cover image Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy

Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy

Victor Perera. University of California Press, $40 (297pp) ISBN 978-0-520-07965-6

This engrossing combination of reportage, personal narrative, oral testimony and ethnographic investigation focuses on four Guatemalan towns which have been the object of an ethnic extermination campaign by the military. More than 65,000 Guatemalans of Mayan descent have died in this conflict since 1978. Perera ( The Last Lords of Palenque ), a native Guatemalan living in the U.S., examines the relationship between the campaign and the country's political leadership, the destruction of natural resources, and the Mayan-Christian religious practices of those under assault. Included is an analysis of the activities of radical Catholic priests and human-rights groups in a land of torture and killing, and observations on the growing Protestant evangelical movement which has already converted more than a third of the nominally Catholic indigenous population. Perera's layered narrative, set in a land of earthquakes, volcanoes and massacres, reads like a medieval morality tale. Photos. (Oct.)