Available for the first time in English, this document presents the testimonies of the victims of Guatemala's 36 year long war. When Bishop Juan Gerardi, responsible for the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHAG), released this study of human rights abuses in his country on April 24, 1998, he was murdered two days later. The ODHAG has since accused members of the Armed Forces of being responsible for the crime. This is the report of the Recovery of Historic Memory Project of Catholic Church. The 6500 personal testimonies which are the basis of the report were collected by 600 specially trained volunteers, and accounted for over 55,000 victims of the estimated 150,000 dead and disappeared during the conflict. Two thirds of the testimonies were collected in different Mayan languages. Twenty five per cent of the victims were children. Three quarters of all victims were indigenous. 422 massacres are documented. Responsiblity of 79.3 per cent of violence was identified as falling to the Army while the guerrillas account for 9.3 per cent of the violence recounted.

Francisco Goldman's widely-acclaimed retelling of the Bishop Gerardi murder case, now reissued with a new epilogue marking the release of George Clooney's production of the HBO documentary film based on Goldman's account. Known in Guatemala as "The Crime of the Century," the Bishop Gerardi murder case, with its unexpectedly outlandish scenarios and sensational developments, confounded observers and generated extraordinary controversy. When it was first published, The Art of Political Murder exposed a cover-up of the crime and helped change Guatemala's destiny as it emerged from decades of civil war. In the years since, major players in the case have been imprisoned, including the president of Guatemala, and one of the key suspects was murdered while in prison, along with thirteen others. Now reissued with a new epilogue to account for these recent events and their far-reaching repercussions, this is an unmissable new edition of this "extremely important book." (Salman Rushdie).

Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

This study exposes the support that administrations in Washington have given right-wing dictatorships that committed terrorism especially during the cold war and war on terrorism. It rejects the narrow definition of terrorism insisted on by Washington that exempts terrorism committed by governments (state terrorism) from the definition, and for political reasons restricts the term solely to the private terrorism committed by private individuals or non-governmental organizations. Every one of the six truth commission reports used in the studyone each for El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa and two with remarkably similar conclusions for Guatemala-- found that the governments were responsible for the great preponderance of terrorism and other acts of repression that occurred in their respective countries, much more so than the guerrillas. [publisher web site].

Caminar is the story of a boy who joins a small band of guerilla fighters who must decide what being a man during a time of war really means.

Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.

This ethnohistory examines how the Guatemalan gangs that emerged from the country's strong populist movement in the 1980s had become perpetrators of nihilist violence by the early 2000s.