Not since Chester Lloyd Jones’s Guatemala, Past and Present (Minneapolis, 1940) has there been a serious history of Central America’s most populous state published in English. True, there have been a few popular histories, which either continued earlier misconceptions and myths or which ground political axes with little regard for accuracy or recent research. But now, Jim Handy, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, has written a new history of Guatemala.
Reflecting his own interests and research, Handy's Gift is by no means a comprehensive history of Guatemala from the conquest to the present. Rather, it briefly covers the pre-1945 period, followed by a more detailed account and interpretation of the last 40 years. The first chapter surveys Guatemala's Indian heritage and Spanish rule. The second chapter describes the first half-century of independence, largely under Conservative rule, and features Rafael Carrera's peasant revolt of 1837. Two more chapters relate the Liberal domination from 1871 to 1944 and the accompanying strong role of the United States, These chapters are drawn from standard sources and offer no startling revelations, although they occasionally include an interesting comment from an obscure source. Unfortunately, at times they also repeat annoying inaccuracies, although the synthesis is generally competent.
The remaining eight chapters give us a superb, sensitive account of modern Guatemala, synthesizing existing research and reflecting some new directions, Referring to the revolutionary decade (1944-54) of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz as the “Ten Years of Spring,” Handy argues that far from being the communist threat as perceived in the United States, the revolution was “decidedly capitalist” (p. 103). According to Handy, Arévalo and Arbenz were “determined to create within Guatemala a modern capitalist economy, breaking down what they perceived to be the lingering remnants of feudalism” (p. 103). The revolution was also nationalistic and democratic, encouraging political organization at the village level and control over the heavy foreign investment in the country.
Given his favorable view of the revolution, it is not surprising that Handy is harsh toward the U.S.-supported overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 and critical of all Guatemalan governments since then. He provides considerable evidence to support his condemnation, but his history is especially valuable for its emphasis on peoples’ institutions in post-1954 Guatemala: labor and peasant organizations, as well as the guerrilla and underground political forces. His sympathetic treatment of these groups explains their durability and continued resistance through a parade of repressive governments. He also does a good job of describing the relationship between Guatemala’s traditional oligarchy and the military, which has come to represent a new oligarchy of its own.
Handy’s Gift will hardly be welcomed by defenders of the old elite or by those who remain committed to the liberal tradition, which has dominated much of Guatemala’s historiography for more than a century. Handy represents, both in his own research and in his synthesis, an essentially Marxist interpretation that emphasizes class struggle and the injustice of the repressive rule of the many by the few. He has written a provocative history of a country where revisionism within its borders has met violent discouragement. Despite some annoying minor inaccuracies; inconsistent and indiscriminate misuse of maternal and paternal surnames (which suggests less than full acquaintance with Spanish genealogical custom); and occasional spelling (or typographical) errors, Handy’s Gift of the Devil makes a positive contribution.
