the Mountain reads much like a novel as the author, through the written word, recreates his experience in that troubled country.
Buried Secrets is not without its own set of virtues, however. Replete with data and facts, it provides hard numbers and descriptive information regarding villages razed, techniques of torture and terror, and the government’s strategy as it set about denying its genocide of the Maya. Indeed, the book reads like a reference work in places and probably provides more actual information than Silence on the Mountain.
On a more critical note, though, Buried Secrets must have originally been a Ph.D. dissertation, subsequently recast for book publication. Long passages are marked, burdened really, by a writing style suggestive of a graduate student’s slavish efforts at conceptual precision. And the author’s continual effort to place her Guatemala research into a broad theoretical framework, again suggestive of dissertation research, at times gets in the way of her own story.
These books are reminders of evil’s pervasive reality, and that much of the evil in the world is caused by people who believe, or claim to believe, that they are fighting evil.
