All Things Hidden: A Witness to Paradise Lost

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.

About the Author

Lesley Miles a practicing architect for 40 years has designed schools, libraries and community spaces. She wrote her first story about her grandfather, an ANZAC in WWI, while in New Zealand in 2018. Reading, A London Love Story, on a KQED Perspectives segment encouraged her to start writing about her experiences in Guatemala in the late 1970s. 

Her memoir All Things Hidden: A Witness to Paradise Lost, covers her time in Ixcán, Guatemala, her return and search for what happened to the community. 

Studying with Corporeal Writing, writer Haley Campbell, and author and teacher Jordan Rosenfeld, she writes as she notes, just the facts. When she left Ixcán in 1979, she stored textiles, letters, journals and photos of the two years she had lived in a village of 15 families. Unboxing this hidden period of her life, she relives this time, writing of her experiences including a historical perspective. 

Her Substack, I’ve Got a Story for That, runs the gamut from architecture and Guatemala to stories about war,  pets, children and plants. www.lesleylmiles.com

Praise for All Things Hidden

“This is a book bathed in tears. A testimony to a piece of our Guatemalan history with international proportions.”
—Ricardo Falla, Anthropologist and Jesuit priest

“This is the breathtaking and daring story of one woman’s relatively innocent entry into a benevolent Mayan community building experience in Guatemala where she discovers a deep and dangerous complexity of American involvement in arms dealing, proxy wars, and genocide.
—Lidia Yuknavitch, National Bestselling author of The Chronology of Water