Abstract

Why They Fight

This article presents information on several books. The books included in the article are "Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy," by Victor Perera and "Between Two Armies: In the Ixil Towns of Guatemala," by David Stoll. The war that swept over Guatemala beginning in the late 1970s is in many ways the least understood of all the Central American conflicts. Some 65,000 people were killed and, in a nation of 10 million, perhaps a million and a half were displaced. The core of Perera's book consists of extended studies of four regions--the Ixil Triangle, Huehuetenango, Santiago Atitlán and the Petén--where most of the violence took place. Stoll's book is both narrower in focus and more academic than Perera's, but Stoll, the author of a previous study of the rise of Protestantism in Latin America, writes clearly and with a refreshingly skeptical intelligence. Stoll began his study of the Ixil in 1988, at a time when the worst of the violence was over,