The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

By Francisco Goldman

Government/Politics
Literary Fiction

The Long Night of White Chickens” was my introduction to the author and I’ve been a fan ever since. His mother is a Catholic Guatemalan, his father Jewish American, and he was born in Boston, so he started off with a very interesting combination of influences. The book is a tense, almost surrealistic detective story which opens windows on the Latin American reality of State Sponsored assassinations, mara youth gangs and organized crime.

 

The author’s insights come out of his coverage of the wars in Central America in the 1980s as a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine. His book is a non-fiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera by the Guatemalan military. The book was an expansion of an article in the New Yorker, plus seven years of painstaking and often dangerous journalistic investigation.

Book reviewed by Mark D. Walker
United States