A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala by W. George Lovell, Between the Lines (Toronto, Canada), 1995, 161 pp., Can$19.95 (paper). In his academic life, Canadian geo- grapher George Lovell writes about the demographic history of Guatemala during the colonial peri- od. In A Beauty that Hurts, he moonlights as a journalist. Drawing on his scholarly background, his observations from countless trips to the country, and his flair as a story- teller, Lovell has written a reliable and engaging introduction to Guatemala. The country first comes into focus through vignettes of six peo- ple. Although from different walks of life, each has been profoundly affected by the violence that has gripped Guatemala since reformist President Jacobo Arbenz was over- thrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. The most poignant story is perhaps that of the Maya refugee Gonzalo. The boy's 17 years are a saga of hardship and endurance: his father's murder at the age of six, his work on a cotton plantation at the age of 10, his forced recruitment into an army civil defense patrol at the age of 13, his flight first to Mexico and then to the United States the same year, and finally his journey at age 16 to Canada where he was granted refugee status. The book's middle section per- forms the legwork of recounting political events in the country since 1981. Lovell uses terse accounts of murders and disappearances in the local daily papers as touchstones for his narrative. In the final third of the book, Lovell steps back to assess "the historical forces that shape, and the cultural context that frames, cur- rent predicaments, especially those of Maya communities." Despite Lovell's obviously pro- found knowledge of Guatemala, the Maya remain, in the end, somewhat of an enigma. The reader's first reaction is to fault the author for not digging deeper. Soon however, we Vol XXIX, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1996 realize that Lovell has the wisdom and modesty to let the chasm between Maya and Western society function as a leitmotif. The book is filled with allusions to things unspoken, things misunderstood, things garbled in translation. It is that capacity to elude the penetra- tion of outsiders-and to assimilate aspects of Western culture without fundamentally changing their iden- tity-which explains in large part the Mayas' remarkable survival over the centuries. Thy Will Be Done... The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil by Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Harper Collins Publishers, 1995, 960 pp., $35 (cloth). This is a voluminous and well-doc- umented study of the seemingly disparate, yet ultimately inter- twined activities of two men: Nelson Rockefeller with his global corporate economic empire, and Cameron Townsend with his world- wide missionary organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators. The story ultimately concerns the inter- section of power, wealth, culture and ideology in the shaping of the modern world. Colby and Dennett reveal how the corporate quest for profits, the missionary zeal for souls to convert, and the U.S. gov- ernment's obsession with prevent- ing the spread of "Communism" wove a Byzantine tapestry of deception and destruction. The con- fluence of these three forces laid waste to the planet's greatest bio- logical treasure-the South American Amazon-and destroyed entire peoples in the process. Nelson Rockefeller was in the vanguard of U.S. corporate "devel- opment" activities in Latin America from the 1930s. The scope of his activities, along with the access to political power and policy-making circles which his wealth afforded, gave him a key role in shaping the recent history of the region. Rockefeller family holdings ranged from Standard Oil in Vene- zuela to ranches, banks, factories, mines and agribusinesses from Mexico to Brazil. Nelson became Roosevelt's assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Eisen- hower's liaison to the CIA as special assistant for Cold War strategy and psychological warfare, special advi- sor to Nixon, and finally, vice-pres- ident under Gerald Ford. Rocke- feller's economic activities and political dealings were inextricably linked. For example, because Rockefeller's investments in oil and agribusiness in Brazil were threat- ened by President Goulart's pro- posed land-reform and nationaliza- tion policies, his companies helped finance the CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew Goulart in 1954. As its title suggests, the book is primarily concerned with Nelson Rockefeller's relationship with evangelism in the age of oil. The same coup that was such a boon to the Rockefeller empire in Brazil also provided a boost to Wycliffe's Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Cameron Townsend's goal was to convert to fundamentalist Christianity all of the world's remaining indigenous peoples, especially the untold thousands awaiting "the Word" in deepest Amazonia. Townsend and his mis- sionaries took full advantage of the military's open-door policy. The CIA and U.S. corporate cap- ital provided the missionaries with military equipment and generous financial support for projects of mutual benefit. Colby and Dennett detail such bizarre subplots as the CIA's use of missionaries to identi- fy psychotropic and toxic sub- stances in the rainforest for Project MK-ULTRA, the agency's mind- control program. More importantly, Wycliffe's SIL activities in the Amazon spearheaded the corporate penetration of the Amazon region. The missionaries paved the way for the discovery and exploitation of the Amazon's natural resources-- from oil to hydroelectric power. "Perhaps this is the real historical meaning of William Cameron Townsend's reaching every tribe with the Word and Nelson Rockefeller's reaching them with 'development,"' Colby and Dennett conclude. "Both methods were destructive to tribal ways of com- munal sharing and respect for the land. Both stories told of the same result: it was not God being brought to tribal cultures, but an alien cul- ture of possessive individualism grown to such a giant corporate scale, with its own rapacious, com- petitive needs, that it could only devour them." Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q'eqchi' Experiences by Richard Wilson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, 373 pp., $32.95 (cloth). Richard Wilson's ethnography of the resurgence of Q'eqchi' identity in Alta Verapaz is a fascinating, close-up study of how the Maya people have responded to the pro- found social dislocations of the past two decades by attempting to revive their ancestral ways. After an intelligent discussion of different ways to theorize about identity formation, Wilson goes on to explain the mountain cults- embodied in the mountain spirits, the tzuultaq'as-that anchor each local Q'eqchi' community to a spe- cific geographic area. He details the role these tzuultaq'as play in agri- cultural production, health and human reproduction. These local- ized identities have facilitated Maya cultural resistance since the Conquest, but worked against the establishment of broader-based identities. Wilson next offers compelling details of the dramatic events of the 1970s and 1980s that undermined the relationship between Q'eqchi' villages and the tzuultaq'as, erod- ing traditional, community-based identities. An evangelizing drive led NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS by Catholic missionaries in the 1970s sought to suppress the "pagan" earth cult. Guerrilla activi- ty in Alta Verapaz in the early 1980s and the ensuing military repression resulted in the physical displace- ment of hundreds of Q'eqchi's. The expansion of capitalist-wage rela- tions in the countryside also pushed many people off the land. As the sacred relationships with the tzuul- taq'as broke down, new competing bases of identity-Catholicism, class, nation-emerged in the Q'eqchi' communities. In the aftermath of the counterin- surgency war, a new generation of Catholic lay catechists began reval- orizing Q'eqchi' language and tra- ditions. The catechists spearheaded an ethnic revivalist movement in Alta Verapaz committed to renovat- ing the traditional rituals, whose focus was not the village-specific tzuultaq'as but a broader concep- tion of pan-Maya religion. The reconstruction of Q'eqchi' identity transcended the local community, and reimagined a broader, pan- Q'eqchi' identity-what Wilson calls "cultural creation in response to ethnocide." Wilson has done a fine job of dis- cussing the cultural and some of the organizational elements of the Q'eqchi' revivalist movement in Alta Verapaz. However, he does not explain how this revivalist move- ment fits into the dramatic resur- gence of hundreds of Maya organi- zations throughout Guatemala, many of which have become active- ly involved in politics. He explores only one concrete example of local political organizing-the group Qawa Quk'a ("our food, our water"), which organized consumer boycotts and sought to establish barter net- works to protect indigenous com- munities from the ravages of the market. Wilson's study gets at the cultural construction of a pan- Q'eqchi' identity, but the political implications of this emerging iden- tity are discussed only in passing.
