Mandahla: Betrayed
Betrayed opens in the Guatemalan cloud forest, a remote, deep green paradise of white mist, the red flash of quetzal birds, coiling orchids and terror. After playing all day, three young children--two girls and a boy--head back to their village, hungrily drawn by the scent of cook fires. But when they step into the clearing, the smoke is wrong, as are the strange men stacking people like sacks of potatoes and the homes blazing like torches. The children are spared and taken away.
Twenty years later, Vicki Andrews arrives in Guatemala City. An anthropologist working for Children at Risk, she is to assess Casa de Esperanza for funding. The mission-run charity works with the basueros, who live, if it can be called that, in the city's garbage dump. While the situation is all too familiar to Vicki, she's still puzzled at her reluctance to visit the country; however, she's happy for the chance to see her younger sister Holly, who works in a wildlife rescue center in a nature reserve. Holly has something she wants to tell Vicki, but before she can, she's murdered. Holly's murder, exotic animals missing from the refuge, massacred villagers--Vicki is a damsel in a lot of distress. Throw in a handsome CIA agent and a handsome beach bum, a tough old curmudgeon and a gentle missionary, and you'd have a standard thriller, but J. M. Windle has a bit more on her mind than just a good read.
She sees the smoldering fires beneath the garbage dumps and compares them with fires beneath the surface of Guatemala itself, for all its theoretical peace. Over the last two generations of armed conflict and political assassinations, the Guatemalan Army was responsible for more than 90% of the atrocities. The legacy of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), a CIA-sponsored coup, populist uprisings and military reprisals and the joke of narcotics interdiction have damaged the people and the land irreparably. The usual sad, familiar story, but with a counterpoint: an old hymn, "This Is My Father's World," whose words work as both a clue and a theme. Who's to blame for this mess? If this is God's world, what does that mean? Yes, the author does have a few things to say within the framework of a thriller.
Betrayed is not only a good mystery, but a good primer on the current state of much of Latin America and the legacy of our involvement there. And for those readers and booksellers who might be put off by the Christian slant: on the one hand, it's gentle, like the hymn that runs through it. On the other hand, it's thought-provoking, also like the hymn, and gives the story a tension beyond the social and political.--Marilyn Dahl
