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Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Science | Book | 972.81053 EV 17H, 1997 | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Harvard-educated attorney Jennifer Harbury went to Guatemala to help refugees, and found herself drawn into a political drama that would test her beliefs, courage, and moral strength. She fell in love and married Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, better known as Commander Everardo, a Mayan Indian resistance leader. Soon after, he vanished in combat. This is the story of Harbury's search for Everardo, one that grew into an impassioned crusade to expose those responsible for the human rights abuses suffered upon the victims of Guatemala -- one woman's heroic stand against the Guatemalan oligarchy, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA. A headline-making story of love, war, and courage, this is the personal account of an American woman and her unrelenting fight to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of her husband, a Guatemalan guerrilla leader.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harbury's impassioned letter to her dead husband, a Maya Indian Guatemalan guerrilla leader known as Everardo, recounts the story of their relationship, which unfolded in civil war-torn Guatemala. Harbury, a lawyer with a history of social activism, met Everardo in 1990, when his country was ruled by a right-wing military regime and most of the population lived in dire poverty. Despite the difference in their backgrounds and Everardo's certainty that he would be killed, they married. He disappeared in 1992, and Harbury details her fruitless efforts to get help from the Guatemalan or U.S. governments until she conducted hunger strikes in both countries that drew attention to her plight. She finally learned that Everardo was captured by the army, tortured and killed on the orders of a CIA informant. Harbury makes clear to the point of polemic her strong commitment to the Guatemalan rebel cause and her idealistic love of the Maya people. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A disappointing memoir of love in a time of civil war. Harvard-educated attorney and first-time author Harbury made news a couple of years back for her public quest to locate her husband, a Guatemalan rebel who had been arrested by the military and then disappeared; that quest involved congressional hearings, a well-publicized hunger strike in Guatemala City, and something of a crusade on the part of Mike Wallace and the CBS news program 60 Minutes. Here Harbury recounts those events in a voice that uneasily shifts from an epistolary, second-person address to her husband, known by the nom de guerre Everardo, to first-person reportage. Her prose is often overwrought and flowery (``Did they drag you here dead in a burlap bag and bury you like a magnificent broken bird that they could never fully comprehend or value''), and Harbury seems unwilling to acknowledge that her husband was in fact a guerrilla soldier involved in a war, ``the commander of an entire region,'' not an innocent bystander swept up by tragic events, and therefore subject to the harsh penalties of defeat--in this case, execution. Still, she does a good job of describing the injustices of Guatemalan society and the apparent injustices of an American foreign-policy apparatus wedded to Cold War notions of containing Communism in the western hemisphere. She also confirms, if there were any doubt, the depth of CIA involvement in Guatemalan affairs, including the training and financing of the very death squads responsible for Everardo's death. Readers of her account will be reminded of Costa Gavras's film Missing, and perhaps even Oliver Stone's Salvador, save that these two are much better storytellers. A much shorter book--or even a long magazine article--could have readily accommodated the basics of Harbury's rather slender narrative. (Radio satellite tour)
Library Journal Review
In 1990, two people from utterly different worldsHarbury, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and Commandante "Everardo," a Maya Indian rebelmet in Guatemala, where he had been fighting against the military right-wing governments that used U.S. arms and training to oppress the poor. In 1991, after they married, he disappeared. Although American citizens have been tortured and killed in Guatemala for less and despite official U.S. refusals to help, Harbury's grief drove her to persist in learning his fate. When her hunger strikes caught the attention of 60 Minutes, it was revealed that a CIA-paid lackey had Everardo killed in 1992 and that the CIA knew it all the time. Harbury urges us to learn the truth about the U.S. role in abetting oppressive regimes. Another book to read along with this is I, Rigoberta Menchu (Routledge, 1985) by the Maya Indian Nobel prize winner. This sensitive book is highly recommended.Louise F. Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.