A Strange Yet Familiar Violence in Postwar Guatemala ON 10 MAY 2009, RODRIGO ROSENBERG, a prominent attorney in Guatemala City, was shot in the head and killed while riding his bike. Days before his murder, Rosenberg videotaped an 18-minute message, subsequently circulated widely in Guatemala and internationally, in which he stated that should he be killed in the near future, the intellectual authors of the crime would be standing president Alvaro Colom and his wife, Sandra Torres. Their motive would be retribution, specifically for Rosenberg's representation of another recently murdered member of the Guatemala City elite, the businessman Khalil Musa. In the videotape, Rosenberg states that Musa was murdered because of the information he was about to release, which clearly showed the president's links to organized crime and drug trafficking. Rosenberg said he made the recording because he feared that Colom and his associates would not stop at killing Khalil Musa.The killing never stops in Guatemala. More than a decade after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed, which ended 36 years of civil war, homicide rates rival those during the war years. Progress on all fronts seems minimal at best; economic and social gaps between the wealthy and the poor are among the world's worst. Falling

R e s u m e n Abstracto: Con enfoque en El Baile de los Monos, el baile-drama más popular y duradero que se realiza en el pueblo de Momostenango en los Altos Occidentales Mayas de Guatemala, examinamos como la violencia epidémica que ha matado al líder espiritual del baile se ha combinado con la inseguridad econó mica que ahuyenta a la juventud Momosteca, quienes salen en bú squeda de un futuro econó mico, para amenazar el papel del baile como asilo cultural para los bailarines y para la comunidad. La amenaza hacia el Baile de los Monos es, en si, emblemático de la amenaza neoliberal a la cultura Maya en Guatemala; mas sin embargo la resistencia de los bailarines y su respaldo continuo en el sistema religioso tradicional entre tantas inseguridades enfrentadas paradó jicamente brinda una esperanza perdurable. Esta continuidad indica la flexibilidad y plasticidad de la cosmovisió n tradicional Maya. Pero también revela los efectos desnivelados del neoliberalismo en los Altos de Guatemala PALABRAS CLAVES: Guatemala, Violencia, Religió n, Cambio Econó mico Since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, ending the 30-year civil war, Guatemala has fully embraced a neoliberal economic agenda and undergone a period of economic and physical insecurity that many believe has been as traumatic as the war itself. According to the predictions of the general critique of neoliberalism, these developments are a natural outcome of the neoliberal plan, bent on the destruction of bases for collective action that could resist the individualistic ideology and elite-class oriented goals

In the years following the 2005 hurricanes and floods in New Orleans, many of the city's residents found themselves explaining the disaster to people in the rest of the country. The destruction of New Orleans was a result of failed engineering, bad planning, cronyism, and corruption. This was true not only of the floods but also of the way in which the rescue and recovery were handled. We wandered the country warning people: this can happen to you. Your city or state may be next. The government will neither prevent this nor save you after it happens. Your insurance may not work. The people who do come may not have your best interests in mind. Those were dark times.Vincanne Adams's Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is a very readable and timely explanation of what all those wandering oracles meant. The focus is not on the events of 2005 but, rather, on the struggles that residents of New Orleans faced in their attempts to rebuild and recover. It is worth recalling that 80 percent of the city was flooded and that the floodwaters did not recede for weeks. This left a moldy, waterlogged mess behind. Every building in the flood zone had to be gutted and rebuilt. Residents had to replace nearly everything they owned. Insurance companies were often slow to provide the resources people needed. This is where government could have stepped in to help but did not. Programs with names like "Road Home" were created to make people "whole" again, enabling them to restart businesses, rebuild homes, and bring communities back to life. The programs, along with much else, were run by private contractors. The programs did not, however, work well. Stories about denied assistance were common in the years after the floods. Often, the private contractors and government agencies assigned to help were attempting to impose impossible regulations on disaster victims, demanding documentation that may never have existed, refusing to adapt to the circumstances people confronted. Yet behind this failure, as Adams shows, there were enormous profits being made by private contractors.

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