Throughout the 1980s, as Guatemala was experiencing the worst years of its long and ghastly civil war, few foreign photographers, writers or journalists chose to make this country their home. And with good reason. The nation was terrorized by an ongoing conflict and a brutal, repressive regime that unleashed upon its citizenry some of the most heinous state enforced madness of the 20th Century.
Jean-Marie Simon was one of those very few journalists who chose to live here, and in 1987 she published, Guatemala: Eternal Spring / Eternal Tyranny (W.W. Norton & Co.) The book is a moving and enigmatic presentation, often in the form of short vignettes of text and image that give the reader the sensation that the war, itself, is growing around them from a thousand different points in time and space. Reading this book is as important to understanding the Guatemala Civil War as reading The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman is to understanding how its howling still echoes down canyons of impunity to this very day.
In June of this… »
RSS Feed for the La Cuadra Magazine