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.