Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?. Greg Grandin

complaining that members of the “Menchú cult” had called him “everything but an infidel Jew.”⁴

      Stoll himself had criticized the “postmodern scholarship” of Edward Said in his book, yet now he pleaded with those gripped by the scandal to keep focused on Guatemala. His point was not to discredit Menchú, he said. He rather wanted to contest popular and scholarly explanations of Guatemala’s civil war that presented the insurgent Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) and its peasant and Christian affiliates—such as those extolled by Menchú—as growing out of a collective experience of historic racism and economic exploitation. Instead, Stoll argues that conditions in the Western Highlands were improving for most indigenous peasants in the 1970s and that the state had conducted widespread political repression not to uphold an unjust system but merely “to get at” the EGP, which was largely led by middle-class urban radicals with little connection to or support in the peasant communities they presumed to liberate. It was the guerrillas, therefore, that pre-empted the possibility of peaceful reform by bringing to power the “homicidal wing” of the military. Mayans, for their part, joined the rebels in droves only to escape state terror, not because social conditions drove them—or ideals motivated them—to make a revolution.

      To make his case, Stoll actually focuses less on Rigoberta Menchú than on her father, Vicente, presenting him as a litigious landowner locked in a decades-long quarrel not with rich ladino planters, as his daughter described, but with his wife’s family. In the years prior to his death, Vicente Menchú was evicted from his land, jailed, and beaten, Stoll confirms, but those primarily responsible for his torment were his Mayan in-laws, the Tums. He also guesses that Vicente Menchú was not as politically active and astute as his daughter made him out to be, notwithstanding his involvement in peasant leagues, local development projects, and the Catholic catechist movement. He speculates that Rigoberta Menchú, too, came to her “political consciousness” late, largely in reaction to the murders of her brother, father, and mother, and perhaps spent the time her family was being persecuted enjoying life at Catholic boarding schools. From these conjectures, Stoll makes what he considers his most important deduction: that the Menchús stumbled into their alliance with the insurgents, and they did so not because they were determined to overthrow an intolerable social system but because they hoped to gain the upper hand against their peasant rivals⁵. In so doing, they—and their neighbors—reaped the whirlwind.

      Stoll complained that, amidst all the scandal’s noise, the larger point of his research was getting drowned out. Only it was not. Right-wing activists, again, finely attuned to how A leads to Z, knew exactly what was at stake. They said it more shrilly, but they said more or less the same thing: “The fact is that there was no social ground for the armed insurrection that these Castroists tried to force,” Horowitz wrote; ultimately “the source of the violence and ensuing misery that Rigoberta Menchú describes in her destructive little book is the left itself.”

      Conservatives recognized the value of Stoll’s argument because it had been made before, at least as early as 1790, when Edmund Burke said France’s old regime was in the process of self-reformation before ideologues who read too much Rousseau derailed things. In fact, Stoll’s position parallels, probably unwittingly, more recent revisionist arguments concerning the French Revolution. Since feudalism was already on the wane prior to 1789, revolutionary militancy did not advance liberalization but rather represented a ghastly dérapage, as François Furet put it, a slide into chaos. In later work, Furet revised his opinion, rejecting the contingent implications of the word dérapage to argue that the “very idea of revolution” generated Jacobin terror. It is a position that runs to the core of contemporary debates concerning the causes of militancy, between those who see conflict as rooted in larger social relations, with violence resulting from the instigating intransigence of elites, and those who blame terror on utopian ideological fervor. While the latter position has been used to explain events in Europe and the United States, such as the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the radical New Left, it holds considerably less influence in the Third World, where the relationship between repression, on the one hand, and colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, on the other, is hard to deny.

      Thus the broad resonance, beyond anything having to do with Guatemala, of the Menchú controversy. Guatemala has long been recognized as one of the most exploited societies in a region defined by exploitation, a place where many Mayans were subject to what was in effect slavery well into the twentieth century. The role of the United States in terminating the first and still so far only government that tried to democratize the country has been so well documented that it has become the mainstream example of choice when one wants to illustrate the misuse of Washington’s power abroad. It even forced a sitting US president to apologize. The catastrophe that followed the 1954 coup had staggering human costs, resulting in one of the most savage wars in twentieth-century Latin America. So, if it could be demonstrated that political violence in northern Quiché—among the poorest of regions in the poorest of departments in the poorest of countries—was caused not by land dispossession, racism, or aborted reform but by, as Stoll thinks, “middle-class radicals” entranced by the Cuban Revolution, then the whole of Latin American history would be up for grabs. And, indeed, by the end of his book, Stoll has parlayed discrepancies in Menchú’s story into a blanket indictment of the Latin American Left throughout its Cold War history, blaming the rise of death-squad dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and other countries in the 1970s on the “misguided belief in the moral purity of total rejection, of refusing to compromise with the system and seeking to overthrow it by force.”

      It is hard, though, to hang such a grand interpretation on the personal motives of one disputatious indigenous peasant and the imaginative license of his twenty-three-year-old orphaned exile. But Stoll does try, insisting on tracing nearly every act of aggression Menchú attributes to ladinos, planters or security forces back to an original provocation committed by her father. Nowhere is this shadow narrative more perversely applied than in his account of an event that serves as the climax of both Menchú’s memoir and Stoll’s riposte: the January 1980 firebombing of the Spanish embassy, which resulted in the death of Vicente Menchú and over thirty other peasants and university students who were protesting escalating military repression in the countryside, including the killing of Petrocinio Menchú. Investigations by the Spanish government, the Catholic Church, and the United Nations all confirmed Menchú’s description of events, and in 2005 a Spanish judge issued an arrest warrant for a former Guatemalan interior minister accused of ordering the bombing. But as the signal event in the civil war, a naked display of unyielding power when many Guatemalans realized that no reform would be tolerated or petition considered, Stoll cannot help but weigh in. He speculates that the protesters might have intentionally killed themselves to reinforce “the left’s cult of martyrdom.” It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary this statement is, especially coming from a researcher who bases his legitimacy on opposing fact-based, empirical argumentation against the deductions of a politicized Left. There is no tradition of tactical suicide among Guatemala leftists, and there is not one piece of evidence, not one witness, not even among those critical of the protesters, to support the possibility that the embassy massacre could have been a “revolutionary suicide that included murdering hostages and fellow protesters.” But the logic of his argument, if not the facts of the case, compels Stoll to consider it, and in so doing he transforms Vicente Menchú from victim to victimizer.

      Subsequent research over the last decade has proven Stoll’s provocative thesis about Guatemala’s civil war to be largely wrong, while confirming Menchú’s interpretation of events.⁶ The definitive refutation has come from the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico—the aforementioned UN truth commission—which released its findings in early 1999, shortly after the Menchú controversy broke. Based on over eight thousand interviews and extensive archival and regional research conducted by a team of over two hundred investigators, the CEH, like Stoll, understands the escalating civil war as emerging from the fault lines of local conflicts, including petty family grievances and parochial land conflicts, often among peasants and between indigenous communities. But it places its examination of any given clash within the broader context of a militarized plantation economy where non-indigenous elites fought to hold on to their monopoly control over land, labor, markets, credit, and transportation. As to Chimel, commission investigators recognized local feuds