http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1696.html
The Guatemalan Military Project
A Violence Called Democracy
Jennifer Schirmer
368 pages / 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth 1998 / 0-8122-3325-5 / $47.50s / £33.50
Paper 1999 / 0-8122-1730-6 / $22.50s / £16.00
Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
Winner of the 1999 PIOOM Human Rights Award
"The Guatemalan Military Project is a remarkable achievement. As any
journalist or diplomat who has spent time in Guatemala will attest, no group
is more difficult to penetrate than the Guatemalan armed forces. Over a
period of a decade, Jennifer Schirmer succeeded in getting more than fifty
Guatemalan officers to speak with uncustomary candor about their
actions."--Larry Rohter, New York Times
"[An] indispensable account of the history of the Guatemalan military's rise
to power and of the construction of a thoroughly militarized 'façade
democracy'.'"--Journal of Latin American Studies
In 1999, the Guatemala truth commission issued its report on human rights
violations during Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996.
The commission, sponsored by the UN, estimates the conflict resulted in
200,000 deaths and disappearances. The commission holds the Guatemalan
military responsible for 93 percent of the deaths.
In The Guatemalan Military Project, Jennifer Schirmer documents the
military's role in human rights violations through a series of extensive
interviews striking in their brutal frankness and unique in their first-hand
descriptions of the campaign against Guatemala's citizens. High-ranking
officers explain in their own words their thoughts and feelings regarding
violence, political opposition, national security doctrine, democracy, human
rights, and law. Additional interviews with congressional deputies,
Guatemalan lawyers, journalists, social scientists, and a former president
give a full and balanced account of the Guatemalan power structure and
ruling system.
With expert analysis of these interviews in the context of cultural, legal,
and human rights considerations, The Guatemalan Military Project provides a
successful evaluation of the possibilities and processes of conversion from
war to peace in Latin America and around the world.
Jennifer Schirmer is a lecturer in social studies at Harvard University. She
is also an associate with the Program on Non-Violent Sanctions and Cultural
Survival at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Devine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 8:47 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:12874] good news from Guatemala
> from SLATE:
> >The LA [TIMES] fronts word that 11 Guatemalan communities are going to
> >file suit today against a former president, accusing him
> >of genocide. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during a civil war
> >in the 1980s. According to the LAT, the suit charges that former
President
> >Efrain Rios Montt "presided over a brutal policy of racial extermination
> >as the nation's dictator in the early 1980s." The charges have some
basis.
> >According to a 1999 United Nations truth commission report, the
Guatemalan
> >military, led by Rios Montt, committed "acts of genocide." One thing the
> >LAT left out: The last time Rios Montt hit the front pages, in 1982,
> >Ronald Reagan was celebrating him as "totally dedicated to democracy in
> >Guatemala."
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>
