Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala Essay

During the late 70s and 80s, Guatemala experienced the individual retirework forcet account of Hades as the Guatemalan array conducted a genocidal campaign against the Maya by delegacy of massive violence and terrorism. This campaign was known at front as La Situacion but after the peace accord was signed raze in 1996 the persecuted Maya drug abused a more appropriate terminology and called it as La Violencia. Because of the economic sabotage of sev epochl Guerilla move workforcets, the government was pressure to cleanse Guatemala. Two hundred thousand people, most(prenominal)ly Mayan, were persecuted and murdered and superstar and a half million people from six hundred 20 six villages were put out of place.Victoria Sanford used the ply of oral communication in her throw Buried Secrets Truth and Hu valet de chambres rights in Guatemala by gathering more than four hundred testimonies and interviews from forensic experts, human rights activists, array officers, governme nt officials, guerilla soldiers and survivors that seeks community healing, truth and justice.The book provides genuine situation into the experiences of the survivors as they fight to restore their lives and devastated community and more importantly, it shows how these testimonials became evidence of determination truth and justice for the Mayans in Guatemala. Also, the book gave emphasis on the bleak way of race murder the Guatemalan phalanx carried out. People who agree with the stamp that human rights are anthropologys most important scholarly and policy-making concern would admire Sanfords book.Sanford sympathetically and critically documents and analyzes one of the most inhuman events in Ameri terminate fib, the genocide against the Maya population. She observed the participants with the Guatemalan rhetorical Anthropology Foundation as they disinterred concealed sculpt, which enabled her to execute what she calls as excavation of memories (p.17) by means of collect ing testimonies from survivors. She used her multisided ethnography to argue persuasively the reformation of genocide from a violent intrusion of villages to the massacre of its inhabitants and to continuous experience of aggression. This block of view is carried out from five intertwined chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 in which Sanford explained genocide as a process rather than an event.The first stage is the mobilization of the villages where the army would intrude the villages and accuse its inhabitants as sympathizers of the guerillas, specifically the Guerilla phalanx of the Poor, the Revolutionary Organization of Armed People, the Rebel Armed Forces, and the Guatemalan struggle Party. Villagers are then massacred by the Guatemalan army. At first, only men are murdered but at the end of the reign of terror, children and women result also be slaughtered. The army will further punish the so-called sympathizers by burning all the structures and crops leaving no place for enter tain and source of living. Survivors will then flee to the mountains to hide but the army would follow and hunt them.Who ever theyll see will either be killed or forced to join the army control. The intolerable difficulties that hiding in the mountains brings starvation and diseases would make the survivors surrender to the army. Those who joined the army would be move to model villages. These are army controlled towns which came from the current lands that the Mayas possess. After being set(p) in model villages, the survivors would be brainwashed by the army to carry off whatever sympathy with the guerillas they still have.The final step is the lurking memories of terror the army gave to the survivors. Democracy and justice is taken away from the captives making them more conquerable from emotional stress. Sanford shows that the redefinition of mass killing and the survivors that suffered a long way during that era and told their stories through testimonies could begin the he aling process. At first, this would be simply a psychological help but as one goes on, he john get the sympathy of other people that can help them rebuild their destroyed lands and unsecured futures.The author resists the desire to breakdown the stories of the survivors, but instead, she synthesized them creating a whole picture of violence and inhuman activities. The power of the book is that Sanford did non create the events and the characters. All are real number events experienced by real people. Sanfords gathered testimonies have the power to transform a undercover memory into a public space, where the survivors has the courage to speak. It gets away from the governments negotiation of life-shattering events. (p. 12).Although Sanford saw hope in her field work and analysis, the field of impunity one of her informants raised is a critical concern. The author recounts a alarming experience of a doctor whose patient was murdered while falsehood down on the operating table. With the doctor plastered against wall, three men with guns shot the patient to death. As the doctor said to the author, it is all well-nigh privileges, the protection from punishment of the act itself when those gun shooters did not even wear down masks so as not to be recognized considering that they live in the vicinity is so visible.One of them actually lives on the same track as the doctor, and each time the doctor runs into him, he relives the moments of that murder. He sees that man every single day and the freedom is so great that the receiver does not even droop his head to express fear from justice. (p. 35). In a world where forensic anthropologists receive death threats and increasing outlaw violence fills every published newspaper, a skeptic may ask, is communicate and gathering truth worth the risk just to empower comparability among races?The book demonstrates clearly how the power of testimonies can help transform a land of havoc and wrath into a land of democrac y and peace. run-in became a powerful tool in fighting the advocacy of violence. It was patent on many parts of the book. The Maya, by being able to ascertain their adventurous but somewhat horrific plight, took their persecutors stay authority. Also, language has become a tool for both the political and animal(prenominal) of space for the resistors. Language helped the genocide victims by excavating their graves and giving them enough funerals.But in order for an excavation to be carried out, it should be first decided by the court. If the court decides the approval of an excavation, testimonies are gathered to rate the mass grave and identify the found bodies. The act of excavation, which is aided by the power of testimonies, is then again a part of the healing process. The survivors who set up a petition to the court for the excavation of the bodies of their loved ones is engaged in a political process that was forbidden from them before. In this case, democracy at its lea st essence has become transparent. This shows that at the least, spiritual justice is obtained by those who have been brutally killed and by the relatives and friends of the bodies recovered.In addition to the authors intervention on international human rights by writing more or less the reformation of genocide, she highlights the importance of the Maya survivors as a tool in history for achieving freedom and justice for those who had experience the tyranny of the army. She directly challenges the people, like the Guatemalan army, who tried to discredit her informants testimonies. As in the original story on which it is based, its analysis is of the same racist theoretic foundation that resists political consciousness and free will to the Maya whose perception, being manipulated, means to remove the society, individual memory and organization. (p. 49). By gathering information from the survivors, Sanford shows how anthropologists can aid democratic social projects.Now, though Guate mala failed to combat impunity, peace executing and legislation to improve political awareness and participation, the current administration make progress by taking state responsibilities on some human rights violations that occurred during La Violencia and by supporting human rights internationally. Though the testimonies and the expertise of Sanford in anthropology did not fully helped Guatemala, evidence shows that improvements are being made to this country.The book clearly explores the intersection of memory, history and testimonies as it emphasize that through it, power from language can give the survivors power to work within a larger political system. At the end, the survivors redeemed power by the use of judicial system to attain their long-lost aspiration of truth, justice and democracy and the courts vie a major role for the survivors to regain power. They decided whether to excavate the graves of the victims of genocide, they have trials for the perpetuators of genocid e and most importantly, they helped in uncovering the truth behindhand the long violence that happened.Works CitedVictoria Sanford. (2003). Buried Secrets Truth and homo Rights in Guatemala. Palgrave Macmillian. New York