The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman
A young Guatemalan orphan, Flor de Mayo Puac, is sent to a suburban Boston family as a maid. They decide to adopt her and send her to school, and she becomes a big sister to the son, Roger (Rogerio) Graetz, who is the novel’s narrator. Roger – like Goldman himself – has a Jewish-American father and a Guatemalan mother.
Clever, beautiful Flor eventually attends Massachusetts’ prestigious Wellesley College. After graduation, she returns to run an orphanage in Guatemala, where she is murdered. She is accused of running an adoption racket, selling Guatemalan orphans – children of people killed by the military – to rich Americans.
Roger and his Guatemalan school friend Luis Moya Martinez, now a newspaper columnist – who both loved the enigmatic Flor – embark on a quest to find out who killed her and why. But they’re on dangerous ground as they delve into her life and loves.
Goldman vividly captures the edgy Guatemala of the 1980s, as a bloody civil war rages and death squads operate with impunity.
The novel melds personal with political as it segues from coming-of-age tale into whodunnit, history lesson, love story and more. It’s an impressive first book.
Goldman covered the Central American wars as a journalist in the 1980s.
The President by Miguel Angel Ásturias, translated by Frances Partridge
This political satire is an impassioned condemnation of tyranny. Asturias conjures up the nightmarish and paranoid world of a totalitarian regime – a system driven by cruelty, cronyism and corruption.
The ruthless president surrounds himself with sycophants and has secret police do his dirty work. His basic tenet is “never to give grounds for hope, and everyone must be kicked and beaten until they realise the fact”.
When an army colonel is murdered by a deranged beggar, the president sees an opportunity to manipulate the situation and liquidate his perceived enemies. He tasks his favourite henchman, Miguel Angel Face – “as beautiful and as wicked as Satan” – with setting a trap for a rebellious general.
But Angel Face betrays his benefactor, abducts the general’s beautiful daughter, and promptly falls in love with her. Tragedy inevitably follows, and reality overlaps with surreality as the regime’s arbitrariness and abuse of power are starkly revealed.
Although the story takes place in an unnamed Latin American country, it is generally taken to be Guatemala in the early 20th century.
The Guatemalan novelist was a pioneer of both magic realism and the Latin American sub-genre of the dictator novel. He based The President on Manuel Estrada Cabreras, who ruled from 1898 to 1920.
Ásturias, who also enjoyed a diplomatic career, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1967. He died in 1974.
Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal and Forgetting in Guatemala by Daniel Wilkinson
On a research visit to Guatemala in 1993, Wilkinson decides to investigate the torching by guerrillas of the landowner’s house on a coffee plantation a decade earlier. His inquiries lead him into the country’s tortured recent history.
As he unravels the mystery of events on La Patria plantation, in Guatemala’s western highlands, Wilkinson also tells the broader tale of the 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.
In 1952, the democratically elected Arbenz government instituted land reform to alleviate the misery of displaced indigenous people and coffee workers. It prompted a CIA-engineered “anti-communist” coup just two years later, heralding Guatemala’s long descent into darkness under murderous military regimes.
The ensuing civil war left 200,000 dead – more than 90% killed or “disappeared” by the security forces.
Wilkinson focuses on those most affected by the violence. Over many years and visits, he peels away the layers of terror-induced silence and forgetting, and lets people tell their stories – heartbreaking accounts of brutalisation, betrayals and massacres.
Ultimately, the most deafening silence is Washington’s, during its decades-long support for some of the worst human rights violators in the Americas.
Wilkinson’s eye for detail, doggedness and storytelling skills make his book both engaging and enlightening.
The New York-based author, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch, served on Guatemala’s post-conflict truth commission in the 1990s.
