Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala

Buried Secrets : Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala

During the late 70 's and 80 's , Guatemala experienced the wrath of Hades as the Guatemalan army conducted a genocidal campaign against the Maya through massive violence and terrorism . This campaign was known at first as La Situacion ' but after the peace accord was signed down in 1996 the persecuted Maya used a more appropriate terminology and called it as La Violencia . Because of the economic sabotage of several Guerilla movements , the government was forced to cleanse ' Guatemala . Two hundred thousand people , mostly

Mayan , were persecuted and murdered and one and a half million people from six hundred twenty six villages were put out of place . Victoria Sanford used the power of language in her book Buried Secrets : Truth and Human rights in Guatemala ' by gathering more than four hundred testimonies and interviews from forensic experts , human rights activists , military officers , government officials , guerilla soldiers and survivors that seeks community healing truth and justice . The book provides genuine perspective into the experiences of the survivors as they fight to rebuild their lives and devastated community and more importantly , it shows how these testimonials became evidence of finding truth and justice for the Mayans in Guatemala . Also , the book gave emphasis on the new way of genocide the Guatemalan army carried out . People who agree with the notion that human rights are anthropology 's most important scholarly and political concern would admire Sanford 's book

Sanford sympathetically and critically documents and analyzes one of the most inhuman events in American history , the genocide against the Maya population . She observed the participants with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation as they disinterred concealed graves , which enabled her to execute what she calls as excavation of memories (p .17 ) through collecting testimonies from survivors . She used her multisided ethnography to argue persuasively the reformation of genocide from a violent intrusion of villages to the massacre of its inhabitants and to continuous experience of aggression . This point of view is carried out from five intertwined chapters - 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 and 8 - in which Sanford explained genocide as a process rather than an event . The first stage is the militarization of the villages where the army would intrude the villages and accuse its inhabitants as sympathizers of the guerillas , specifically the Guerilla Army of the Poor , the Revolutionary Organization of Armed People , the Rebel Armed Forces , and the Guatemalan Labor Party . Villagers are then massacred by the Guatemalan army . At first , only men are murdered but at the end of the reign of terror children and women will also be slaughtered . The army will further punish the so-called sympathizers by burning all the structures and crops leaving no place for shelter and source of living . Survivors will then flee to the mountains to hide but the army would follow and hunt them . Who ever they 'll see will either be killed or forced to join the army control . The intolerable difficulties that hiding in the mountains...