Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit
Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983. Virginia Garrard-Burnett. Oxford University Press, 2010.
On March 23, 1982, General Efraín Ríos Montt announced to a perplexed Guatemalan press that God alone gives and takes away political authority, and that Ríos Montt would therefore serve until God alone removed him. And with that claim of divine favor, one of the more peculiar regimes in Central American history came to power.
Ríos Montt might have slipped into history as just another bloody strongman in a bloody era were it not for the spectacle he made of his devout Pentecostal Christian piety projected from – not just practiced within – the role of head of state. And for a leader who lasted not even two years in office and who had less blood on his hands than did his predecessor, Ríos Montt has certainly overachieved as a research subject among scholars of politics and religion.
Past work on Ríos Montt has treated him variously as a case study in the nefarious effects of evangelical Christianity, or of naive zealotry, or of messianic delusions, or some combination thereof, on the upper echelons of government.
Critics both during and after Ríos Montt’s tenure spilled most of their ink exposing and vilifying his links to theological and political comrades in the U.S. The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson at one point even came for a personal visit. Ideologically committed histories of U.S. Cold War activities in Central America, such as Grandin’s (2006) Empire’s Workshop, do a fine job of proving evangelicals’ complicity in the region’s anti-communist iron fists.
These more ideological works, however, show little care for and even less skill with the actual content of Ríos Montt’s beliefs. And as religion has begun to move to the center of political scholarship – and as Latin American studies are making something of a “Pentecostal turn” - the lack of a penetrating, religiously literate study of Ríos Montt has become clear.
And this is where Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s new work is a breath of fresh air. She approaches her subject with the characteristic discipline and clarity that has moved Garrard-Burnett to prominence in her field. She improves existing literature on Ríos Montt by taking that infamous March 23 statement as the beginning of the story, not rather as the whole story.
The text walks a politically neutral path that passes judgment on the violence itself, and suspends judgment of Ríos Montt’s ideology, and – in an even greater trick – the work suspends judgment of his faith. The author points out important historical complexities, such as the genuine respect large segments of the population retained for Ríos Montt long after he left power, and even after accounts of the violence came to light.
While Garrard-Burnett’s book certainly deepens the overall historical record of La Violencia, as those years have come to be known, the book’s real gems are chapters 3, 5, and to a lesser extent chapter 6, all dealing directly with the "religious question" in Ríos Montt's "New Guatemala". Garrard-Burnett worked from Ríos Montt’s nationally broadcast “Sunday Sermons”, where each week he would discuss his vision for a “renewed” – even redeemed – Guatemala populated with sober nuclear families, clean streets and honest citizens.
Existing literature tends to charge Ríos Montt with building his self-styled Christian, New Guatemala at the point of a gun. A spike in Protestant conversions during his tenure seems to support the “holy war” thesis. However, Garrard-Burnett assesses the causal links between Ríos Montt’s Pentecostal Christian faith and the numbing destruction he created, and in the end, she finds that link to be weak. Ultimately, she blames the violence on ideological, not Pentecostal, zeal.
In confirming the jump in Protestant conversions in the La Violencia years, she determines that Guatemalans correctly concluded that membership in a Protestant church could be a kind of survival strategy. But, she says, “it is important not to make too much of this equation…The reasons behind the conversions most certainly had to do with the message of…Pentecostal theology, which promised solace and peace and helped to reorder the lives of people” whose world was ruined by violence (136).
Garrard-Burnett shows that Ríos Montt was not a master puppeteer, but instead was very isolated both inside his regime and internationally. At best, he became an accidental and convenient tool for U.S. evangelicals, even as he became the subject of an internal tug of war within the Reagan administration about how to handle its connection to Ríos Montt’s human-rights disaster.
The book’s moderate tone serves Garrard-Burnett well, allowing her to avoid the “pornography of violence” – what she describes as a kind of wallowing in the gory details - that often afflicts histories of mass violence. It is, of course, not possible to talk about La Violencia without speaking frankly about death. But the author succeeds generally in keeping her accounts of massacres and torture illustrative and not gratuitous.
Garrard-Burnett paints an almost-sympathetic portrait of this genuinely pious and religiously sincere man – a tragic, quixotic figure - who is so often caricatured that true understanding of his motives has thus far remained elusive. She finds that Ríos Montt never fully integrated his faith with his ideology, though he clearly attempted to evangelize his nation from his bully pulpit. Of the General’s bifurcated passions she says:
“Ríos Montt’s particular genius was that he was able to reframe the shopworn objectives of secular nationalism within a new moral and explicitly religious framework…It gave way as soon as the army no longer had need for either it or the General himself” (143).
The primary objection I have to the text is that Garrard-Burnett does not sufficiently explain why Ríos Montt did not unite these passions and whether that was by design or by default. Still, the resulting work is a welcome addition to the growing literature on religion’s influence in politics in Latin America, a field once dominated either by conservative research arms of missionary groups or by the left-intellectual fetishization of liberation theology.
Those of us who believe religion to be a uniquely powerful, tangible, and often-overlooked force in the lives of individuals must still accept that sometimes religion is, in fact, not as causally forceful as expected. In this case, Garrard-Burnett’s conclusion that the influence of Ríos Montt’s faith on La Violencia was perhaps less than meets the eye is not due to academics’ tendency to dismiss religion as meaningless fancy or inherently problematic. Rather, it is simply the worthy conclusion of a disciplined historian.
Richard Potts is the Associate Director of The Media Project.