Silence on the Mountain

Daniel Wilkinson is Managing Director, Americas Division at Human Rights Watch.

“Silence on the Mountain has the seductive allure and vivid characters of the finest fiction and the penetration of the most elegant journalism. Mr. Wilkinson’s painstaking work has crucial lessons for our government’s future role not only in Latin America but in the entire world. Above all, his book serves literature’s deepest impulse: to bring forth truth out of silence.”-The 2003 pen/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction citation “This is an extraordinary tale, and an extremely well-told one. Written like a modern explorer’s journal, Silence on the Mountain is the account of Daniel Wilkinson’s self-appointed mission to uncover dark secrets in a shady corner of Guatemala. With humility, humor, honesty . . . he has given us a rare and intimate understanding of how this achingly beautiful country became one of the Western Hemisphere’s most brutalized places.”- Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life “Wilkinson sets out to tell the story of Guatemala’s recently ended thirty-six-year internal war through the secret history of one venerable coffee plantation. The result reads like a novel, narrated by a disarmingly funny, perceptive, deeply humane young American who knows how to wear his courage lightly. You feel as if you are riding with Wilkinson on his beat-up motorcycle up muddy, dangerous jungle trails into the heart of a secretive country just waking up from a long nightmare. . . . A brilliant and important book.”- Francisco Goldman, author of The Long Night of White Chickens "A young human rights lawyer with an eye for detail and the gumption to ride a rickety motorcycle to get to the bottom of a story until now largely untold, Wilkinson has written a book full of grim details about exploitation of coffee pickers, genocidal massacres, and frustrated leftist organizing." - Clifford Krauss (New York Times Book Review) "The author's style is taut and precise, but it is the Guatemalans themselves who speak with the greatest eloquence." (The New Yorker) “Part travelogue, part historical thriller, and part chronicle of self-awakening, the book does indeed resonate with ‘big picture’ subjects such as terrorism, globalization, human rights, and migration.” - Alvis Dunn (Hispanic American Historical Review) "[Silence on the Mountain] document[s] unthinkable horror, insisting as we try to turn away that attention must be paid, that what happened there must never happen again, that the past isn't past at all." - Joanne Omang (Washington Post) "[A] page-turning work of detective nonfiction." - Diana Nelson Jones (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) "[C]ombines the probity of a serious historian with the literary instincts of a crime writer . . . peeling back layers of silence and deceit in ways that are reminiscent of what Marcel OphÜls's film The Sorrow and the Pity did for Vichy France." - Peter Canby (The Nation) "Given the recidivist nature of U.S. policy in Latin America, Wilkinson's book [is] a well-timed reminder of the potentially devastating consequences of our successes." - Alex Stone (Washington Monthly) "Anyone who knows little or nothing about Guatemala can pick up Silence on the Mountain and be reliably filled in. Students of anthropology will appreciate its textual accessibility. Specialists, too, should not be disappointed and will surely admire the commitment and dedication that went into the book's composition." - W. George Lovell (American Anthropologist) "Wilkinson's quest for information takes him from the upper to the lower to the middle classes, through the different tiers of Guatemala's dependent export economy, all the way to your morning latte." - David Stoll (The New Republic)

• I. A House Burned The Owner 3The Student 7The Battlefield 11Exhumation 19II. Ashes Fell Rumor 29Travelogue 32Natural History 42Bildungsroman 48Revelation 56Decree 65III. A Future Was Buried A Dangerous Question 83The Law That Would Change the World 157Betrayal 168Burials 180IV. And They Were the Eruption The Savages 193Sacuhum 199The Guerrillas 217The Politicians 252The Terrorist 307The Defeated 337The Storytellers 350List of Names 361Notes on Sources 362Selected Bibliography 367Acknowledgments 372Index 374