Customer Reviews

Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala

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I have spent the past several years of my life living and working in the Ixil region of Guatemala. During this time I have traveled to nearly all the places described in this book. I HAVE lived and worked with many former guerrillas and memebers of the "comunidades en resistencia" and I found Stoll's analysis of the Ixil region and its recent history to be both enlightening and accurate. His conclusions concerning the nature of the armed conflict in this region correspond very closely to my own experiences interacting with the people here.
Those who criticize Stoll are generally people who have only a very superficial knowledge of Guatemalan reality or those who try manipulate the country's history to confirm their own political fantasies of third world "noble savages" carrying out poplar utopian revolutions.
The only criticism I would offer to Stool is that he should have been much more vocal in his denunciations of the army's disgusting genocidal campaign against the Ixiles and the other indigenous peoples of Guatemala. By characterizing the army's campaign of mass murder as a simple reaction to a percieved threat, Stoll almost sounds as if he is excusing or rationalizing the unthinkable acts of this most horrible national institution.

In the early 1990's, I prepared political asylum petitions for numerous Mayan Indians that had fled the killing grounds of Guatemala. The single thing that surprised me most, were their stories of atrocities committed by the Guerillas. I had thought the "Army of the Poor" were fighting on behalf of the Mayan Indians against the Army and Guatemalan State. However, many of the stories I heard had to deal more with communal land struggles than Revolution against the State. I soon realized that the situation was vastly more complicated than I had thought.

Soon after the worst of the killings were over, the anthropologist David Stoll was doing fieldwork in one of the areas most devestated during the War. What he found is a more nuanced story than many of the accounts outsiders were hearing during this time period. By looking at revolution and counter-insurgency on a village by village, hamlet by hamlet basis, Stoll paints an extraordinary complicated picture of an Indian peasantry caught between a brutal Army and its own violent history of intercomunal conflict. More than any other type of warfare, revolution and counter-insurgency lends itself to the analysis of micro-history.

This book is an extraordinary account of a War that devestated Guatemala's indigenous people. David Stoll is to be commended for his personal bravery in gathering the local details of the War and his commitment to the unvarnished truth. One has to wonder how many more years it will take for the first anthropologists to be doing this same work in Iraq. Highly recommended.

David Stoll has written a book that opens much of the 1980's civil war torn Guatemala up to the reader. The details of village life, movement and to some degree, attitude is pertinent and important. Where the facts end and the theory begins is where the reader should take caution with Stoll's analysis.

Stoll seems to come to the conclusion that the Guerilla movement and the Guatemalan Army equally share blame for the strife of the country during this time period. While this is a truism, it is only a half-truism. Stoll neglects to dwell on the status of the Mayan Indians in Guatemala prior to the civil war and omits discussion of whether the war was justified or not justified. Stoll instead puts forth the rather obvious conclusion that neither the Guerillas or the Army represented all Mayans in Guatemala. While true, this situation of citizens caught between warring factions is usually a universal truth in war and does not shed any new light on Guatemala during this period.

The danger in Stoll's simple analysis in this book is that while he attempts to put forth the theory that the majority of Mayan citizens of Guatemala were "between two evils" he ends up promoting the theory that the majority of citizens were NOT aligned with the Guerillas. It is this point that is perpexling because Stoll does not directly interview any Guerilla combatant or get close to their camps. He does, however, include direct quotes from Army soldiers. Stoll can not hope to give a balanced viewpoint on the political scene with such a one-sided view of the situation. In fact, his very presence in Guatemala during this time would render the testimony given to him as less than factual. It is well known now that the US was involved in the Civil War in Guatemala during this time and many villagers have testified to human rights commissions that they saw Americans in both Guatemalan Army fatigues as well as American military fatigues. Stoll's presence then could be very unnerving to the very people he sought truths from. Stoll justifies this by saying that his interviewees talked badly about the Army and the Guerillas which lead him to the conclusion that they must be telling him the truth. Equally possible is the scenario that what he was hearing was not the truth at all as his subjects were wary of his questioning and would not put themselves at risk for his venture.

In the end, Stoll's book is a good source of general information but his conclusions are theories. And if one is to believe the massive volumes of human rights records on the issue - his theories are largely incorrect.

This study of how Guatemala's civil war impacted the lives of everyday campesinos is one of the best and most realistic studies of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) politics since Forrest Colburn's Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua. Stoll shows how both the guerrillas and the Guatemalan government share blame in putting peasants in the cross-fire of a war they didn't want. This book is sure to draw the ire of "romantic" revolutionaries that only see the Guatemalan conflict in terms of "good" vs. "evil."

I happen to have had him as a teacher in the early 90's. I also happen to have lived in Guatemala the whole of my formative year's. Fact is that his view's of why and how of that period, in this and other books about Guatemala, corelate with both my and my friends experiance in Guatemala. I highly recomend this and other books of his both for their informative value and their basic readability.