Silence On The Mountain ─ Stories Of Terror, Betrayal, And Forgetting In Guatemala

Silence on the Mountain is a work of reporting and a narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were "disappeared") at the hands of the military government backed by the United States. The story begins in 1993, when Daniel Wilkinson decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation's manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country's recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala's Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets.
Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete that it verges on collective amnesia. The author's triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution relevant not only to Guatemala but also to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.