Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?. Greg Grandin

wider circles of radicalization, military analysts marked Mayan communities according to colors: white spared those thought to have no rebel influence; pink identified areas in which the insurgency had a limited presence—suspected guerrillas and their supporters were to be killed but the communities left standing; red gave no quarter—all were to be executed and villages destroyed. “One of the first things we did,” said an architect of this plan, “was draw up a document for the campaign with annexes and appendices. It was a complete job with planning down to the last detail.”¹

      A subsequent investigation by the United Nations Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH)—a truth commission—called this genocide. The CEH documented a total of 626 army massacres, most of which took place between early 1982 and 1983—that is, the period between Menchú’s interview and her book’s publication in French and Spanish. In a majority of cases, the commission found

      evidence of multiple ferocious acts preceding, accompanying, and following the killing of the victims. The assassination of children, often by beating them against the wall or by throwing them alive into graves to be later crushed by the bodies of dead adults; amputation of limbs; impaling victims; pouring gasoline on people and burning them alive; extraction of organs; removal of fetuses from pregnant women . . . The military destroyed ceremonial sites, sacred places, and cultural symbols. Indigenous language and dress were repressed . . . Legitimate authority of the communities was destroyed.

      Massacres broke the agricultural cycle, leading to hunger and widespread deprivation as refugees hiding in the mountains and lowland jungle scavenged roots and wild plants to survive. A million and a half people, up to 80 percent of the population in some areas, were driven from their homes, with entire villages left abandoned.

      This scorched-earth campaign was designed to cut off indigenous communities from the insurgency and break down the communal structures which military analysts identified as the seedbed of guerrilla support. This explains the exceptionally savage nature of the counterinsurgency, which, while comprising the most centralized and rationalized phase of the war, was executed on the ground with a racist frenzy. The point was not just to eliminate the guerrillas and their real and potential supporters but to colonize the indigenous spaces, symbols, and social relations military strategists believed to be outside of state control. Terror was made spectacle. Soldiers and their paramilitary allies raped women in front of husbands and children. Security forces singled out religious activists for murder and turned churches into torture chambers. “They say that that the soldiers scorched earth,” one survivor told me, “but it was heaven that they burned.”

      I, Rigoberta Menchú cut through the shroud that surrounded this slaughter, revealing a hidden history of pain and death. The heartbreaking murders of Menchú’s brother, father, and mother mark key turning points in a powerful coming-of-age story, where the protagonist’s progress as a politically aware person merges with the revolutionary momentum of society as a whole. Menchú presents her father’s long struggle to defend their village’s land against the predations of planters as typical of the dispossession suffered by Guatemala’s peasants, and subtly melds indigenous rituals and beliefs to the ideals of liberation theology, a current in Catholicism that sought to align itself with the poor. Having given her interview prior to the genocide that turned the tide of the war in favor of the military, Menchú brings readers to the edge of the abyss. We now know that the revolution was doomed to fail, and there are hints throughout her book that Menchú knew it as well. By her story’s end, she lingers timorously on the cusp of the looming apocalypse, which she tries to forestall by increasingly asserting the inevitability of the people’s victory.

      In one passage, Menchú recalls hiding in the capital before her flight to Mexico, sick with ulcers, unable to rise from bed for days at a time, finding consolation that she “wasn’t the only orphan in Guatemala” and that her grief was the “grief of a whole people.” For a moment, she is bearing the burdens of “all poor Guatemalans” not to predict triumph but to accept loss. Having unexpectedly reunited with her twelve-year-old sister, Menchú demands to know what kind of world is it that could produce such misery: “How is it possible for our parents to be no longer with us?” Her anguish leads her to fantasize about succumbing to some unnamed “vice,” a “depravity,” so that she would no longer “have to think or bear life.” Menchú would go on to escape Guatemala and achieve international recognition. Here though she glimpses the oblivion that was the fate of some war widows and orphans. The vices available to Mayan women were sex and drink, and starting in the late 1970s, indigenous prostitutes, refugees from decimated families, began to haunt the margins of Guatemala City’s downtown, many still dressed in native traje. A more common fortune was to struggle on in solitude, trying to hold what was left of one’s family together. Menchú’s despair, however, is fleeting. “What has happened is a sign of victory,” she reports her sister telling her, “a revolutionary isn’t born out of something good” but of “wretchedness and bitterness.” Having confirmed her commitment to the struggle, this triumphalism is obviously less propaganda than deflection, a way to put off reckoning with incalculable loss and barely controlled rage. “We have to fight without measuring our suffering,” she recalls her sister telling her.

      In 1999, David Stoll, a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College who had spent nearly a decade researching the veracity of Menchú’s story, published his findings, charging that the Nobel Laureate exaggerated and otherwise distorted some of the events chronicled in her autobiography. Many who knew Guatemala well thought Stoll’s book, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, a strange exercise in compulsion, in which the author repeatedly reaffirmed his admiration for Menchú but then drove himself to dispute even her off-handed comments. “What rankles,” wrote journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman—who himself has spent many years peeling back the layers of the baroque conspiracy surrounding the 1998 execution of Guatemalan bishop Juan José Gerardi—“is the whiff of ideological obsession and zealotry, the odor of unfairness and meanness, the making of a mountain out of a molehill.”

      Two of Stoll’s charges concerning Menchú’s life do have merit. First, he documents that she received some education, contradicting a claim that her father refused to send her to school because he did not want her to lose her cultural identity. Second, Stoll presents evidence that Menchú falsely placed herself at the scene of her sixteen-year-old brother’s murder. Petrocinio Menchú was kidnapped by the military when his sister said he was, and along with other captives brought to the town of Chajul, accused of being a guerrilla and murdered to intimidate the population. Menchú’s account of the execution, Stoll believes, “can be considered factual.” Except that she, most likely, did not witness it firsthand. As to Menchú’s equally harrowing description of her mother’s killing, Stoll grants that “Rigoberta’s account is basically true”.²

      The New York Times highlighted Stoll’s accusations in an above-the-fold, front-page story, while journals high and low—the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Time magazine, the New York Post—weighed in.³ Some took the opportunity to pen lengthy meditations on the relationship of facts to memory in a preliterate, traumatized peasant society. Others simply swiped at the academic Left, lumping Menchú with Edward Said, whose autobiography was just then also coming under attack for allegedly obscuring some facts of his life while embroidering others. Conservatives, of course, seized on Stoll’s accusations. David Horowitz called I, Rigoberta Menchú “a tissue of lies” and “one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century . . . virtually everything that Menchú has written is a lie.” He took out ads in college papers, condemning Menchú as a “Marxistterrorist,” denouncing professors who continued to teach her book, and calling for the revocation of her Peace Prize.

      For his part, Stoll seemed caught off guard by a controversy that was quickly escaping his control, offering contradictory statements to explain the point of his research. His book dedicated a chapter to proving that Menchú could not have witnessed her brother’s execution, yet he now said that “how one member or another of her family died” was a minor issue. Stoll confirmed the “essential factuality of Menchú’s account of how her brother and mother died,” yet complained to a reporter that she was “still displaying a lack of candor”