Does anybody know any good books about Guatemala? There's a couple I've been looking at but I still feel like I'm missing a lot of meat. It can be about any period (what I know about the most rn is the genocide - wouldn't mind learning more about Arbenz, the Banana Fruit or the independence either).
I guess most of all I'm asking here and not just googling because I want good, preferably even Marxist books and not just any lib shit. There's probably only one or two people who can help me if anyone but... I'm very open to recs.
Shattered Hope by Piero Gleijeses is my favourite account of the "Ten Years of Spring" (i.e. Arévalo and Arbenz governments).
Bitter Fruit by Schlesinger and Kinzer looks at the same period, but is more focused on the United Fruit Company.
I, Rigoberta Menchú is an autobiography by an indigenous activist on the Ixil genocide.
The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman touches on impunity and corruption immediately following the peace accords.
Power in the Isthmus by James Dunkerley is a bit hard to get and quite academic, but it covers state formation, the dissolution of the United Provinces of Central America (RIP), all the way up to the 1980s.
On the fiction side, El Señor Presidente by Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias (who won the Lenin Peace Prize) was one of the first examples of magical realism, and discusses how dictatorships impact everyday society.
Thank you so much! I got the first two you mention, and I'd already acquired Menchú's and Asturias' before (the only one I've read so far is El Señor Presidente... I really loved it).
Maybe I should've mentioned in my post that I'm a native Spanish speaker so I also take recommendations in Spanish. So in addition to these I recently ordered Cardoza y Aragón's "Guatemala. Las líneas de su mano" which I had been recommended before.