Description
Guatemala is a society of fear. Even as events in Chile have outraged international opinion, the widespread political violence in Guatemala has gone unnoticed. Over the last ten years there have been an estimated 20,000 political killings, a death toll as high as that inflicted by the savage earthquake which struck the country in 1976. Folks that protest against the country’s unjust social and economic system and take a stand against the government and land-owning elite simply “disappear” or their bodies are found horribly mutilated, the sufferers of right-wing death squads whose activities are officially condoned.
Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster looks at the back of the immediate effects of the earthquake to the nature of the sociey which was once struck by it. It documents the violations of human rights and analyzes the grossly inegalitarian structures of Guatemalan society which have given rise to such violence, dealing with the repression of the trade union and peasant movements. The report also critically examines current initiatives to link foreign aid with human rights issues and looks on the questions to be faced if international pressure is to have any effect on one of the crucial repressive countries in recent Latin The united states.