Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit

I was born in Guatemala at the height of a 36-year civil war, during the short but consequential dictatorship of Efraín Ríos Montt. An outspoken Pentecostal and a former army general, he was tried for genocide even while some – including a number of Christians I know – defended and continue to defend his legacy as an upstanding godly leader. Needless to say, it’s a complicated story, and here Virginia Garrard-Burnett tells it with a degree of nuance that’s so often missing in books like this. Which is not to say her assessment results in a wash; her qualified verdict (like mine) is genocide. Ríos Montt died on Easter, which finally prompted me to crack this one open. This was not a fun book to read, nor did I expect it to be, but it is an important one for grappling with relatively recent Guatemalan history, my own story as an MK, and the intermingling of religion and politics (a case study in what principled pluralism doesn’t look like).