Secrecy in Guatemala's Rebel Armed Forces (FAR)

I recently finished Silvia Posocco's Secrecy and INSURGENCY: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala (2014). If you'd like to get a sense of what war was like for guerrilla combatants in the Peten, this should work.

Secrecy and Insurgency deals with the experiences of guerrilla combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) in the aftermath of the peace accords signed in December 1996 between the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents.

Drawing on a broad field of contemporary theory, Silvia Posocco’s Secrecy and Insurgency presents a vivid ethnographic account of secrecy as both sociality and a set of knowledge practices. Informed by multi-sited anthropological fieldwork among displaced communities with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the book traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations, unraveling the gendered dimensions of guerrilla socialities and subjectivities in a local context marked by violence and rapid social change.

The chapters chart shifting regimes of governance in the northern departamento of Petén; the inception of violence and insurgency; guerrilla practices of naming and secret relations; moral orders based on sameness and sharing; and forms of relatedness, embodiment, and subjectivity among the combatants. The volume develops new critical idioms for grappling with partiality, perspective, and incompleteness in ethnography and contributes to new thinking on the anthropology of Guatemala.

While some of the interview material is quite interesting, the book probably won't be that useful for armchair students of Guatemala. The theoretical material is pretty dense and is spread throughout the entire text (You can't just skip chapter 2). However for those academics looking to better appreciate the complexity of the war in the Peten from some combatants' perspectives (and elsewhere in Guatemala?) this does pretty well. Even more so because it covers the FAR (rather than the EGP, ORPA, and PGT) and the Peten (rather than the Western Highlands, including El Quiche, San Marcos, and Huehuetenango).

Secrecy was a necessity of guerrilla life. Combatants and supporters could not tell family members of their involvement in the guerrilla out of fear. Noncombatant supporters often had little knowledge of the identities and experiences of combatants and vice versa. The rank and file often had no idea what the mid-level and commanders were thinking and doing.

Secrecy might have been a necessity of the war but I can't help but imagine how difficult it made the transition to political party and postwar political life.