Memory of Silence The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report

Memory of Silence is an edited english language version of the Guatemalan Commision for Historical Clarification (CEH). CEH was one of the more important and successful truth commissions, exposing the details of "la violenca" during which hundreds of massacres were committed during a scorched earth campaign that displaced approx. one million people, a tenth of the population of Guatemala. Rothenberg received a grant from the Open Society to fund translation of the report and a legal team to oversee the editing and translation process. The final book will be stylistically formal but by no means unreadable, Rothenberg will be condensing this from hundreds of pages to about 200 pp which will allow him to be selective about the material he includes and will be editing out the UN style paragraphs which will should give the book a narrative feel. It will include a preface by either Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for indigenous activist work, or Kofi Annan, a forward by the Commissioner of the CEH, intro. by Rothenberg, and a conclusion by Michael Ignatieff.

Daniel Rothenberg is currently a Senior Fellow at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School and a Fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.

* Preface *Foreword * Introduction * Ten chapters composed of translated excerpts from the original CEH twelve volume report * Conclusion