Abstract
The editors of Latin American Perspectives note with sadness the passing of our honorary editor Susanne Jonas, who served for many years as an original participating editor of the journal. Susanne Leilani Jonas was born on December 31, 1941, in Honolulu, where her parents had settled after leaving Europe to escape Hitler’s persecution of Jews, only to be arrested as enemy aliens after the Japanese attack on December 7. They eventually relocated to Cincinnati. Susanne went to Radcliffe College and first visited Mexico with the Harvard-Radcliffe student orchestra. She later moved to UC Berkeley for her Ph.D. studies. While there she became part of a radical group of students studying Latin America at Stanford and Berkeley who challenged the U.S academic approach to the study of the region and the imperialist foreign policy that it justified, and in 1970 she published a seminal article in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “The Ideology of Developmentalism: American Political Science’s Paradigm Surrogate for Latin American Studies” (Susanne J. Bodenheimer) In some respects, Latin American Perspectives grew out of that graduate student network.
In the early 1970s Susanne was a leading member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), contributing important articles to its bulletin (now the NACLA Report). She became a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives at its founding in 1974, and that same year NACLA published her influential work with David Tobis, Guatemala, “And So Victory Is Born Even in the Bitterest Hours.” With Marlene Dixon, she wrote Revolution and Intervention in Central America (1983) and Nicaragua Under Siege (1984). Her intimate knowledge of Guatemala made her a valuable resource for the 1980s movement against U.S. intervention in Central America.
In 1985, after the West Coast NACLA became the Data Center, Susanne began a 24-year teaching career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her colleague Gabriela Arredondo wrote, “Jonas infused generations of students and colleagues with her passion for justice and her love for Central America.” A former student spoke of “her passion for human rights, especially indigenous rights, and her deep belief in the right to self-determination in Latin America.” Her work in Latin American Perspectives included “Central America as a Theater of U.S. Cold War Politics” (9 [3], 1982), “Contradictions of Guatemala’s ‘Political Opening’” (15 [3], 1988), “The Construction of Democracy in Nicaragua” (with Nancy Stein) (17 [3], 1990), and “In Memoriam: Frank Bonilla, Renaissance Man (1925–2010)” (38 [3], 2011). No student of Guatemala can be without her best-known books on that country, especially The Battle for Guatemala (1991) and Of Centaurs and Doves (2000). In a foreword to the former, Edelberto Torres Rivas wrote that he was “grateful for her unflagging solidarity with the people of Guatemala, which has become her second homeland.”