Overview

"During Guatemala's recent civil war, the CIA-advised army wiped out hundreds of Mayan villages. This is the story of one woman, Maria's struggle to save her village, and her sister Brenda's efforts to live normally after being raped and tortured by CIA-advised intelligence officers in El Salvador. It is a story of courage, bravery, and unrelenting faith that there is a future. ""The character of Brenda, who is one of the Roses in the title of this fact-based novel, is modeled on a tri-lingual Mayan friend. Other friends survived torture by several U.S.-backed regimes in Latin America. I wrote the book for them, for the voiceless millions on the receiving end of ill-considered U.S. power, and for my beloved country, which can do better."""

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Reviews

From the quetzal's first observations in its role as Greek Chorus to the final ponderings about torture and survival, Malcolm Bell has woven the Mayan theme of resistance during the years of civil war in Guatemala and El Salvador into the warp and weft of his historical novel, Roses in the Night. Unrelenting fear, terror and horror funded by their governments and the complicity of ours provide the weft, but the stronger warp threads of hope, perseverance, great courage and love predominate to create an unforgettable novel. -Gail Mott, longtime human rights activist, former member of the SanctuaryMovement, and co-publisher of Interconnect, a quarterly of the U.S.-Latin America solidarity community. With compassion and candor, Malcolm Bell has captured a story that opens hearts and minds to better understand the depth of desperation that drives those who undertake enormous risks to enter a strange land, simply to find the same kind of safe and peaceful life that most of us take for granted. -Christine Christopher, Emmy Award-winning film producer, Sundance, Documentary Film Institute grantee In Roses in the Night, Malcolm Bell has spun a tale of love and admiration for the courageous survivors and martyrs of Guatemala's Mayan genocide. He deftly weaves together two worlds: a Mayan village in Western Guatemala in the 1980s and the beautiful, mountainous terrain of Vermont, home to Mayan refugees displaced by the violence. Full of revelations about US foreign policy toward Central America, the Sanctuary Movement, and the special needs of survivors of torture, this is a story that needs to be told and needs to be read by all who value the courageous opposition mounted to one of the United States' most violent and devastating interventions. Most of all, this is a tale of love in its various modalities, including the latticework of solidarity between those oppressed and brutalized with the help of the US government and those who risk their own safety to walk with them and help them to heal. The stories in Roses in the Night are not easy to forget, and this is all the better; they need to be remembered. - Patricia Davis, author, longtime human rights activist, Board President of theGuatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, co-author of Sister Diana Ortiz'smemoir The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. With searing detail, Malcolm Bell tells a story of brutality and terror, also of remarkable humanity, during Guatemala's civil war (1960-1996). The U.S. helped engineer a 1954 military coup d'état that put in place a dictatorship that became one of the most brutal in Latin America's history, one that lasted for more than four decades. These stories are part of that history. With keen insight into the human nature of both soldiers trained in brutal counterinsurgency tactics and their victims, and then his account of the U.S. Sanctuary Movement in which he participated, he bears witness to realities about which all Americans need to know. While this is a work of fiction, all the stories narrated here are of events that actually took place. -Margaret Swedish, former director of theReligious Task Force on Central America & Mexico

Author Information

Malcolm Bell grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Harvard College (cum laude) and Law School, served in the U.S. Army, and practiced in Manhattan. After fifteen years of mainly civil litigation, he decided to become a criminal defense lawyer, where more was at stake than other people's money. To learn the new trade, he answered a blind ad for prosecutors, a step that would change his life. The special prosecutor of crimes arising out of New York's bloody 1971 Attica prison riot hired him and soon tasked him with indicting state troopers and prison guards who had committed murders and other violent crimes there. But the closer he came to obtaining indictments, the more his superiors blocked his efforts. He resigned in protest and took the cover-up public in the New York Times. High officials postured and scurried, leading to revelations they had sought to suppress and more justice than they had wanted; and New York law firms lost interest in hiring Malcolm. His account of all this came out in 1985; its latest version is The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Cover-up and the Pursuit of Justice (Skyhorse Publishing, paperback, 2022). Having sacrificed his career to uphold the law at Attica, he chose a decade later to break the law. During the 1980s, refugees streamed north from lethal, state-sponsored, U.S.-backed repressions in Guatemala and El Salvador; U.S. immigration judges nearly always denied them asylum and returned them to the death squads. This outrage gave rise to the Sanctuary Movement, whose members violated criminal laws to stand with the refugees. Malcolm and his wife Nancy joined the movement. He served on the national steering committee of the Alliance of Sanctuary Communities; spent many years working with the Mayan founders of the International Mayan League/USA; and reviewed books for Interconnect, a quarterly for the U.S.-Latin America solidarity community. His yet unpublished Sisters in the Storm: Life and Death on the Receiving End of U.S. Power relates the saga of three valiant women, two of them Americans and one a Guatemalan, who challenged the U.S.-Guatemala reign of terror and survived. And he wrote Roses in the Night, a fact-based novel about two valiant Maya who strove to survive that power. While becoming a confirmed Episcopalian at age thirteen, he began to question traditional Christian doctrines. His spiritual journey took him from the Episcopal Church to a United Church of Christ, where he taught junior and senior high Sunday school, to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), where he found his spiritual home. For the past forty years, he has jotted down his spiritual thoughts, which are now collected in Overdue Heresies and Other Reflections of a Quaker Seeker. The book seeks, not to persuade anyone of anything, but to prompt readers to examine their own spirituality.

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