The Life That Makes Us Die/The Death That Makes Us Live: Facing Terrorism in Guatemala City

Radical History Review

Volumn 2003, Issue 85, 2003, Pages 94-104

  Levenson, Deborah ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84909321047     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2003-85-94     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Guatemala: Memory of Silence, TZ’INIL NA ‘TAB’ AL (Guatemala: CEH, 2000), 20. According to the CEH, the guerrilla groups were responsible for 3 percent of the violence and terror. The commission could not determine responsibility for 4 percent of the acts of violence.
2. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, s.v. “terror,” “terrorism.”
3. CEH, Guatemala, 26.
4. Ricardo Falla, Esa vida que nos hace vivir (San Salvador: UCA Ediciones, 1984).
5. Greg Grandin, unpublished manuscript. Grandin points out that the oligarchy did not like Arbenz, but made no plan to overthrow him. That was the work of the CIA, the new fascistic groups, and a few military men.
6. Marvin Gettleman et al., eds. Guatemala in Rebellion: Unfinished History (New York: Grove, 1983), 119.
7. Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 149–58; Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol.2 (London: Zed, 1985), 32–122.
8. Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 280.
9. An enormous figure by any standard, but even more so when compared to the better-known cases of the Argentine state, which murdered over 30,000 in the Dirty War, and the Chilean dictatorship, which in the years after the 1973 coup, murdered over 7,000.
10. In the English language protagonist is generally used in a literary sense to refer to the main character. In the JOC and within the Theology of Liberation, it refers to a person who takes on life in every sense. Sometimes the word subjecto is used to mean the same thing.
11. Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists against Terror (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 81–94.
12. Julio Celso de Leon, interview by the author, January 1991.
13. CNT, “Boletín,” Guatemala City, 1973, CNT file, Centro de Documentación, Informpress Centroamerica (CDIC), quoted in Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists.
14. CNT, “Formación,” 1974, CNT file, CDIC.
15. Comité de Trabajadores de la Elegante, March 1975, Trabajadores file, CDSIC, quoted in Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists, 95.
16. Interview of CNT lawyer, name withheld on request, Guatemala City, 1977, quoted in Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists, 3. This insight is similar to one made by psychoanalyst Franz Fanon in reference to colonialism’s effect on people. He wrote that “colonialism forces the people whom it dominates to ask themselves constantly the question ‘In reality, who am I?’ ” Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1966), 203.
17. Adelante, July 1978.
18. La Nación, October 8, 1978, 20.
19. Personal communication with Figueroa’s union companions.
20. Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists, 160–65.
21. Diario Impacto, May 4, 1980.
22. Frank Graziano, Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and Radical Christianity in the Argentine “Dirty War” (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992); Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, The Politics of Anti-politics: The Military in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997).
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7–26.