This book is the real item. Unfortunately, as Mr. Scanlon's review illustrates so many well-intentioned people, who have empathized with the Guatemalan people and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Guatemalan army, have confused this extraordinary work of investigative journalism by de la Grange and Rico as a white-wash of military assasins. Not so! Just like all the rest of the well-intentioned folk, the authors began to cover the trial with a mutual enthusiasm that, perhaps, the army's long-standing impunity to civilian justice was about to be broken. The problem was that the facts (or lack of facts) that the prosecution presented just didn't add up to a conviction. But everyone was happy. Military officers had finally been convicted of a crime. It was an historic moment. All of us well-intentioned folk were applauding so loud that we didn't pay much attention to what the evidence really was.
But de la Grange and Rico were uneasy after covering the trial in its entirety. They began their own investigation at some peril to themselves. Because if these scapegoats weren't the real killers, whoever was had very powerful and dangerous connections to the Portillo/ Rios-Montt governement, which was the most corrupt in recent Guatemala history. It is not about defending "the military", but ditinguishing who's who in the military.
What was overlooked in our immediate enthusiasm for the fact that military impunity had apparently been broken is twofold: One, there is no such thing as a monolithic guatemalan military, but rather an institution riven by factions associated with different graduating classes of officers, by different areas such as intelligence or logistics, and by personal rivalries and animosities, that have become murderous since some former intelligence officers have turned their cold-war impunity to more profitable criminality that just mere murder. And two, what we lose sight of here with all our hopes for Guatemala and her people to have a peaceful, democratic future is that that future will remain impossible as long the judicial system can be manipulated by political and criminal powers. Without a completely independent and impartial judiciary system, Guatemala remains a street-fight without a referee.
What de la Grange and Rico have done here is to take a valiant stand for that future democracy by taking an internationally unpopular stance to which their investigation lead them. Ok,not these military officers, but, yes, perhaps some others,named and identified. The conviction had already been overturned once by an Appeals Court, but then ratified by a Supreme Court that had been stacked by the Portillo/Rios-Mont government. It is important to note that it wasn't at all an unpopular stance here in Guatemala, where there is little love for the army but where their book broke all best-sellers records and was widely praised by a population that had learned to distrust anything that came out of the Portillo/Rios-Monnt government.
For further details, please see my review and comments on the Francisco Goldman page.
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