Prologues like this can be rhetorical obstacles to reach the substance of the book they intend to open. Brevity, therefore, is the greatest virtue of such exercises. The reader may skip these pages and come back to them after reading the book or read them now before plunging into the fascinating history that follows. My goals are simply to suggest some general conclusions around the themes of silence, justice, and the truth and to point to connections with other histories beyond Guatemala.

I Ask for Justiceuses judicial and administrative sources to document legal conflicts and their resolution. With the...

When Pedro Coroy shot his wife, Lorenza Pata, in their Santa Cruz Balanya home in 1913, local authorities quickly investigated the incident and prosecuted Coroy. Although the couple would have preferred the episode be forgotten, the thirty-three-year-old, illiteratejornalero(day or wage laborer) Lorenzo Chonay insisted it not be. Convinced the mayor had failed “in his role asjuez de paz” (justice of the peace) by “leaving the crime in impunity,” Chonay hired a scribe to write a letter to the Chimaltenango department judge some eight months later, on February 5, 1914. (A Guatemalan department is comparable to a U.S....

More than any other institution—including schools and the military—courts were where competing views of nation, identity, and citizenship were contested. Although some historians have argued that early twentieth-century courts were illegitimate and anemic,¹ my study indicates otherwise. As one of the few venues that facilitated the integration ofindígenasand poor ladinos particularly by instilling in them the habit of submitting their differences with each other to judgments by duly constituted authorities, courts were crucial for state building.

The courts can be used as an analytical tool to measure the balance of power between people and the state....

On December 3, 1932, authorities in Quetzaltenango discovered a clandestine still that was producing 250 bottles ofaguardientea day in the Administración de Rentas (Treasury Administration) building. Remarkably, this was not the first such offense. Perhaps surmising that such production was best disguised in the entrails of the very institution that was most concerned with stamping it out, other bootleggers had set up shop there, too. Their instincts may have been right; this latest distillery remained hidden in plain sight for more than a month before authorities found “a great quantity” of fermenting sugar “destined for distillation.”¹

In an...

When aregidorcaught Isabel Bajxac “monopolizing” fruit and other goodsen cantidad mayor(wholesale) in the San Martín plaza early on the morning of February 11, 1935, the forty-eight-year-old, illiterate, indigenous vendor claimed she was unaware of the law restricting such sales to the afternoon.¹ A few months later, when theregidorarrested Bajxac for the same crime, he noted that “Bajxac has extensive knowledge [of the prohibition] as she has been punished repeated times now for the same reason.” In her defense, Bajxac told thejuez de pazthat she engaged in these acts because she was “very...

The National Police and other authorities approached infanticide and abortion as crimes against motherhood, reflecting rhetoric elsewhere in Latin America, while highland women put fathers and husbands on trial for these acts. Of the fifteen cases of infanticide and abortion in the department of Chimaltenango from 1900 to 1925,¹ nine of the defendants were males and nine were females; in one case the police had no suspect (appendix 7).² The high rate of male defendants contrasts sharply with other areas of Latin America; in Argentina and Mexico, infanticide generally was committed by women to maintain their jobs or honor.³ Although...

When the “Macheteador de Mujeres” struck in May 1931 (figure 5.1), the police described one of his victims as “a woman of indigenous race, with various grave injuries on the right side of her face and neck, similar to the way the forearms and hands were horribly slashed. It was clear that all the injuries had been caused by a machete.”¹ The nickname and press coverage sensationalized the Macheteador de Mujeres’s exploits, but the criminal record reveals that gender-based violence was not uncommon. When Tomasa Morejón denounced her husband shortly after he repeatedly hit her in the head with a...

To read Guatemalan criminal records from the first half of the twentieth century, one gets the impression that highlanders—indígenasand ladinos alike—were both extremely foul-mouthed and excessively sensitive. Defamation and slander cases consumed an inordinate amount of the municipal legal system’s time, and many such exchanges never made it to the courts. Chimaltenango department authorities too dedicated considerable resources to this litigation. Although they handled only 36 instances of slander (calumnia) between 1900 and 1944, they dealt with 523 insult andinjuria(offense) cases—the seventh most common type of crime during that period (appendix 4). From 1932...

The legal system and particularly criminal litigation reveal much about the governments under which they operated. To encourage the populace to embrace the mantra of order and progress, dictatorial governments in Guatemala engendered a desire for order by creating threats of disorder. Decrying and criminalizing the methods and in some cases even the very existence of certain indigenous livelihoods did just that. As the twentieth century progressed, the state increasingly deployed criminology, biomedicine, and other modern “sciences” to embolden its position. Convinced thatindioswere susceptible to and propagators of disease because they lacked hygiene, for example, authorities used modern...