To Save Her Life: Disappearance, Deliverance, and the United States in Guatemala, by Dan Saxon, University of California Press, 2007, 306 pp., $19.95 paperback
Maritza Urritia’s story began on an early July morning in a middle-class neighborhood in Guatemala City. As Maritza dropped off Sebastian, her four-year-old son, at the Walt Disney nursery school, she kissed him goodbye, telling him she would pick him up at noon. But noon never came.
Even though we know what happened next, Dan Saxon, author of To Save Her Life, creates suspense with vividly rendered detail through her eyes: “ . . . Maritza never saw the large man who fell on her and covered her mouth with his hand and held her arm against her ribs. . . . She never noticed the second man, who almost simultaneously rushed up behind her and grabbed her arms.”
Martiza was abducted that day in 1992 by men who later identified themselves to her as members of “a very secret organization . . . that was not part of the army, but pursued any person who endangered the security of the nation.” Saxon never names the captors but strongly suggests that the men were affiliated with Guatemalan army intelligence. Maritza spent a week in captivity, blindfolded and chained to a bed, enduring harsh interrogations on her political activities. To his credit, Saxon, now Maritza’s husband, keeps the focus on her ordeal and the extraordinary “human rights machine” that saved her. He is honest about his relationship with her and her involvement with the guerrillas, but his brilliant rendering keeps him from becoming self-indulgent.
The Guatemala Saxon evokes is a country hovering between war and peace, fierce nationalism and pro-U.S. docility, chaos and stability. Through a detailed examination of one case history, Saxon, a prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal, skillfully connects Maritza’s story with the broader implications for Guatemalan history and politics, as well as international humanitarian policy. To Save Her Life thus joins the ranks of recent books that examine particular cases, rendering the horror of the U.S. legacy in Guatemala: Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre; Beatriz Manz’s Paradise in Ashes; Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain; and my own Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced.
Maritza’s captors repeatedly forced her to film a statement to make it sound authentic, but she convinced them she usually used garish makeup, signaling to her friends and family that she had been coerced. Meanwhile, the human rights wheels had begun to turn on the outside. Maritza’s brother Edmundo René, a former leftist with a political science degree from the University of New Mexico, began publicizing his sister’s disappearance to everyone he could think of in both Guatemala and the United States. He eventually made contact with Saxon, a young U.S. lawyer who was then the “international presence” in the Archdiocese of Guatemala’s Human Rights Office.
Maritza’s secret—that her former common-law husband was up in the mountains with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, and that she herself was leading the propaganda arm for the umbrella group of the leftist rebels in the capital city—made life more difficult for her brother and, ultimately, for Saxon, as they raced against time to save her life. It also raised the stakes for Martiza, constantly fearing that she would break under torture, becoming responsible not only for her own death and the orphaning of her child, but also for the probable capture and death of her comrades.
Saxon’s close attention to narrative detail works well in illustrating Maritza’s torture. There are no branding irons, no dunking in water, no electric shocks. Maritza was chained to a bed and sleep-deprived while a radio blared incessantly. A guard—the “fat man,” as she dubs him—gave Maritza a plastic bag filled with Pepsi and a straw, the kind found in any Guatemalan mom-and-pop store, and eyed her lasciviously. Maritza’s fear of rape intensifies for the reader through the ordinary touch of the soda and straw.
The book is not lacking in academic context, either. Saxon explains how torture works and precisely what disappearance means. Through most of the book, these explanations are fluidly interspersed with Maritza’s tale and the negotiations for her release. That part of the story, including her subsequent exile, is a complicated one. Maritza’s captors wanted to make it seem as if she had not been captured but was voluntarily confessing to guerrilla involvement to obtain amnesty from the government. The negotiations were indirect; human rights groups, the church, and government civilians used publicity to force her captors’ hand. If the confession story was to be believed, they would have to release her. Yet they could also maintain her under their control as an informant.
Martiza had been coerced into asking for amnesty, but if she did not manage to get out of the country in time, she would be forced to testify in court regarding her disappearance. And if she did that, she would put her own life and that of her family in danger once again. Two branches of the Guatemalan government (her shadowy, army-linked captors and the attorney general’s office) seemed to battle each other, and divisions within the U.S. government mirrored that situation. “Combating drugs—with the Guatemalan government as a staunch ally—had overtaken human rights as the principle U.S. policy concern,” Saxon observes. “Temporal demands of contradictory United States policies hung like a stone on the U.S. Embassy, impeding the efforts of foreign service officers to act quickly and decisively. The inconsistent policies—punish the Guatemalan army for its human rights violations; reward the Guatemalan army for its anti-drug work—became the subject of confusion, trust, and ridicule.”
Unfortunately, in the last third of the book, the tone becomes more distant and less compelling. After Maritza’s release, Saxon seems to pull away the close angle of his camera and views the situation with a cloudy lens. Yet the subject is no less dramatic. He continues to provide information about Maritza, her stay in the back of the cathedral and then in the United States and her subsequent move to Mexico. It’s as if he ran out of time.
Whereas in the earlier part of the book, we can feel Martiza’s fear and rejoice in her astuteness, here we are merely told, “After interviewing Maritza the previous Friday, [embassy officials] believed Maritza was sincere about her reasons to go to the United States.” We don’t see Maritza. Likewise, after her arrival in the United States, we are told that she could not stop crying, and then that she went to Mexico to be closer to her revolutionary colleagues. “To regain her world,” Saxon pontificates, “Maritza would have to speak out.” But he ceases to let us glimpse her world.
Although Saxon makes clear from the beginning that he and Maritza eventually married, he only alludes to the romance later by saying, “After Maritza suggested that we become romantically involved, I reacted in my typical, earnest way. ‘That would be highly improper,’ I insisted, ‘and a violation of my professional ethical obligations in attorney-client relations. Plus, you were a guerrillera.’ Fortunately, Maritza fought as hard for love as she did for life, and we were married in 1999.” The book had worked previously so well on two levels, the intimate and the political, that I felt cheated toward the end.
Nevertheless, Saxon leaves us with a mostly dramatic tale and some valuable insights that extend far beyond Guatemala. He shows us how humanitarianism is politics. Through Maritza’s story, we develop an understanding of the conflicting concerns that shape humanitarian policy. He details how the interests of the press, various governments, the church, and human rights organizations can sometimes collide, even when they share the same ultimate goal of saving lives. And he is unafraid to take on what he calls “the complex and often cruel politics of human rights.”
He writes in his preface: “I hope this book will provoke more discussion about what it means to be involved, from Guatemala to Guantánamo to Iraq, in that spider web of values and interests known as human rights.”
This is a book of thoughtful history and warm humanity. At a time when terrorism is very much on our minds, Saxon offers us insights into the very nature of what it means to care.
June Carolyn Erlick is publications director at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced (Seal Press, 2004) and Una gringa en Bogotá (Aguilar, 2007).
