The Blood of Guatemala

"Guatemala is often overlooked. It is part of the Aztec-Maya nexus and the site of a very bitter civil war from the 1970s to the 1990s. It has this very significant indigenous population which is split into different peoples. This is a book which is both quite radical in its vision and iconoclastic. It begins with the simplistic idea that the civil war, and indeed the period beforehand, which was marked by a high degree of US intervention, was simply the result of white settlers on indigenous people, who were pretty much of a muchness in that they didn’t have any internal divisions. They didn’t have any social divisions or hierarchy. Grandin is studying the community of Quetzaltenango and the indigenous Kekchi people. The story that he tells is told in quite technical terms, in that he goes back to the censuses and looks to see how caste and gender come in. He explores how the internal economy was really quite differentiated. And at the same time he has elements in his book similar to those of Lauren Derby on Trujillo. He relies a lot on photographs. The book is well illustrated, and he takes a general narrative over two and a half centuries as well as taking freeze frames. He looks, for example, at cholera epidemics of certain times when you have got far greater documentary evidence than for most ordinary periods. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He develops a picture which is very nuanced and shows also, as Derby does, that you don’t need to shoot people down or drive them with whips in order to make them do things they don’t want to do. And very often you don’t need to do that across racial lines. You can get people from a different racial group to do it for you. A lot of people steer clear of Guatemala because it is both so stark and so complicated, but if I were to recommend one book it would be this one because Grandin knows the country exceptionally well, writes very clearly and he understands he is writing something that is a little counter-intuitive – in that much power was socially determined outside military conflict – so he has to take time to take the reader with him and he does that admirably well."