The job of an ethnographer seems to be to call them as she sees them and this is exactly what Beatrice Manz does in this moving and frightening book. The land tenure system she describes in Guatemala is unbelievable to outsiders--the plight of peasants there is comparable to that faced by African-American citizens in the south after the end of Reconstruction. The law was what the landowners said it was and they had state power to back it up. In Guatemala this incuded the police, the army and semi-official paramilitary death squads which were as lawless as the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan but more effective.

The village that Manz studies is incredibly poor. The people of the village decide to set out for the wild northern part of Guatemala where land has been promised. Once there, having borne the hardships of a trek through unimproved jungle they found that their very existence was a threat to the landowning class. Using methods which the U.S. had tried in Vietman (and which were first used years before in Central America by the U.S. trained military) the villagers were rounded up into strategic hamlet type operations with military posts nearby, informers to spy upon them and agent provacateurs to infiltrate their policitical and social organizations.

It is a heartbreaking tale but ultimately uplifting as Manz shows that the human spirit is indominatable. Beautifully written--this may be an academic study but is by no means done in "academic" prose--and well worth reading.