Coming to terms with Guatemala’s dark underside is a challenge to the detached scholar as much as to the feeling human being in all of us. Areas of great natural beauty and colorful native tradition coexist with the grimmest of social and economic realities. To grasp such contradictions, writers sometimes employ paradoxical or oxymoronic constructions. In the seventeenth century, for example, Dominican friar Thomas Gage described the country as “seated in the midst of a paradise on the one side, and a Hell on the other,” while recently geographer W. George Lovell has written of “a beauty that hurts.” As his title suggests, historian J. T. Way is himself given to ironic expression. Evoking such oppositions as “the modern anti- modern,” Way has produced a history of twentieth- century Guatemala in which the central irony is the assertion that the more capitalist development succeeds, the more it fails.
Insisting that...
