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in October
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Today's
Stories
August 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Bush: a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action
Figure?
Recent
Stories
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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August
26, 2003
Ghosts of Regime Changes
Past
A
Review of Silence on the Mountain
By LARRY SIEMS
Sixty pages and several months into Daniel Wilkinson's
journey into Guatemala's heart of darkness, the author spends
an evening in a coffee worker's cinder-block, tin-roofed home,
trying to coax from him the barest information about civil conflict
in and around the plantation. His host, an evangelical Christian
who has painted a mural of the River of Life flowing through
Paradise on the wall, deflects every question away from the physical
world toward an abstract realm of bible quotations. Suddenly
a gun battle erupts nearby. "This was my chance--I could
feel it--the moment of truth had come at last," Wilkinson
narrates. "No on could deny that something was happening
here, something political, something violent."
It is indeed a moment of truth, but not
the truth he was after that evening. He gathers nothing about
this or any other battles; instead, as his host offers only passages
from Revelations as explanation, Wilkinson learns the
almost impossible obstinacy of the workers' silence. What is
holding people's tongues, of course, is fear. In chronicling
four more years spent pursuing the events that engendered that
fear, Silence
on the Mountain becomes more than an excavation of past
horrors. By the end, Wilkinson has managed to transport the Guatemalan
conflict squarely into the arena of our current national obsession:
Terrorism.
Narratively, Wilkinson does this through
a feat of misdirection. The present action of the book largely
follows his efforts to unravel the mystery of why rebels burned
the La Patria manor house to the ground in the 1980s.
However, because he is unable to elicit the truth from witnesses
directly, he tells those he questions that he is interested in
what happened on the plantation during Guatemala's brief experiment
in land reform in 1954. Getting even this much information requires
him to learn the geneologies of individual characters. As he
digs  deeper into the past, he displays
a novelist's faith that any particular piece of earth contains
a full record of history, and the story of La Patria delivers
the cast and intrigue of a literary saga.
In the 1890s, a German immigrant tries
Guatemala; he works his way to the forefront of a generation
of Europeans that yoked huge swaths of Central American jungle,
and indigenous Americans, into coffee production; he fathers
a son by an indigenous woman, and then, in fulfillment of a personal
vow that there be no more 'brown babies' in the family, takes
a German bride and has a legitimate son. Years later, the politics
of land reform play themselves out between heir and bastard,
just as, a generation later, another pair of brothers, one a
popular politician, the other a self-proclaimed brujo and
military informant, will shape the local course of the civil
war. Wilkinson builds the narrative with eye for details. A university
professor he meets "wore glasses and always carried a book
or newspaper in one hand, the way boys where he grew up carried
slingshots and the men carried machetes." The aging plantation
patriarch has a way of driving home declarations in which "he
clenched his fists in the air and jerked them in a downward motion,
as if he were hammering Spanish exclamation marks on either side
of his sentence."
As a character himself, Wilkinson wanders
with various Virgils through plantations and villages. For a
time, the tormented souls let him approach but will not speak.
When they do begin to open up, the narrative voice becomes direct,
gathering force and guiding the reader toward a well-merited
rage.
The turning point comes when he finds himself facing a gathering
of survivors of the January 1, 1982 massacre in the mountaintop
village of Sacuchum. He is introduced by his translator as "an
important person who was coming to investigate the massacre,"
and one by one the survivors rise to offer their accounts of
a military operation that specifically targeted a civilian population
and ended in the murder of 44 residents of the village. That
massacre announced a major shift in tactics for the Guatemalan
army, from confronting guerrilla units directly to attacking
civilian populations from which the insurgents drew their support.
The breakthrough at Sacuchum opens the way into the horrors in
and around La Patria, where 74 civilians were killed during
the war.
The signing of a final peace accord in
1996 accelerates the discoveries, and with new access to former
combatants, Wilkinson begins working with local activists to
help area residents present their own testimonies to the Truth
Commission. As he emerges from listener to activist, he becomes
a target of threats himself. He also gathers stories of remarkable
moral complexity. In one searing scene, a guerrilla leader describes
being confronted on a mountain path by a little boy just after
his unit ambushed an army unit:
"I don't know where he came from,
but it was something I'll never forget. He was Cupertino, a worker
in the plantation. He was crying. And because his face was very
dirty, his tears left a line of mud on his cheeks. He said to
us, 'why don't you leave us alone? They killed my father. They
killed my father because of you. Why'd you have to come here?'
"There was nothing I could say.
Paco spoke to him and asked what had happened. He said the army
had killed a group of workers who had been on the road when the
fighting broke out. 'How many people died?' Paco asked. 'Eight,'
the kid said.
"We continued climbing. We didn't
say anything to each other. I couldn't get the kid out of my
mind. I thought, 'God, please give him the answer. And if there
isn't one, punish us.'"
Silence on the Mountain traces the answer to the boy's question of why
the guerrillas came to 50 years of thwarted reform efforts: to
the 1954 U.S.-backed coup that pulled the plug on land reform
and drove reform-minded Guatemalans into clandestine political
parties; to another U.S.-sanctioned coup in 1963 that prevented
the return of the exiled progressive former president; to countless
assassinations of union leaders and violently-suppressed street
demonstrations; and to the "disappearance," in March
1966, of many of the more moderate voices in the fledgling guerrilla
movement, killings carried out by the national police in their
first major operation after receiving "counter-terror"
training from a U.S. military officer.
It is, amazingly, an analysis that does
not differ so greatly from that one offered to Wilkinson by General
Hector Gramajo Morales, who served as Guatemala's Defense Minister
in the 1980s. Gramajo's basic grasp of the notion that political
repression breeds instability and violence, and his self-declared
determination that the military should no longer be used as the
"dirty rag" of the oligarchy, allowed him to act the
part of reformer even as he was overseeing military operations
at the height of what the Truth Commission would later determine
was genocide.
Gramajo tells Wilkinson that when he
and other Guatemalan officers received military training in the
U.S. in the 1950s, they were taught National Security doctrine
that viewed local conflicts in the context of the Cold War, and
that after the 1954 coup this doctrine became the governing philosophy
of the Guatemalan military. Distinguishing between guerrillas,
who Gramajo defines as an armed movement sustained and supported
by the civilian population, and terrorists, who lack popular
support and commit acts of violence to create fear, Gramajo tells
Wilkinson, in essence, that the military effectively turned guerrillas
into terrorists in Guatemala. They did this, Wilkinson drives
home the point, not by killing guerrillas, but by their own textbook
campaign of terror: lacking popular support in coffee-producing
areas, the army resorted to acts of violence against civilians
to create fear. "Guatemala," he concludes, "was
a place where terrorism did in fact win."
Wilkinson managed to interview Gramajo
by virtue of the fact that both are alumni of Harvard; he first
called the general on the advice of a wealthy, Harvard-educated
Guatemalan businessman who suggested, correctly, that he might
need a powerful friends as he pressed ahead with his research
on La Patria. Like human rights advocates working to reconstruct
the recent past in so many places, throughout Silence on the
Mountain Wilkinson pursues truths he suspects are known not
only by locals terrorized into silence but by officials in both
Guatemala City and Washington. By the end of the book, it is
only U.S. officials that have not spoken about their knowledge
of and role in a war that a local politician tells Wilkinson
"killed the spirit of the people." Wilkinson's book
is, in the end, a scathing indictment of the shroud of silence
surrounding a century of U.S. involvement in Guatemalan politics
and support for a 30-year, genocidal war. To Central Americans,
that silence is deafening.
I was reading Silence on the Mountain
on the subway one morning on my way to work. A woman standing
near me identified herself as Guatemalan, nodded at the book,
and looked me hard in the eye. "There are many things we
need to talk about," she declared. "We need many such
books."
Larry Siems
directs the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN
American Center and is the author of Between
the Lines: Letters Between Mexican and Central American Immigrants
and Their Families and Friends.
Daniel Wilkinson
is an attorney with Human Rights Watch in New York. His book,
Silence
on the Mountain, won the 2003 PEN/Albrand award for outstanding
first nonfiction by an American author. You can find out more
about the book at SilenceontheMountain.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
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