She came to teach gardening in the jungle. Instead, she found herself in the opening chapter of a hidden war.

In February 1977, twenty-one-year-old Lesley Miles arrived in the remote Ixcán region of Guatemala to teach biodynamic organic gardening to a cooperative of Maya families carving a new life from the rainforest. With no roads, no electricity, and more than 175 inches of rain each year, the jungle itself was a formidable challenge.

But nature was the least of their dangers.

Cut off from the outside world, the settlers of Proyecto Ixcán were living in the shadow of a growing military presence. As Lesley helped establish an agricultural center meant to sustain the community, the region was quietly becoming a geopolitical battleground. Multinational corporations were eyeing the biodiverse forests for oil, minerals, and farmland. The Guatemalan army—supported by Israeli advisers and clandestine American involvement—was expanding its reach. And from across the Mexican border, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor was moving into the valley.

Caught between powerful and competing forces, the fragile community Lesley had come to serve stood directly in the path of history.

When the organization that sent her collapsed, Lesley was left stranded in the region just as the violence began to escalate. What she witnessed was the beginning of a campaign that, within two years, would erupt into one of the most brutal episodes of Guatemala’s civil war: a scorched-earth assault that destroyed every village in Ixcán and contributed to the massacre of more than 200,000 people.

Back in the United States, Lesley searched for news of the village and the people she had come to love—but found almost nothing. For decades, the memories remained sealed away.

Forty years later, she opened a forgotten box filled with journals, letters, reports, and hundreds of photographs from her time in the jungle. From those fragile records emerges a powerful firsthand account of idealism, survival, and the human cost of a conflict the world largely ignored.