Saldando cuentas. Guatemala, el fin y los fines de la guerra

Diane M. Nelson, 2022 Ediciones del Pensativo, Antigua Guatemala, 471 pp.

The book Saldando cuentas. Guatemala, el fin y los fines de la guerra by Diane M. Nelson (†) takes us to the "postwar" moment in Guatemala. When does the war end, when does the postwar period begin? Nelson does not offer us a fixed answer because it is impossible to "untangle" the war from the peace when she writes this book in its first edition. However, throughout the text, she proposes a way of understanding this period characterized by its ambivalence and complexity.

Of course, the end of the war is associated with the coming to power of the first civilian government in 1985, the Peace Accords signed in 1996 and, above all, the processes of investigation of human rights abuses and the two reports published: the Report of the Interdiocesan Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory, Guatemala: never again (1998), and that of the Historical Clarification Commission, Guatemala: memory of silence (1999). To read this book, we have to go back to 2009, when it was published in its original version in English under the name of Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemalapublished by Duke University Press. Today, it is Ediciones del Pensativo, based in Antigua Guatemala, that brings us this rich translation to Latin America.

By the time Diane published this book, the governments of Alfonso Portillo of the Guatemalan Republican Front party (frg), of Óscar Berger of the Grand National Alliance (win) and Álvaro Colom had just entered with the National Unity of Hope (une). There was also a dialogue on multiculturalism and the specific rights of indigenous peoples (prior consultation and self-determination through the strengthening of ancestral authorities). It was the great moment of the National Reparations Program that tried to settle the accounts of the past with its public policy of transitional justice. It was also the time of the Plan Puebla Panama (ppp), the Mano Dura policies against gangs, the extrajudicial executions carried out by the national civil police, as well as the incessant news of lynchings in Guatemala City and other municipalities in the country. When Nelson wrote ReckoningIt was these events - and many more - that make up the book and the period commonly referred to as the post-war period.

The book has nine chapters that delve into different aspects of his main argument with a thorough description of his ethnography. His methods are varied and very creative. It is based on participant observation, field notes, life histories and film analysis (especially horror films), and is located mainly in Joyabaj, Zacualpa and Guatemala City. His writing engages the reader and questions his position as a social scientist committed to social struggles.

I order this review in three sections that in my opinion are the cross-cutting arguments and concepts of the book: the pervasive deception in the war and postwar period; the story of the "two faces" and the identification process; and the "Postwar-in-action" theory.

Deception: survivals, de-possessions

How did the war operate? Nelson begins his analysis by exploring the concept of deception. Through deceit, suspicion, secrecy, secrets, betrayal, the war in Guatemala was waged. People "slobbered" on other people, we felt slobbered when we knew that someone was on this or that side. The deceit and all the mechanisms of the war were impregnated in the subjectivities and social relations; from the individual/personal level (for example, he tells us how the indigenous peasant recruited by the army to form the paramilitary groups, the Civil Self-Defense Patrols, felt deceived) to the most structural level (as when one of the interviewees repeats that the State deceives us and that we can only claim justice from God). Deceiving and being deceived was a way to survive the violence and is currently the way to navigate life in the face of the fraud of democracy and neoliberalism. In the end, what remains in the post-war period is distrust and dispossession.

Nelson speaks of "possession" and "dispossession" in various senses, drawing on her interviews. She observed that when former vigilantes commented on their participation in the paramilitary groups, they spoke of themselves as if they had been "possessed" by an outside force. It was not they who were patrolling, it was some other strange and foreign entity. This dispossession was also present in the ideologies of the people who chose the path of guerrilla struggle. These people took up arms against "dispossession by accumulation" (referring to David Harvey's concept).1 In addition, it also brings up the fact that the Maya movement constantly reminds us that deception comes not only from war, but also from invasion and its violence, rape and genocide. The concepts of possession and dispossession are central to the understanding of the agenciamientos (and its counterpart, such as what he tells us about the patrol boat possessed by external forces) during the war.

Clandestinity protected life during the war, but it also nurtured deception and illness. It is another form of dispossession that is lived through bodies, expressed in depression and so many other anxieties. Mayan women teach us today that healing can come through more bodily and affective methods. "Memory appears after the blow," Nelson (2022: 168) tells us. We process and transform the blow; memory is necessary for mental health, it is political and creates subjectivities and identifications.

What deception produces, and that is installed in the heart of societies and communities, is that we see someone's face, but behind that face someone else may be hiding, is what Nelson develops in the book as a story of "Two faces".

The "two-faced" story: dualities and identifications

This is the second concept developed throughout the book. Nelson tells us a permanent story of identifications. She understands these identifications as "two faces": the "two faces" of people, of organizations, of state institutions; everything is traversed by a double face, of one face that we see and another that is hidden, behind the public stage.

It exemplifies these double faces through life stories and situational analysis. It refers to the life stories of publicly known individuals: anthropologist Myrna Mack; rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum; critical politician Édgar Gutiérrez; and the stories of people from the Joyabaj and Zacualpa communities. These life trajectories, which can sometimes seem dichotomous, contradictory and even misleading, show much more complexity. For example, he tells us how Edgar Gutierrez, who was the "young promise of the left," led the team for the aforementioned report of the rehmithen became a civil servant for the government of the frg of Alfonso Portillo and Efraín Ríos Montt, and signed the law creating the famous International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (cicig), seems to be a shady character who deceived the leftist movement by having worked with the frg. However, by digging into subjectivities and identifications, its history reveals how these "two faces" present at every moment in the post-war period function.

From psychoanalysis and the sociology of Émile Durkheim, Nelson offers us an interpretation of this identification process, made up of three parts:

[...] you live post-factothrough a "birth of consciousness". What has been familiar becomes strange, what had been personally established as true, as just the way the world works, becomes a false identity, which in turn makes way for what is apparently perceived as a more authentic sense of self, which may be the possibility of political action (2022: 96).

In this process there are three ways of understanding identity and their order is important (p. 90):

• Identity starts from what Nelson calls "the assumption". Put another way, that's the way things are and the world as I learned to know it.
• In the second moment, the identity is "assumed": that's how I understood things until something happened that made me realize that I had been deceived..
• It gives way to the third moment, identity from "the true self": now that I know and make sense of what happened and happens, I feel more authentic, awakened and transformed into a subject.. Here she takes up the work of Judith Butler.
• And so on with each transcendental moment.

Identity processes in war and postwar are neither dual nor simple nor linear, Nelson tells us. She invites us to "think" about the in-between-mediums. These processes are marked by many emotions and interests. In these war and postwar contexts, identification often originates in trauma, in feeling let down, in feeling ignorant and deceived. Therefore, identities cannot be reduced to prototypes as currently proposed in order to better read otherness and which is embodied in legal frameworks and public policies. I refer here directly to the international law of indigenous peoples or to the policies of compensation to former members of the Civil Self-Defense Patrols: if a person or a collective responds to defined criteria of identity, it is easier to enter the prototype and thus receive this or that service. Nelson also reminds us that "solidarity needs the binary history in order to act" (2022: 221).

Identities are built and constituted by relationships, which are always asymmetrical power relationships, by interests that motivate to understand each other and the world in such ways. All this works (or does not work or works halfway) in networks, in gears, in assemblages, from the most local to the most global. Here I connect with the third central concept of the book, in which Nelson offers a theory of the postwar period.

A theory of "postwar-in-action": assemblages and settling scores

Nelson calls it the "postwar-in-action" to make direct reference to the work of Bruno Latour, who writes based on actor-network theory and who in turn draws on Gilles Deleuze's proposals on rhizomes and postmodern philosophy. The "postwar-in-action" is an assemblage of nodes and networks that tries to "articulate or simultaneously make sense and make connections" (2022: 431). It is a laboratory, a battlefield for giving meanings and for wanting to know and knowing: whether the war was to install conditions to improve life, whether it was a "race" or "class" war, who was deceived and who was not, who was possessed and who was not, who pretends to know and know, who pretends to know and know? It is a battlefield between the faces of repression and violence, as well as between the faces of recognition and what we are led to believe and what we believe happened.

The post-war-in-action scenario takes place in what Mike Davis calls the "ecology of fear" (2022: 325), in which terror tactics continue to prevail in a global "counterinsurgent hermeneutic". The actors continue to be the army, the oligarchies, the different state institutions, the criminal groups: Illegal Corps and Clandestine Security Apparatuses (ciacs). Now there are also the ngoThe International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (cicig), there is the International Monetary Fund and so many other institutions of geopolitics and globalized economy. There is academia itself and the universities. The dynamics within this assemblage are many: lynchings, exhumations, reparations, delinquency, neoliberalism, drug trafficking, servitude, migration and remittances, dialogue tables, etcetera. All are marked by the identities of race, class, gender; by colonialism and counterinsurgency. Nelson tells us that all of these have their "Two faces", hidden agendas, managed by funding and cooperation agencies. "They keep drooling on us and we keep drooling on other people.", as they say colloquially in Guatemala. The conspiracy is implicit.

What all this assembly brings together are promises of transparency, of balance, of "settling accounts" of the past and the present. What is "settling accounts"? It is an accounting exercise, an audit; it is the numerical act of counting. In the post-war period, we try to count the losses, to give value to those losses. But when there is war and genocide, it is impossible to count the losses; the dispossession is immeasurable. And the Mayan movements have reminded us that, in the face of 500 years of colonialism, dispossession is inherently immeasurable. But Nelson writes that counting is more than the numeric fact. When we count we also narrate and make procedures visible. And it is here that the author finds the hope that lies in postwar-in-action: "[transnational] networks are a union of force that can translate a range of interests to make certain numbers 'count' and thus make a cause more powerful" (2022: 413).

In conclusion, this book reminds us that what has been taught in more traditional anthropology about the formative processes of identification and subjectivation is more complicated than it seems. In war and post-war contexts, identities and subject formations are intimately marked by shocks and interests that produce consciousness, mobilization and agency. The author invites us to go beyond the assumed and to observe what lies in between. This is an anthropology of emotions applied to studies of the political fact. This book is a solid example, in Spanish, of what has been called in the U.S. the Affect Theory (a theory of affects), which consists of studying emotions and what they can produce in terms of social interactions and experiences of inhabiting the world. Finally, as Nelson writes: "This book explores the experiences of possession, duplicity, and the hope of knowing, which are part of the everyday lives of Guatemalans." (2022: 88). Indeed, this book sheds light on this hope of understanding ourselves, not only in Guatemala, but in any territory that has shared similar conditions to those addressed here.

Bibliography

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (1999). Guatemala: Memoria del silencio. Guatemala: ceh.

Nelson, Diane M. (2009). Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. Durham: Duke University Press.

— (2022). Saldando cuentas. Guatemala, el fin y los fines de la guerra. Antigua Guatemala: Ediciones del Pensativo.

Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (1998). Guatemala: nunca más. Informe del Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica. Guatemala: odhag.

Ana Braconnier De León is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the ciesas Mexico City. She is a fellow of the research project "PluriLand: Theorizing Conflict and Contestation in Plural Land Rights Regimes" directed by Dr. Rachel Sieder. Ana holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a MA and BA in Political Science from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (2009). She works on issues of judicial politics, power networks in colonial-extractive contexts and indigenous peoples' rights using qualitative and ethnographic methods. She is a member of the interdisciplinary group of Empirical Studies of Law, sponsored by the Institute of Legal Research of the University of Chile (2009). unam. She has been a professor at the Faculty of Political Science at the Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala and has collaborated with civil society organizations in consulting on issues of transitional justice and legal pluralism in the Guatemalan judiciary.