Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?. Greg Grandin

       New York City

       October 2010

      1. Stoll writes that Burgos “had always sent Rigoberta the full royalties,” and reproduces in his book receipts showing that Menchú received 295,802 francs, about $59,000, between 1983 and 1993 (my emphasis). See David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO, 2008), 321. A Gallimard representative, however, told me that according to company records, until 1993, the company “paid [Menchú], upon request of Elisabeth Burgos, every year part of Burgos’s royalties.”

      2. Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, translated by George Shriver (New York, 1989), 273.

      3. In Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives ( Chicago, 2002), 171.

      Introduction: A Victory Described in Detail

      Dante’s Inferno “is out”; I, Rigoberta Menchú“ is in,” the Wall Street Journal wrote, in late 1988, of Stanford University’s decision to include Third World authors in its required curriculum. “Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus give way to Frantz Fanon,” the paper said, concerned that Stanford’s new reading list viewed “the West” not through the “evolution of such ideas as faith and justice, but through the prism of sexism, racism and the faults of its ruling class.” Herewith began the metamorphosis of a young and relatively obscure Guatemalan Mayan woman into something considerably more than a witness to genocide.

      Since its publication in English in 1984, Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s memoir had been assigned with increasing frequency in university courses in the US and Europe. Historians taught it as a primary source documenting revolution and repression in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America, anthropologists as first-person ethnography, and literary theorists as an example of testimonio, a genre distinct from traditional forms of autobiography. But Menchú’s mention in the Journal thrust her further into the then escalating cultural wars, with conservatives holding her up as an example of the foibles of the multi-cultural Left. “Undergraduates do not read about Rigoberta,” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Dinesh D’Souza in 1991, “because she has written a great and immortal book, or performed a great deed, or invented something useful. She simply happened to be in the right place and the right time.”

      The place was Guatemala’s Western Highlands, inhabited by some four million people, the majority poor indigenous peasants living in remote, hardscrabble villages like Chimel, Menchú’s hometown. The time was the late 1970s, when the Guatemalan military was bringing to a climax a pacification campaign, the horror of which was matched only by historical memories of the Spanish conquest. By the time it was over, government forces had taken the lives of Menchú’s parents, her two brothers, and two hundred thousand other Guatemalans. And though this campaign may have been “unfortunate for her personal happiness,” D’Souza said, it was “indispensable for her academic reputation,” transforming Menchú into a fetish object onto which “minority students” could affirm their “victim status” and professors could project their “Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture.”

      Then in 1992, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas, Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize, and whatever ability she had up until that point in maintaining the integrity of her particular story gave way to the burdens of representing the victims of imperialism everywhere. She was given the prize, the Nobel selection committee noted, not just for her work exposing the murder and mayhem committed by US allies in Guatemala but for serving as a “vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation” in a world still scarred by European colonialism.

      It is safe to say that most who read her book did not interpret her tale as “an explicit indictment of the historical role of the West or Western institutions,” as D’Souza feared, but rather as a saga of individual resilience in the face of great hardship, much like Anne Frank’s diary. If anything, Menchú held out the possibility of redemption, as the Nobel committee suggested. Unlike Anne Frank, she survived. And following the end of the Cold War, many intellectuals and policy makers hoping to construct a pax neoliberal were willing to acknowledge that victory over the Soviet Union had entailed some moral compromises. Support of “widespread repression” was “wrong,” said US President Bill Clinton, a “mistake” that the “United States must not repeat.”

      Yet, as far as irreconcilables on the cultural and political Right were concerned, the Peace Prize might as well have been given posthumously to Frantz Fanon or Che Guevara. Trapped as they are by the fallacy of a consequent logic, where to admit A would mean accepting Z, those most hostile to Menchú believed that to acknowledge her legitimacy would indeed indict the whole of the West and all of its works. The attacks came fast after she won the Nobel Peace Prize, with detractors working hard to expose Menchú as an Indian with an agenda. They demanded that she “come clean” about her involvement with Guatemalan guerrillas, renounce her support of the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua, and denounce human rights violations in Cuba. D’Souza thought it suspicious that Menchú met her “feminist translator”—Elisabeth Burgos, once married to Che’s comrade Régis Debray—“in Paris, not a venue to which many of the Third World’s poor routinely travel” and that her “rhetoric employs a socialist and Marxist vocabulary that does not sound typical of a Guatemalan peasant.”

      What truly irked though was not the language but the details. “No details! Never bother me with details!” pleads the archbishop in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1951 The Devil and the Good Lord, hoping to be spared the specifics of a violent military suppression of a peasant revolt. Sartre’s sixteenth-century cleric knew what Cold War triumphalists feared: “a victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.” And Menchú provided too many details.

      Rigoberta Menchú Tum was twenty-three years old when she arrived in Paris in January 1982, where she gave the interview that would produce her memoir, and the worst of Guatemala’s civil war was yet to come. The roots of the crisis reached back to five years before Menchú was born, to the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz. The agency had objected to the fact Arbenz legalized a small communist party and implemented an extensive agrarian reform. Following the coup, Washington promised that it would turn Guatemala into a ‘showcase for democracy.” Instead, it created a laboratory of repression. After the costly Korean War, US policy makers decided that the best way to confront communism was not on the battlefield but by strengthening the “internal defense” of allied countries. Guatemala, now ruled by a pliant and venal regime, proved a perfect test case, as Washington supplied a steadily increasing infusion of military aid and training. US diplomats often signaled a desire to work with a “democratic Left”—that is, a non-communist Left. But the most passionate defenders of democracy were likely to be found in the ranks of Washington’s opponents and singled out for execution by US-created and funded security forces.

      By the late 1970s, more than two decades after the overthrow of Arbenz, the Guatemalan government stood on the point of collapse. Repression against reformist politicians, a radicalized Catholic Church, indigenous activists, and a revived labor and peasant movement swelled the ranks of a left-wing insurgency that, by the end of the decade, was operating in eighteen of Guatemala’s twenty-two departments. Between 1976 and 1980, security forces killed or disappeared close to a thousand Social and Christian Democrats, trade unionists, university professors and students. By 1980, death squads were running rampant in Guatemala City and the countryside, and mutilated bodies piled up on the streets and in ravines.

      In the indigenous highlands, violence against activists had been commonplace since the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz, and steadily increased through the 1960s and 1970s. Menchú’s brother, Petrocinio, was murdered in late 1979. Repression of Catholic priests and catechists reached such a pitch that the Church shuttered its diocese in the department of El Quiché in 1980, and the first of many assaults on Menchú’s village took place that year on Christmas Eve. The massacres started in 1981, and at first were not linked to a plan of stabilization or rule. Then in March 1982,