pickThis is one of the heaviest books I‘ve read. Bones have a story to tell, if you know what to look for, and if you are willing to spend time with them. The author did just that in Argentina. They were searching for bones: trying to identify who they were, trying to properly lay them to rest, find justice for them and their families, give some peace to their families. It was the deepest of emotional labors. This book covers some history ⬇️
…the dead whisper to me that it does not have to be this way. The massacres, secret prisons, and hidden graves, all the terror and loss. Another world is possible. On a burning planet, pockmarked by mass graves, it is hard to have much faith. But my work among the dead has taught me that even in the face of violence and terror and breakdown, even at the bottom of the well, there is something—a movement of life, an impulse for justice, a kind⬇️
How much grief can one mass grave hold?
If you can‘t understand the bones as people who are missed and loved, with a mother and father standing by the edge of the grave waiting, you can‘t do this work. If you can‘t understand the bones as evidence to be analyzed and examined, you can‘t do this work. You must touch bones and be touched by them. You must be able to drink your tea with the dead.
If I can perfectly align the interests of my company with the interests of top officials in the U.S. government— not the interests of the country, but the interests of the people in charge of the country— then the United States will secure my needs.
The United Fruit Company is the principal enemy of progress in Guatemala, of its democracy, and of every effort at its economic liberation.
To protect its authority [United Fruit] had recourse to every method: political intervention, economic compulsion, contractural imposition, bribery, [and] tedious propaganda, as suited its purposes of domination.
