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
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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.
