This author has not written his bio yet.
But we are proud to say that Frank Smyth contributed 205 entries already.
An unusual cartoon appeared recently in a Guatemalan newspaper. It showed the small figure of Helen Mack swinging a hammer, chipping away at a towering brick wall that symbolized more than thirty-seven years of military impunity. Helen Mack is leading her family’s investigation of the September 1990 assassination of her sister, Myrna…
The women wore white gúipils embroidered with pastel flowers and a thin brown trim. The men’s pants were of a matching design, cut off below the knee. The people of Santiago de Atitlán –more than 5,000 of them– marched the half mile out of town to the site of the former army garrison. “Here,” said one, “we are planting the peace.”
HER short stature and soft voice were deceiving. Among Guatemala’s highland Indians she was a legend. Among her colleagues in North America and Europe she was a rising academic star. An ethnic Chinese Guatemalan, Myrna Elizabeth Mack Chang had become one of Latin America’s most eminent anthropologists. Her research focused on Guatemala’s nearly 1 million indigenous refugees…
THE signing of a conditional agreement at the United Nations in New York to end El Salvador’s 12-year civil war is irreversible and likely to be respected, longtime activists on both sides of this embittered conflict say. Although there is still fear that violence by ultra-rightist groups opposed to the accords may escalate in the coming months…
Somewhere just outside of Baghdad, I was blindfolded and led down a corridor into a room where, to judge by the sound of the voices, there were at least half a dozen men. The possibility of being beaten or tortured was on my mind. I was ordered to sit, and waited in the darkness. The interrogator asked me what was my “real job.”
GUATEMALA CITY — Myrna Elizabeth Mack Chang was Guatemala’s most respected anthropologist. Her work with the country’s indigenous refugees — displaced by the military’s severe counter-insurgency practices — was internationally renowned. But on September 11, 1990…
NEAR THE BORDERS OF SYRIA, TURKEY AND IRAQ -Small waves broke over the sides of the creaky raft that our Kurdish contacts had lashed together from old inner tubes and scraps of plywood. Though it was only about as wide as a city avenue, the river was high with the spring melt, and the water was the color of coffee…
