Bitter Fruit for Rigoberta
I, RIGOBERTA MENCHU: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.
In the early eighties, I, Rigoberta Menchú became an international
bestseller. A moving account of gruesome repression, gut-wrenching poverty
and vicious racism, the book made Menchú a human rights celebrity,
eventually winning her a Nobel Peace Prize and focusing worldwide attention
on the plight of Guatemalan Indians. Menchú was unsparing in her
criticism of the Guatemalan Army, charging it with the wholesale slaughter
of thousands of Indians, including members of her own family.
As the New York Times recently reported, however, David Stoll,
a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, has called Menchú's
story into question. In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All
Poor Guatemalans Stoll alleges that Menchú exaggerated and otherwise
distorted some of the events she chronicled in her autobiography.
No matter how absorbing this controversy may be--and it has been taken
up gleefully by the right, with Dinesh D'Souza proclaiming in the Weekly
Standard that "there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious from the
outset of Rigoberta Menchú's credibility"--we should keep it in
perspective. Menchú's book came out in 1983, just after the Guatemalan
military had concluded the most brutal campaign of repression in this hemisphere.
In 1982 alone, the army committed more than 400 massacres, destroyed hundreds
of Indian communities, killed as many as 100,000 people and forced nearly
1 million from their homes. Until the publication of Menchú's book,
the international community was largely silent about these atrocities,
while the major news media in the United States paid hardly any attention
to them at all.
Throughout the worst period of the violence, the Reagan Administration
repeatedly attempted to discredit human rights organizations working to
publicize the massacres. One State Department official went so far as to
suggest that Amnesty International was waging a "calculated program of
disinformation which originated from Managua, Nicaragua and [was] part
of the worldwide communist conspiracy."
Menchú's book cut through this veil of silence to reveal a hidden
history of pain, death and terror. Her story was a call to conscience,
a piece of wartime propaganda designed not to mislead but rather to capture
our attention. It relied upon a classic Dickensian technique of pulling
together different individual experiences into one character's heart-rending
story. Such distortions were probably necessary to break through the wall
of media indifference.
One of Stoll's principal charges is that Menchú lied about the
death of her relatives. It seems that Menchú did not witness her
younger brother die of hunger on a lowland plantation, nor was another
brother burned alive by the army in the public square of her village, as
she had claimed.
Whatever the truth of these allegations (interviews with other relatives,
as quoted in the New York Times in mid-December, lend them significant
weight), the undisputed facts of Menchú's story are horrible enough:
She did have two brothers who died of malnutrition at an early age;
her mother and brother were kidnapped and killed by the army; and
her father was burned alive.
Stoll also reveals that Menchú was more educated and politically
astute than she let on. It appears that rather than being an illiterate
domestic servant and seasonal plantation laborer--a condition suffered
by a great many Mayan women--Menchú had received an elementary school
education.
Yet it is no great surprise that political leaders rearrange events
in their lives for political reasons. In his presidential campaign, Abraham
Lincoln presented himself as a backwoods hayseed even though he was an
accomplished legislator and lawyer. Likewise, Betty Friedan portrayed herself
as an alienated, apolitical housewife when in fact she was a longtime political
activist. And what about the exaggerations in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography?
As the director of the Nobel Institute who awarded Menchú her prize
reminds us, "All autobiographies embellish to a greater or lesser extent."
Perhaps Western readers expect only simplicity and naïveté
from Indian women, and Menchú may have skillfully used this expectation
to publicize the wholesale slaughter being conducted by the Guatemalan
military.
While the publicity on the accusations thus far has focused on the historical
accuracy of personal details, Stoll is interested in more than simply exposing
Menchú (perhaps explaining why the Times gave the story page-one
play). He wants to challenge the larger claim that the Guatemalan revolution
had popular support. He argues that guerrilla movements, not just in Guatemala
but throughout Latin America, pre-empted peaceful political and economic
reform and therefore were responsible for provoking repression:
This formulation reveals a deep ignorance of Guatemalan and Latin American
history. In the century before the cold war, dictators throughout Latin
America, like the nineteenth-century Argentine despot Juan Manuel de Rosas,
used terror to hold on to power. If a democratic transition was under way
in Guatemala prior to the left's decision to pick up arms, how does Stoll
account for the violent 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala's best
chance at democracy? Or the 1963 military coup aimed at preventing Juan
José Arévalo, a former reformist president, from again running
for president? If guerrillas are responsible for Latin American political
violence, how does Stoll explain Pinochet's Chile, where military repression
took place despite the absence of armed rebels? Or the systemic state violence
directed at union activists and independent reporters in Mexico before
the Zapatista uprising? Or the 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco plaza?
Just as he accuses Menchú of doing, Stoll arranges and suppresses
events to support his claims. Stoll would have us believe that if not for
the guerrillas, the Guatemalan military might not have become the most
bloodthirsty killing machine in the hemisphere. Yet by reducing Guatemala's
conflict to the back-and-forth sparring between the guerrillas and the
military, Stoll willfully--or ignorantly--misrepresents the history of
Guatemalan opposition and repression. In the seventies, trade unionists,
Mayan activists, peasants, students and social democrats came together
to push for social reform. No other country in Central America witnessed
this level of political mobilization. But well before anyone had ever heard
of the guerrillas, the military was going after this movement, murdering
peasants in coastal plantations and politicians and unionists in the capital.
What is most offensive about Stoll's argument is his insistence on blaming
the victims for the violence that the military visited upon them.
Stoll would counter this charge by separating Mayan communities from
"outsiders"--those whom he baits as the urban "Marxist Left." But this
distinction is too neat. As Stoll himself demonstrated in his previous
work, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, the Maya
have a long history of alliances with non-Indians. In the seventies, the
Catholic activists, peasant organizers, Christian Democrats and guerrilla
leaders were themselves Mayan.
Taken to its logical conclusion, Stoll's argument holds Menchú,
her father and her family responsible for "allowing" the military to slaughter
them and their neighbors.
In Guatemala, these assertions have all too real consequences. Throughout
Guatemalan history, Indians have been portrayed as either violent brutes
or docile innocents easily led astray. Elites continue to use these stereotypes
to legitimize the violence. They argue either that the war was necessary
to stop the Indians from rising up and avenging centuries of exploitation
or that outside agitators were responsible for stirring up the Indians.
It is unfortunate that at this moment, when truth commissions and exhumations
are opening the secrets of the recent past to scrutiny, Stoll's work provides
both these stereotypes with a scholarly patina. As a military officer responsible
for the 1982 scorched-earth campaign recently said, "The poor Indians,
they don't get involved in anything. They were between two armies." He
didn't even have to bother to footnote Stoll.
Next month, the United Nations Truth Commission (officially known as
the Historical Clarification Commission) will release the results of its
eighteen-month investigation of human rights violations in Guatemala. International
human rights organizations expect that the report will confirm what they
have been saying all along: The vast majority of Guatemala's political
violence was committed by the Guatemalan military, with the support and
knowledge of the US government. The controversy over Menchú should
not be allowed to overshadow this truth.
Copyright ©1999 The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Unauthorized
redistribution is prohibited.
Please attach this notice in its entirety when copying or redistributing
material from The Nation. For further information regarding reprinting
and syndication, please call The Nation at (212) 209-5426 or e-mail
dveith@thenation.com.
IN THIS ESSAY
RIGOBERTA MENCHU AND THE STORY OF ALL POOR GUATEMALANS.
By David Stoll. Westview.
By Rigoberta Menchú. Translated by Ann Wright. Verso.
Some Central Americans believe that only armed struggle could
have dislodged the dictatorships ruling their countries.... They could
be right, but it also has to be asked: What gave rise to such ferocious
regimes in the first place?... What reduced [the Guatemalan military] to
the fanatical anticommunism that allowed it to slaughter so many men, women,
and children?
While Stoll concedes that the United States bears some responsibility for
the violence, he concludes that "it could not have happened without the
specter of foreign communism." "Insurgency," he says, "bolster[ed] the
rationales of the most homicidal wing of the officer corps in one country
after another."