Manuel Galich rose to political prominence during the decade of the Guatemalan revolution. He served for a time as secretary general of the Frente Popular Libertador and ultimately held the post of Foreign Minister under Jacobo Arbenz. Galich’s earlier works, Del pánico al ataque (Guatemala, 1949) and Por qué lucha Guatemala: Arévalo y Arbenz: dos hombres contra un imperio (Buenos Aires, 1956), depicted the forces responsible for the overthrow of Jorge Ubico and offered a defense of the subsequent revolutionary governments. With the present volume, however, Galich makes no further contribution to knowledge concerning Guatemala. In fact, a moment’s reflection on the bibliographic information given above should enable the reader to form his own judgment concerning the value of this survey. As a consequence of brevity and bias, the work contains little that will interest the specialist and much that will mislead the beginning student.
Throughout the volume Galich pursues the thesis that Guatemalan affairs have been controlled by foreign interests to such a degree that the book might have been better titled, “The Dominance of the United States over Guatemala.” The first five chapters present an overview of Guatemala’s geography, society, economy, government, and culture. While these chapters contain the basic data familiar to students of the area, they also serve the author’s didactic purposes, for he asserts that the program of Central American economic integration is designed primarily for the benefit of United States investors (p. 18), that the government of Mario Mendez Montenegro is on a par with that of ex-dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera (p. 24), and that the Kennedy administration was responsible for the overthrow of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes (p. 31). The balance of the work is concerned with the historical development of the nation. Individual chapters deal with the pre-Columbian civilization, the conquest, independence, the nineteenth century, the era of “imperialistic Pan Americanism” (1885-1954), and the post-revolutionary period. The absence of a chapter devoted to the 1944-1954 revolution is rather surprising, and the decision to restrict discussion of the conquest, independence, and “imperialistic Pan Americanism” to chronological summaries is difficult to understand. Galich ’s observations concerning the demagoguery involved in the Belize issue, the failure of meaningful land reform, and the role of the United States in the events of 1954 are sound. It is unfortunate that these are obscured by his effort to attribute all of Guatemala’s ills to external causes.