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摘要
摘要
Spanning the years of civil war in Guatemala, Unfinished Conquest portrays an embattled country facing the third cycle of a conquest that began when the conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century. As personal narrative weaves with reportage and oral testimony, we meet the victims, champions, and villains of a society torn apart by violence and injustice.
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Shattering examination of Guatemala's bloody civil war, combining oral history, investigative journalism, personal narrative, and ethnography. If we are to believe only half of what the Guatemalan-born Perera (Rites, 1985, etc.) claims, Guatemala's violent history makes its sister-republics' human-rights violations look almost like nothing. This terrible chronicle is divided into three ``chapters of conquest,'' beginning with the Conquistadors. Commissioned by Cortes to bring the people of what was to become Guatemala to peace without war, Captain Pedro de Alvarado instead took actions that made his name ``synonymous with the bloodiest chapter in the Conquest of the Americas.'' But despite encomienda (royal grants giving landowners full title to Indian serfs living on their estates), hundreds of Mayan communities retained ownership of ancestral lands. In the second chapter, set in the late 19th century, self-styled ``Liberal Reformer'' Justo Rufina Barrios, needing to create a labor pool for the country's huge coffee plantations, passed debt-peonage statutes and abolished Maya land titles by the hundreds. Marked by massive counterinsurgency campaigns, the third and perhaps final chapter commenced in the late 1970's. In Ixil, a brutal plantation owner was killed. Retaliating, hundreds of Indians were tortured and murdered. Perera tells us that Guatemala has death squads who specialize in killing and torturing children and that most massacres of Mayas in the highlands are committed by other Mayas whose communal and blood bonds have been warped by army officers who consider contemporary Mayas subhuman. Further polluting the waters, Guatemala is racked by a religious war in which proselytizing evangelical Protestant sects have complicated even more the age-old antagonism between Catholicism and scotumbre (Maya religious practice) by converting about one-third of the highland Mayas as well as two recent presidents. But whoever is president, Perera says, the military seems to have its way. A harrowing study of our hemisphere's own killing fields- -admirably written, painstakingly researched. (Twenty-eight photographs--not seen)
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Despite the slight flurry of interest inspired by the award of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize to Mayan Indian Rigobarta Menchu, the press is again ignoring the ongoing genocide of the Guatemalan people by state-sponsored terrorism. In an insightful historical analysis, Guatemalan writer Perera describes how the breathtakingly beautiful home of the Mayas has been torn apart by heinous abuses of human rights. The civil war, really a peasant agrarian movement against large interests aided by the United States and Israel in the guise of fighting communism, is destroying a culture so strong that it survived the brutality of the Spanish Conquest almost intact. Highly recommended for lay readers as well as scholars. --Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.