Terror in the land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983

Between 1982 and 1983, the military government of Guatemala waged a scorched-earth campaign of terror against largely Mayan rural communities. Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides a fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efraín Ríos Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even families.