The Enduring Relevance of Víctor Montejo’s Testimonio: Muerte de una comunidad indígena en Guatemala Thirty Years Later

Between 2015 and 2019 Guatemala’s Ministerio Público, with the International Committee against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) exposed webs of systemic corruption involving prominent members of the private sector and key political actors. There was great popular support in the form of unprecedented public protests for this anti-corruption work, which for many, represented hope for a nation where impunity and injustice would be questioned. Guatemalan anthropologist Alejandra Colom interviewed people who participated in the protests, and their experiences shed light on how the elite closed ranks to silence dissension, using strategies that protesters likened to those employed during Guatemala’s Civil War. This parallel that Colom points to between the moment she analyses and the 1960–1996 war resonates throughout her book, Disidencia y disciplina (2021), and opens a fertile space to revisit Montejo’s Testimonio (1993). I examine how Montejo uses the genre of testimonio to unveil the temporal and spatial depths of the long-standing corruption and impunity that were essential to the machinations of the Civil War and that Colom problematizes in her book. I suggest that this practical continuity implies an ideological continuity that threatens Guatemala’s future because it perpetuates a milieu of impotence that can only ensure more of the same. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .