Available for the first time in English, this document presents the testimonies of the victims of Guatemala's 36 year long war. When Bishop Juan Gerardi, responsible for the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHAG), released this study of human rights abuses in his country on April 24, 1998, he was murdered two days later. The ODHAG has since accused members of the Armed Forces of being responsible for the crime. This is the report of the Recovery of Historic Memory Project of Catholic Church. The 6500 personal testimonies which are the basis of the report were collected by 600 specially trained volunteers, and accounted for over 55,000 victims of the estimated 150,000 dead and disappeared during the conflict. Two thirds of the testimonies were collected in different Mayan languages. Twenty five per cent of the victims were children. Three quarters of all victims were indigenous. 422 massacres are documented. Responsiblity of 79.3 per cent of violence was identified as falling to the Army while the guerrillas account for 9.3 per cent of the violence recounted.

"As a church, we collectively and responsibly assumed the task of breaking the silence that thousands of war victims have kept for years. We opened up the possibility for them to talk, to have their say, to tell their stories of suffering and pain, so they might feel liberated from the burden that has been weighing down on them for so many years."

In this New York Times Notable Book, the Pulitzer Prize–finalist undertakes his own investigation into the murder of a Guatemalan bishop. Named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Economist, and the San Francisco Chronicle Two days after releasing a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some two hundred thousand Guatemalan civilians, Bishop Juan Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in his garage. Gerardi was the country’s leading human rights activist, but the Church quickly realized it could not rely on police investigators or the legal system to solve the crime. Instead, Church leaders formed their own investigative team: a group of secular young men who called themselves Los Intocables—the Untouchables. Author Francisco Goldman spoke to witnesses no other reporter was able to reach, observing firsthand some of the most crucial developments in this sensational case. Documenting the Latin American reality of mara youth gangs and organized crime, The Art of Political Murder tells the incredible true story of Los Intocables and their remarkable fight for justice. “Becoming by turns a little bit Columbo, Jason Bourne and Seymour Hersh, Goldman gives us the anatomy of a crime while opening a window to a misunderstood neighboring country that is flirting with anarchy.” —The New York Times Book Review

Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

Caminar is the story of a boy who joins a small band of guerilla fighters who must decide what being a man during a time of war really means.

Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America. The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.