Politics: Revisionist History

I'm knee-deep in my paper on the Guatemalan civil war (and its aftermath), so I might as well blog about it.

One thing that's always bandied about whenever you talk about Central American history is the United States' involvement during the Cold War. 1954 wasn't exactly our finest hour - a CIA-backed coup in Guatemala overturned a leftist, but democratically-elected government in favor of a military regime more friendly to U.S. interests. We've since apologized, and the really atrocious acts in Guatemala occurred a couple decades later, but it's still regrettable.

The conventional history says that the noble indigenous Mayans, repressed for centuries, allied with the Communist insurgents to fight the tyrannical fascist government during the civil war. I've been reading several books by anthropologist David Stoll, who contends that while the military regimes' actions were indeed vile in the early 1980s, the natives really didn't care about the Communist cause and just wanted to be left the hell alone.

Even Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú tacitly confirmed that this was more true to what really happened, and, if anything, it makes the murder of thousands of Mayans even more atrocious.