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 enlarge | Author: Francisco Goldman
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $8.93
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 36378
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0802143857
Dewey Decimal Number: 972
EAN: 9780802143853
ASIN: 0802143857
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
 This book doesn't deserve all the rave reviews February 18, 2008
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
This book is is quite a disappointment. The case's most perplexing aspects are 1) Bishop Gerardi's own assistant, Father Mario Orantes, is serving a twenty-year sentence for complicity in his murder, and 2) greeting investigators at the murder scene was a young woman who proved to be the daughter of another Catholic bishop and the ringleader of a homicidal youth gang.
Frank Goldman's first reporting on the case, in the March 15, 1999 New Yorker, did justice to these conundrums. But his book does not, because he is above all concerned to trash the book from which he borrows his subtitle. Quien mato al obispo? Autopsia de un crimen politico (2003, Planeta Mexicana) has never been published in English and probably never will, for the simple reason that it flouts the comfortable leftwing pieties that govern most English-language publishing on Latin America.
The authors of the original Who Killed the Bishop?, El Pais correspondent Maite Rico and Le Monde correspondent Bertrand de la Grange, attended the entire trial of Bishop Gerardi's alleged killers, not just part of it like Goldman. They conclude that prosecutors were duped into fingering three army fall-guys who had nothing to do with the assassination. Rico and de la Grange argue that the true assassins were 1) a gang of colonial church art-looters, led by the afore-mentioned bishop's daughter, who were set up for the crime by 2) a clandestine army network seeking to discredit President Alvaro Arzu (1996-2000), who had alienated army hardliners by signing a peace deal with the Guatemalan guerrillas. Contrary to Goldman, Rico and de la Grange do not exonerate the Guatemalan army-they blame a different faction of the army than Goldman does. The faction whom Goldman does not blame is the one that returned to power in 2000 and wrecked the 1996 peace reforms once and for all.
The most astonishing weakness of Goldman's book is that he treats the Guatemalan officer corps as a monolith, when in actuality it is ridden by murderous factionalism. Goldman also fails to address some of Rico and De la Grange's most damaging evidence that the prosecutors made a huge mistake. Of all the reviewers who have showered Goldman with praise, just one (Ilan Stavans in the San Francisco Chronicle) shows any awareness of the earlier book about the Gerardi murder.
 a compelling read February 12, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
As a former human rights worker in Guatemala (I left a few months before Archbishop Gerardi was killed), I thoroughly enjoyed this book. However, I don't think you need to have had prior experience with Guatemala to understand it. Goldman's narrative style, his first-person contact with members of ODHA and the prosecutors in the court case, as well as the compelling subject matter, make it a fascinating experience for any reader.
I found the determination of ODHA to continue to pursue the case despite death threats, negative press, and other personal costs inspiring. It seems that a few readers here regard Goldman's focus on the ODHA team as a reason to doubt the integrity of this book. Perhaps it's a sad sign of how little has changed when human rights work is somehow seen as suspect or agenda-laden. In Guatemala, where impunity has reigned supreme for decades, accounts of justice in the courts for human rights perpetrators are extremely rare. Although justice was limited in the Gerardi case (several, if not many, of the perpetrators walk free), what was acheived was enormous given Guatemala's history. Overall, a story well worth telling and Goldman does an excellent job doing so.
 We have met the enemy and they is us January 28, 2008
6 out of 16 found this review helpful
Yet another book that demonstrates that the United States is constantly at war with itself. This time in Guatemala:
"An especially troubling paradox of that time was that while the Alliance for Progress program sponsored by President Kennedy sought ways to identify and support young moderate democratic reformers in Guatemala--even, in the 1960's, bringing them to the United States to study--Guatemalan security forces and death squads, backed by the United States, murdered those same reformers after they returned and began to practice what they had learned. By the 1970's, two-thirds of the people who'd been sent to study in the United States had been killed."
Even today, we send our doctors without borders to replace the many Guatemalan doctors murdered by the CIA-backed death squads when they attempted to provide medicine to the indigenous Mayans.
(Kind of reminds one of Iraq, don't it.)
While this is a story that must be told and has been (rather well) by Naomi Klein in "The Shock Doctrine," Francisco Goldman is not the one to tell it. His opaque prose meanders hither and thither, following one character after another, never quite alighting, discouraging even the already converted reader.
Politics in Guatemala January 26, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Frank Goldman's book, The Art of Political Murder is a well researched and absorbing tale of the murder of Bishop Gerardi. The murder took place in Aril 1998 two days after he released his report that found the Guatemalan Army primarily responsible for the war deaths of over 200,000 civilians. Since the murder a courageous group of human rights workers have dedicated themselves, in spite of the risks against their lives, to get to the truth behind the murder. What stands out so vividly is that the perpetrators of the murder had planned and carried it out as if this was their right as the power brokers of Guatemala. There is a photo in the book that shows Colonel Lima Estrada as he is being tried for the murder, sitting in the court pointing his hands as if they are guns at one of the prosecuting lawyers. His gesture is a chilling image that speaks to the difficulty of establishing the Rule of Law in Guatemala. This book is an important view of the strggle for justice in Central America The New York Times placed it on its list o the 100 Best Books of 2007. I totally agree with this choice.
An Excellent Account January 23, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Although there may be some who try to discredit Goldman and his undeniable dicoveries of the Guatemalan Army and government's role in the death Bishop Gerardi and subsequent cover-up, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Guatemalan history and political climate knows what they (the government and Army) are capable of. Goldman weaves a tight tale that, while providing good insight on the civil war and its major players, shows how a man of such high profile as Girardi, a man that no one thought possible of being killed was beaten to death for trying to tell the truth about the country's direct role in the genocide of more than 200,000 indigenous Mayan. As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala, that has family in Guatemala and as someone who frequently travels there, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about a remarkable country that's stunning beauty and (mostly) kind citizens are too often defined by the tragically surreal moments in its history such as this one.
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