If Truth Be Told: A Forum on David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the

Story of All Poor Guatemalans

Latin American Perspectives 26:6, November 1999

(final pre-publication drafts)

Contents
Author/Essay/(pages in 1999 published version) page

Jan Rus, “If Truth be Told: Introductory essay” (pp. 5-14) 2

Carol A. Smith, “Why Write an Exposé of Rigoberta Menchú?” (pp. 15-28) 17

Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, “Of Strawmen and Stereotypes: Why Guatemalan Rocks 38
Don’t Talk” (pp. 29-37)

Victoria Sanford, “Between Rigoberta Menchu and La Violencia: 50

Deconstructing David Stoll's History of Guatemala” (pp. 38-46)

Georg M. Gugelberger, “Between Rigoberta Menchu and La Violencia: 63

Deconstructing David Stoll's History of Guatemala” (pp.47-52)

Elizabeth Burgos/Translted by Austin Austin, “The Story of a Testimonio” (pp. 53-63) 74

Gary H. Gossen, “Rigoberta Menchu and Her Epic Narrative” (pp. 64-69) 91

David Stoll, “Rigoberta and the Last-Resort Paradigm” (pp. 70-80) 99

(Four brief rejoinders by Smith, Chinchilla, Sanford and Burgos are not available in this format)

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From If Truth Be Told: A Forum on David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor
Guatemalans, published in Latin American Perspectives (26:6, November, 1999)

If Truth be Told: Introductory Essay

by
Jan Rus

Within just a couple of months of its publication in late 1998, David Stoll’s book

Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colorado:

Westview) had been reviewed, or at least noted, in the better part of the mainstream press

in the United States. Indeed, some had treated it as a front page news story; one, the

New York Times, going so far as to seek out some of the rural Guatemalans who had

talked to Stoll in order to re-interview them itself. Quite an unusual reception for an

“academic” book that sets out to sift through the details of events in the remote

mountains of western Guatemala almost twenty years ago...

The reason for this extraordinary attention, of course, is that David Stoll’s book is

not just another monograph about rural Guatemala, but a critical reassessment of I,

Rigoberta Menchú (1), the oral autobiography of a young K’iche’ woman who was an

eyewitness to the genocide of her people in the early 1980s. Published during the worst

years of the Mayan holocaust, the book helped rally the universal condemnation of the

Guatemalan state that eventually forced it to begin negotiating for peace. Almost a

decade after its appearance, in 1992, its author, by then perhaps the best known

indigenous person in the Americas, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of

her tireless work on behalf of reconciliation and social justice.

Why would anyone want to re-examine the life of such a revered figure?

According to David Stoll, the idea first occurred to him in the late 1980s while he was

2
doing anthropological fieldwork in the general region of Rigoberta’s village. As he

talked to residents about the civil war at the beginning of the decade, he repeatedly

encountered discrepancies between Rigoberta’s testimony and descriptions of the same

events by others who had lived through them. Eventually, he began to perceive enough

of a pattern to the discrepancies that he decided to try to reconstruct both Rigoberta’s

own history and the course of the violence in the area where she had lived. In the revised

version of Rigoberta’s story that resulted, Stoll concludes, among other things, that

contrary to what Rigoberta had claimed, her father had not been a traditional villager

who had lost his fields to predatory ladino landlords, but was actually a progressive and

fairly well off man whose land fights had mostly been with his in-laws; that her

immediate family had not been forced by poverty to become migrant workers on

Guatemala’s coastal plantations, where one of her brothers died of malnutrition, but had

managed to make a living in the highlands, where her supposedly deceased brother still

lived; that she herself had not been monolingual in K’iche’ and unlettered until she

joined the revolutionary movement, but had finished her secondary education in a

Catholic boarding school; and finally, that when Rigoberta and her family joined the

revolutionary movement at the beginning of the 1980s, it appeared to be not so much

because that was the logical next step from having been leaders of local struggles for

peasant rights, but because they been swept up in a factional fight within their village to

which the army overreacted. In short, Rigoberta’s testimony of deprivation, racial

discrimination and repression, eventually leading to redemption through the act of taking

up arms against her people’s oppressors, appeared to have been at least partly

fictionalized. The most renowned modern document of native Americans’ resistance to

3
conquest and disappearance seemed not to be true.

Presented with the discrepancies Stoll had discovered, many of the mainstream

reviewers turned on Rigoberta. In the “gotcha” atmosphere of the U.S. press in 1998 and

‘99, such contradictions were simply too tempting a target. “Nobel Prize Winner

Accused of Stretching Truth,” announced a headline on page A-1 of the New York

Times; “When the Facts Stood in the Way of the Crusade,” sentenced the Washington

Post. Far less tempered, if that is the word, were such outlets as US News & World

Report (“Nobel Prize for Fiction?”), Reader’s Digest (which captioned a photo of

Rigoberta in its “That’s Outrageous!” section with “Not the Whole Truth!”), and the

Internet magazine Salon (worth every penny of the paper it’s printed on), which blared in

one of its lead columns “I, Rigoberta Menchu, Liar.” Both in press conferences and

interviews, Rigoberta tried to defend herself. Some of the details of her story had been

changed, she explained, to protect teachers and religious workers who had helped her but

who in 1982 were still within reach of the death squads in Guatemala; others had been

made more generic in order to make her story typical of a larger number of people. Most

of all, though, she appeared pained that the doubt cast on her own story might strengthen

those who wished to minimize what had happened in Guatemala, or even deny that the

killing had taken place. To be sure, numerous writers came to her defense, trying to

remind the world -- as if it were necessary -- of the urgency of the situation in Guatemala

in the early 1980s, of Rigoberta’s untiring work on behalf of human rights and peace, and

of the fact that not even Stoll claimed that the discrepancies he found in her book

suggested that the genocide was not as she described it.(3) Unfortunately, such

explanations and qualifications were relegated to back pages and small circulation

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journals. Most mainstream newspapers and magazines, having contented themselves

with reducing Stoll’s book to an opportunity to debunk another public figure, were

disinclined to entertain the thought that the story might be more complicated than that.

For this soundbite driven reaction to remain the prevailing impression of either I,

Rigoberta Menchú or The Story of All Poor Guatemalans would, however, be a great

shame. At stake in the argument between Menchú and Stoll is much more than the literal

truth of Rigoberta’s story. Indeed, both in the introduction to his book and in later

statements to the media (3), Stoll himself has been at pains to try to direct attention

onward from the specific contradictions of I, Rigoberta Menchú to the construction of the

testimony as a whole and its relationship to the history and politics of 1980s Guatemala.

Although there are numerous points of contention between Stoll and his critics,

essentially the most important ones can be grouped in two sets. The first concerns the

participation of indigenous people in the guerrilla movement of the 1970s and eighties.

According to the argument of I, Rigoberta Menchú, this participation was voluntary and

widespread, and was the inevitable outcome of the exploitation and repression to which

the Maya – as embodied in Rigoberta’s own family -- had been subject. Over the years,

the argument goes, they had tried one peaceful approach after another to remedy the

poverty and powerlessness that afflicted them, from Catholic reflection groups, to

cooperatives to labor organizations. Despite their hopefulness and toil, however, they

had been met at every turn by an increasingly violent reaction from a State and Army that

refused to permit even cosmetic improvements in their condition. Finally, out of

desperation, large numbers of Mayas, the Menchús among them, joined the guerrilla. In

response, the State unleashed a scorched earth campaign against the Maya as a people --

5
a campaign which according to the early 1999 report of the United Nations Commission

for Historical Clarification (Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico, or CEH) led in just a

few years to 626 massacres in Mayan communities and tens of thousands of “acts of

savagery.”(4)

Neither Stoll nor any other serious observer questions that the Guatemalan State and

Army are guilty of this genocide. Indeed, in the last year the extent of the Army’s

brutality has been documented not only by the UN commission (which positively

attributed 93% of the violations during the civil war to the State, and only 3% to the

guerrillas), but by the earlier, Spring 1998, report of the Catholic Church’s Recovery of

Historical Memory project (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, or REMHI), which

using different methods produced substantially the same result.(5) Nor does anyone

doubt that many in Rigoberta’s own family were indeed caught up in the repression and

horribly murdered by the Army. What Stoll does question, however, is I, Rigoberta

Menchú’s construction of the history leading up to the killing, and with it the ultimate

responsibility that should be assigned to each of the participants. Did the guerrilla

movement, he asks, incite or encourage the violence by convincing the State that it was

both more powerful than it was, and that its support among the Mayan population was

more extensive than it was? Had it, moreover, “deceived” those Mayas who did join the

guerrilla into doing so in the first place by overselling both its ability to protect them

from the Army and its own chances of ultimate success?(6) That is, is the guerrilla

movement itself in some measure to blame for the genocide? Stoll answers all of these

questions in the affirmative. As we shall see in the essays by Carol Smith, Norma

Chinchilla and Victoria Sanford that follow, others who know Guatemala well disagree

6
with him on one or all accounts, many vehemently.

The second set of issues concerns the text of I, Rigoberta Menchú itself: just what

kind of document is it? In recent months, both Rigoberta Menchú and her collaborators

(among them Elizabeth Burgos, below) have reminded us that it was never meant to be a

simple autobiography. Writing in the midst of a genocide whose paid apologists

included such powerful voices as Ronald Reagan’s media consultant Michael Deaver

before 1981, and the Reagan White House and State Department after, they were trying

from the beginning to craft a story that would draw sympathetic attention to the plight of

Guatemala’s Mayas.(7) In addition to this self-conscious, external shaping of the

narrative, however, anthropologists and literary scholars have also argued persuasively

that the story-telling conventions that inform I, Rigoberta Menchú internally are not

those of Western, eyewitness accounts, but are instead typical of non-Western, oral

traditions. Among others, such conventions include the assumption of a collective, or

amalgamated identity by the story-teller in order to summarize a whole community’s

history; the creation of a “golden past,” before exploitation or colonialism, in order to

show how bad things have become -- and to identify the causes of the deterioration; and

the simplification of the order of events in order to clarify the storyline. To appraise I,

Rigoberta Menchú fairly, then, the reader must understand both the context in which it

was written and the fact that it is a product of an oral, non-Western tradition.

Stoll himself acknowledges these justifications for the fact that Rigoberta’s

testimonio is not constructed like a research paper, and even gives them some credence.

On the other hand, in reviewing the process by which I, Rigoberta Menchú was produced

-- specifically, the advisory role of Rigoberta’s compañeros in the Ejército Guerrillero de

7
los Pobres (EGP) -- he goes on to ask whether what he judges to be discrepancies

between the text and “objective” history might not be as much or more the result of the

need to present the guerrilla in a positive light as of the techniques of Maya storytelling

or the desire to alert the world to the genocide. For instance, is the book’s description of

Rigoberta’s family’s hardships and its eventual decision to join the guerrilla -- among the

themes that Stoll argues diverge most from documentable facts -- the result of the

collective nature and compression characteristic of Mayan oral history, or of the need to

“naturalize” the guerrilla movement’s claim that the armed rebellion was the inevitable

result of exploitation and repression? Even more controversially, against the received

view that I, Rigoberta Menchú helped draw attention to the killing and eventually stop it,

Stoll asks whether it might not be more true that by justifying the guerrilla movement

and securing international support for it at a time when he argues that it was already in

retreat in Guatemala (that is, after 1983-84), and when he claims many Guatemalan

peasants had already stepped away from it, the book might not actually have propped up

the guerrilla and thus prolonged the violence. Again he answers his own questions in the

affirmative, and here even more than in the earlier set of issues his responses infuriate

many others who know Guatemala well and remember how difficult it was to draw

attention to its horrors in the 1980s.

Some of the issues between Stoll and his critics may eventually be resolved

empirically. Stoll’s view that Maya peasants did not voluntarily take part in the guerrilla

movement, for instance -- that they felt pressured to collaborate, or did not fully

appreciate the consequences of collaboration, or simply did not join -- may not be

inconsistent with others’ equally firm view that Maya peasants did join the armed

8
uprising willingly and in large numbers. Part of the difficulty is that in the absence of a

fuller sample of local histories for the 1970s and eighties, both Stoll and his critics are

forced to generalize about the Maya as a whole on the basis of small numbers of

cases.(8) During rural rebellions, however, it is not unusual for neighboring

communities and even different factions within the same community to react differently,

some participating in the revolt while others with apparently identical characteristics try

to remain neutral or even aid the government. Similarly, faced with different responses,

it is also not uncommon for rebel groups to treat neighboring communities differently.

As the number of close, community-level histories of the civil war increases, hopefully

that part of the present controversy that arises from having to guess at the overall patterns

will diminish. Indeed, by challenging the consensus about indigenous history during the

violence that has grown up around I, Rigoberta Menchú, Stoll has perhaps given a spur to

this necessary process of empirical reconsideration.

That said, the virtues of Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

in provoking such reconsideration are also its limitations. In defining Rigoberta as an

icon and taking her on so frontally, Stoll has chosen for himself the role of iconoclast and

systematically staked out positions sharply opposed to those of I, Rigoberta Menchú and

its supporters on every one of the issues listed above. Beyond challenging the received,

somewhat simplified popular view of the Guatemalan civil war that coalesced in the

1980s -- a salutary effort, in my view, especially against the backdrop of the REMHI and

CEH reports when there can never again be any doubt that the State and Army of

Guatemala committed genocide -- he has tied himself on virtually every point to the far

end of what will undoubtedly eventually be a range of more considered, nuanced

9
historical reconstructions of both Guatemalan local politics and the international

solidarity movement. While this may encourage others to undertake further research,

unfortunately it also has the effect of leading many to question his motives to the extent

that they doubt even the accuracy of the detailed histories of the K’iche’ and Ixil

communities on which he bases his arguments.

I said above that some of the debate between Stoll and his critics may perhaps

eventually be settled empirically. Clearly, though, much of it cannot. Even more than

the facts and argument of her testimonio, what Rigoberta Menchú – and Elizabeth

Burgos – brought to the discussion of events in Guatemala was a face and voice; a human

presence. Before I, Rigoberta Menchú, Guatemala’s horrors were discussed in terms of

statistics and anonymous descriptions of abuses. After, there were human beings with

families, lives and hopes for the future – real people whose suffering one could identify

with. In one sense, by taking Rigoberta’s testimony seriously as a document, by

interrogating it and attempting to discover its hidden and collateral purposes, Stoll is

completing the process of taking indigenous voices seriously as interlocutors. He is

subjecting I, Rigoberta Menchú to the same skeptical treatment with which one would

hope scholars would receive statements by…David Stoll. What many of the critics

object to, however, is that despite his avowal that he is not doing any more than scholars

do to each other every day, his treatment of Rigoberta Menchú is actually much rougher

because the indigenous voices in our public conversation are not really conditioned to

that conversation. Not only are they vastly fewer, and in that measure alone more

delicate, but – as was noted above -- they are generated according to different rules about

time, person and literal accuracy of detail. If we were to begin disqualifying them on the

10
basis of such cultural differences, we would put ourselves back in the condition of

knowing rural, non-Western places only from statistics, impersonal case studies, and our

own voices. Is there a balance that can be struck between respectful and critical

listening? That, it seems to me, is the profoundest question with which David Stoll and

the commentators that follow leave us.

*****

Originally, the debate about Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor

Guatemalans that follows was to have consisted of three brief reviews and a response by

David Stoll. Given the media frenzy that greeted the book’s publication, what we had

hoped for was to provide a space to begin a serious discussion of some of the issues

about recent Guatemalan history that had been overlooked in the mainstream press. At

the same time, we also thought we might be able to offer some context, counter

arguments and bibliography for teachers who may have been tempted to shy away from

assigning I, Rigoberta Menchú following the media reaction. When the first review was

received, however, and proved to be longer than the space that had been contemplated for

the entire set, it was clear that the forum was going to be something more.

Eventually, six reviewers were invited to participate. The first three that follow --

Carol Smith, Norma Chinchilla and Victoria Sanford -- are scholars of Guatemala who

have also been actively involved with Guatemalan refugees, human rights advocacy and

the reconstruction of Guatemalan rural history throughout their adult lives. All react

strongly to Stoll’s version of that history, which in a sense is also their own. Following

them is a literary scholar, Georg Gugelberger, who has written extensively about

testimonio as a genre and I, Rigoberta Menchú in particular. His interests are the nature

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of oral “literature,” and its meaning when transported into a Western setting. Finally, the

fifth and sixth contributors are not exactly reviewers at all. Elizabeth Burgos, who of

course was Rigoberta Menchú’s collaborator in the production of her testimonio, offers a

personal view of the book’s history from before it was even written, and both in her

essay and a final rejoinder reflects on some of the misunderstandings in the present

controversy. And the sixth, Gary Gossen, who like me has watched Guatemala from

next door in Chiapas over the last couple of decades, argues that among the Maya people

of Guatemala and Mexico alike (and, I might add, Belice, Honduras…and the United

States), I, Rigoberta Menchú has taken on a life of its own that may in a sense make the

present debate moot. Whatever the precise truth status of its particular details, Gossen

says, Mayas in all of these places are in fact reading it and recognizing a version of their

own stories. It has become, he concludes, a chartering epic of a new pan-Mayan identity.

To all of the contributors, I would like to express my thanks for their thoughtful and

passionate essays. Finally, I would especially like to thank David Stoll for his generosity

in agreeing to participate in this forum, for his forbearance while the reviews were

collected and edited, and for his prompt and careful reply.

-July 28, 1999

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 NOTES

1. Burgos 1984.

2. Rohter 1998, Omang 1999, Leo 1999, Reader’s Digest 1999 and Horowitz 1999.
These are, incidentally, just a selection from dozens of articles attacking Rigoberta. As
for the second, more contextualized category of articles, see Peter Canby in the New
York Review of Books, and Gregg Grandin and Francisco Goldman in The Nation. Julia
Preston’s account of the press conference in Mexico City at which Rigoberta Menchú
attempted to answer many of Stoll’s charges, the interviews with both Menchú and Stoll
published in NACLA Report on the Americas (Burt and Rosen 1999; Dudley 1999), and
a further interview with Menchú in Madrid’s daily El País (Aznárez 1999) are also
noteworthy. (It should be mentioned that many of those who led the chorus of criticism
of Rigoberta cannot be sloughed off as ideologically hostile either to her, to the plight of
Guatemala’s indigenous people, or to the issue of human rights. Larry Rohter, who
wrote the first article in the NY Times, was one of the first -- and few -- US journalists to
document the massacres in Guatemala as they were occurring; and Joanne Omang of the
Washington Post has an equally honest reputation for reporting from Latin America. If
anything, both writers understood the international apathy to the crimes of the military
regimes of the 1980s against which Rigoberta had spoken, and were probably inclined to
be sympathetic to her. That they finally were not perhaps demonstrates the extent to
which mainstream journalism likes its stories to be unambiguous and its heroes
unalloyed.)

3. E.g., Stoll 1998: viii-xv; Stoll in Dudley (1999); and conversation with Stoll on “Talk
of the Nation,” National Public Radio, June 10, 1999.

4. “The Army’s perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas

contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against
them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to the
extermination en masse of defenseless Mayan communities purportedly linked to the
guerrillas...through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral consciousness of the
civilized world. These massacres and the so-called scorched earth operations, as planned
by the State, resulted in the complete extermination of many Mayan communities, along
with their homes, cattle, crops and other elements essential to survival. The commission
registered 626 massacres attributable to these forces.” (UN Commission for Historical
Clarification 1999: 60-63.) (This summary of the commission’s report goes on to
describe graphically some of the horrors the Army perpetrated.)

5. REMHI, which trained some 800 Guatemalan parish workers to investigate the
violence of the 1960s, seventies and eighties, based its final report on more than 6000
interviews with both victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses, 61% of them
conducted in indigenous languages. The statistical distribution of guilt for human rights
abuses was very close to that found by the CEH: 79% were committed by the Army, 9%
by the guerrillas, and the rest by unspecified paramilitaries, police and others. Most of
the abuses took place between 1980 and 1983. (See Ogle 1998: 33-34.) (The

13
coordinator of REMHI, Bishop Juan José Gerardi, was bludgeoned to death two days
after the report was released. Both his murder and the fact that more than a year later it is
still unresolved testify to the violent repression that has never really ceased in Guatemala
despite a formal peace agreement.)

6. See Stoll, p.192ff., for his views on this “deception” (“engaño” in Spanish.) For a
cogent reply, in addition to Smith and Chinchilla below, see Grandin and Goldman
(p.27), who argue that the Mayas who joined the guerrilla had ample historical
experience to make up their own minds about the risks of defying the Army, and must be
presumed to have been fully conscious of what they were doing. Whether the guerrilla
movement should have ceased its confrontational tactics -- and even its proselytizing --
in the face of the State’s evident willingness to murder entire Mayan populations was, by
the way, passionately debated at the time. In English, see Marlise Simons (1981:97ff.),
who calls attention to the “moral bind” which the Army’s willingness to punish all
villagers, supporters of the guerrilla or not, had created for the guerrilla leadership.

7. In addition to Burgos’ essay in this collection and the interviews with Rigoberta in
note 2, see the interview with Arturo Taracena, representative of the Ejército Guerrillero
de los Pobres (EGP) in Paris at the time of Rigoberta’s sessions with Burgos. (Aceituno
1999) For Deaver’s -- and Reagan’s -- views see Rohter (1982.) (Speaking to the press
in Guatemala City soon after Reagan took office, General Vernon Walters, the
administration’s special emissary to Central America, “dismissed most criticism of the
human rights situation...in terms similar to those used by the Guatemalan government...”
and expressed “the United States’ hopes to help that government defend peace and
liberty...” (Dickey 1981.))

8. Stoll himself refers frequently to his earlier work in Ixil-speaking villages (Stoll 1993)
to establish how the guerrilla operated -- and how villagers reacted to it -- among K’iche’
speakers like Rigoberta’s family and neighbors (e.g., Stoll 1998:8ff.,116-118, 131ff.)
Similarly, Carol Smith (below) -- who recognizes the difficulties represented by the
limited number of local histories -- finds a counter example to Stoll’s Ixil and K’iche’
cases in still another neighboring community, Aguacatán, where although there were
K’iche’s, the dominant language is neither K’iche’ nor Ixil, but Awakateko. As Duncan
Earle points out in a forthcoming article, however, in the region he knows best, southern
Quiché department, there were sharply divergent responses to the guerrillas even within
single communities, from the members of such “modernizing” groups as Catholic Action
who tended to provide their supporters, to “traditionalists” who generally tried to remain
neutral. He also notes, however, that when the Army began massacring entire villages, it
did not discriminate between those who supported the guerrillas and those who did not:
all were killed equally. In this sense, indigenous experience in large regions was
undoubtedly the same. Moreover, when the scorched earth campaign began, the guerrilla
movement, often led by members of Catholic Action, began presenting itself as
representative of a supposedly united Maya people, including the traditionalists CA had
formerly disdained. All of these confusions both in memories about what happened and
in the documentary record will have to be sorted out for each locale. (What is needed,
clearly, are more close, local historical studies like that of Ixcán by Ricardo Falla(1992).)

14
 REFERENCES

Aceituno, Luis
1999! “Arturo Taracena rompe el silencio: Entrevista a Arturo Taracena sobre Rigoberta
Menchú,” in El Acordeón, cultural supplement to El Periódico, Ciudad de
Guatemala, 10 de enero.

Aznárez, Juan Jesús

1999 “Los que me atacan humillan a las víctimas: Entrevista a Rigoberta Menchú,
Líder indígena guatemalteca y premio Nobel de la Paz,” El País, Madrid, 24 de
enero, pp.6-7

Burgos, Elizabeth
1984 I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, English translation by
Ann Wright; New York and London: Verso (nineteenth printing, 1995.)

Burt, Jo-Marie and Fred Rosen

1999 “Truth-Telling and Memory in Postwar Guatemala: An Interview with
Rigoberta Menchú,” NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April, pp.6-10

Canby, Peter
1999 “The Truth About Rigoberta Menchú,” The New York Review of Books, April 8,
pp.28-33

Dickey, Christopher
1981 “Haig’s Emissary, in Guatemala, Discounts Charges of Rights Abuse,”
Washington Post, May 14, p.A-16

Dudley, Steven
1999 “David Stoll on Rigoberta, Guerrillas and Academics,” NACLA Report on the
Americas, March/April, sidebar on pp.8-9

Earle, Duncan
nd “Menchú Tales”, in Arturo Arias, ed., The Properties of Words: David Stoll,
Rigoberta Menchú and Identity Politics in Central America, University of
Minnesota Press (forthcoming.)

Falla, Ricardo
1992 Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala (1975-1982), Boulder: Westview
Press.

Grandin, Gregg and Francisco Goldman

1999 “Bitter Fruit for Rigoberta”, The Nation, February 8, pp.25-28

Horowitz, David
1999 “I, Rigoberta Menchu, Liar,” Salon, January 10.

15
Leo, John
1999 “Nobel Prize for Fiction?” US News & World Report, January 25.

Ogle, Kathy
1998 “Guatemala’s REMHI Project,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept/Oct,
pp.33-34

Omang, Joanne
1999 “When Facts Stood in the Way of the Crusade” (book review), Washington Post,
January 25, p. C-2

Preston, Julia
1999 “Guatemalan Laureate Defends Her Book,” New York Times, January 21.

Reader’s Digest,
1999 “That’s Outrageous!”, May, pp.51-52

Rohter, Larry
1982 “Guatemala: No Choices,” Newsweek, March 1, p.24
1998 “Nobel Prize Winner Accused of Stretching Truth,” New York Times, December
15, p. A-1

Simons, Marlise
1981 “Guatemala: The Coming Danger,” Foreign Policy, #43, summer, pp.93-103.

Stoll, David
1993 Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, New York: Columbia
University Press

UN Commission for Historical Clarification

1999 “Findings of the UN Commission for Historical Clarification,” (summary of
findings) NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April, pp.60-63.

16
pp. 15-28 in 1999 printed version

Why Write an Exposé of Rigoberta Menchú?

by
Carol A. Smith
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

In the preface and first chapter of his book, David Stoll notes the following about

Rigoberta Menchú's book. "There is no doubt about [her] most important points: that a

dictatorship massacred thousands of indigenous peasants, that the victims included half

of Rigoberta's immediate family, that she fled to Mexico to save her life, and that she

joined a revolutionary movement to liberate her country" (p. vii). She is only misleading

or wrong about the "situation of her family and village life before the war," (p. vii) as

well as about her presence at some of the situations she describes. He adds, "most of the

pressure that forced the army and the government to negotiate [with the guerrilla, leading

to a Peace Accord at the end of 1996] came from abroad, and it was generated by human

rights imagery" (p. 8) in which Rigoberta's book played an extremely important role (p.

11). After these concessions, Stoll asks, "if Rigoberta is fundamentally right about what

the army did, if her story expresses a larger truth about the violence, why dissect a

personal account that is inevitably selective?" (p. viv). He answers his question with the

following four points.

First, the catastrophes that befell Rigoberta's family, her village, and other

indigenous villages in western Guatemala were brought on by the revolutionary guerrilla

as much as by the army. In the particular case of Rigoberta's village, Rigoberta's father,

Vicente, appears to have invited the guerrilla there--or at least to have received them

warmly.(1) Hence the targeting of him and his family by the army was quite natural. In

17
the case of Vicente Menchú's death through conflagration at the Spanish embassy, it may

be that the victims (who were protesting army murders of their relatives) immolated

themselves.(2) More generally, guerrillas pursue "a high-risk strategy that usually ends

in defeat and disillusion, after sacrificing peasants to romantic images of resistance" (p.

10). Despite Stoll's previous efforts to make this general point about guerrilla warfare in

his first book on Guatemala (Stoll 1993), few seem to have paid much attention--because

of the influence of Rigoberta's book, according to Stoll (p. 10).

Second, Rigoberta's testimony suggests there was powerful support among

indigenous people for the guerrilla, when in fact support was very weak. In this way

Rigoberta played a major role in mythologizing the popular roots of Guatemala's

revolutionary movement (p. xv). Though dissecting the legacy of guerrilla warfare may

require "beating a dead horse" (p. x)--since even leftists no longer support a guerrilla

strategy--Stoll feels it must still be done because Ché Guevara and the third-world

guerrilla continue to provide a romantic legacy to Western solidarity types and to the

middle-class urbanites of the third world--giving them the illusion that they could wield

real political power in an unjust world. More important, Rigoberta has displaced

authentic indigenous perspectives about the violence--most of which equate the guerrilla

with the army. "Rigoberta's version [of events] was so attractive to so many foreigners

that Mayas who repudiated the guerrillas were often ignored or discounted" (p. xiv).

Third, Rigoberta's story depicts "noble Indians [being dispossessed by] evil

[Ladino] landlords ... [which has] encouraged the Guatemalan left and its foreign

supporters to continue viewing the countryside as a contest among social classes, ethnic

blocs, and structural forces" (p. xii). But the real problems of peasant villages are not

18
these. Most contestation over land is not between Indians and large Ladino landholders

but among Indian smallholders (p.254). The poverty of those peasant villages is brought

on by the indigenous livelihood practices, which involve:

a degenerative process of population growth, slash-and-burn

agriculture, and migration [to frontier areas] that is complicated,
but not altered in any fundamental sense, by the ladino-indígena
conflict and inequitable land tenure to which Rigoberta gives so
much attention. Romanticizing peasants is a hoary tradition
that has the virtue of dramatizing their right to their land (p. 19).

Fourth, in the world of human rights activism, journalism and scholarship a "new

standard of truth" (p.xv) is forcing Westerners to cede authority to the non-Western

subaltern and to local witnesses--i.e., to people such as Rigoberta--and thus to support

those who are invariably apologists for one side or another in situations that cannot be

reduced to two sides. Created under the influence of multiculturalism, postmodernism,

and post-colonialism, this new criterion for veracity has discredited "objective"

portrayals of complex situations. "The underlying problem [with Rigoberta's book] is

not how Rigoberta told her story, but how well-intentioned foreigners have chosen to

interpret it" (p. xiv). She is taken as the only authentic voice on "all poor Guatemalans"

because as an Indian, a woman, and a poor Guatemalan, she (unlike Stoll) represents the

"new standard of truth."

Given that Rigoberta and her story on the violence in Guatemala has been granted

more authority in the West than David Stoll and his story, Stoll had to discredit her if he

was to make his point. So I will take Stoll's arguments seriously and evaluate exactly

what Stoll wants to assert in contra-distinction to Rigoberta: i.e., about guerrilla warfare,

indigenous support for revolution in Guatemala, the extent of and reasons for indigenous

poverty, and the impact of multiculturalism and the "new standards of truth" on the

19
nature of reportage. We will also have to consider what exists in the way of evidence for

the two positions. We cannot go to the same eye-witness (or hearsay) accounts Stoll

used. But we can go to other accounts--not on the truthfulness of Rigoberta's testimony

(which Stoll concedes "expresses a larger truth about the violence"), but on Stoll's points

about the economic and political situation in Guatemala--the reasons he gives for writing

his exposé of Rigoberta Menchú.

(1) Did Guatemala's guerrillas recklessly target those indigenous areas least able to

defend themselves? Were the guerrillas responsible for the brutal massacres carried out

by the Guatemalan military governments? Can one equate the guerrilla and the army as

two similar sources of violence affecting peasants? Stoll documents two guerrilla

killings to nearly one thousand army killings in the municipio where he interviewed

Rigoberta's neighbors and family members (Uspantán), which would lead most of us to

wonder about the disparity. Stoll also wonders about it. After rejecting the argument of

racism (which many specialists on Guatemala consider a powerful factor influencing

Guatemalan violence over the years [see Palma and Arenas, ed., 1999]), he argues that

the "fanatical anti-communism of Guatemala's government that allowed it to slaughter so

many men, women, and children could not have happened without the specter of foreign

communism as provided by the revolutionary theatrics from Cuba" (p. 279). And

because insurgents muddy the distinction between themselves and noncombatants,

according to Stoll, "brutality toward civilians is the predictable result" (p. 155). He does

not ask why civilian massacres by armies were much less common everywhere else in

Latin America where guerrilla warfare was waged--as in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

20
 In the context of Cuba it is important to make several points which weaken Stoll's

argument. First, the period when Guatemala's guerrilla "went public" was when

insurgents in Nicaragua and El Salvador seemed likely to take power. The

revolutionaries took power in Nicaragua in 1979. In El Salvador, there was ultimately a

"brokered compromise" between the guerrilla and the army--but virtually all experts

agree that the insurgents (strongly supported in the countryside) would almost certainly

have won had the US not poured billions of dollars into El Salvador's army (Dunkerley

1988). The strength of these two other revolutionary movements in Central America

certainly affected guerrilla strategy in Guatemala. Guatemala had always been

considered a more questionable revolutionary theater because of the time it would take to

recruit the indigenous population to a mixed-ethnic revolutionary strategy. When

revolution seemed imminent in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Guatemalan revolutionaries--

a large middle-class group since mid-century because of Guatemala's murderous

dictatorships--felt they could not hold back. Much more significant than this, however, is

that the Guatemalan insurgents were not supplied with the arms they expected from the

Cubans, unlike the insurgents in Nicaragua and El Salvador. That fact was enormously

important to the fate of Guatemala's revolutionary movement, especially its ability to

'protect' its peasant recruits.

I argue below that the guerrilla appear to have been relatively successful in

recruiting Indians to their cause. But they were unable to arm them which left the

peasant population extremely vulnerable to the army. Of course at the time the guerrilla

announced their presence, they had no reason to expect that they would be unable to arm

their recruits. The area in which the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor--the only guerrilla

21
group really discussed by Stoll) worked, moreover, was a frontier area, close to the

Mexican border, over which civilians as well as the guerrilla could presumably escape.

The other peasant-recruiting group (ORPA), worked in a more vulnerable area but took

far fewer public actions--though they did charge a war tax on the large plantations of the

South Coast.(3) It is difficult, then, to blame the EGP for being reckless. They were

more successful than they expected and they did not get the arms they had been

promised.

So who is at fault for the murders and exile of more than 150,000 Mayan peasants in

Guatemala? Most experts on Guatemala consider the army responsible, especially since

they showed a consistent tendency to avoid encounters with the guerrilla, preferring to

attack unarmed civilians. I can think of no one other than Stoll who would blame

persons like Vicente Menchú, even if he were a "guerrilla collaborator." Many solidarity

types blame the Cubans as much as Stoll does, but for reasons quite different from

Stoll's--the Cuban failure to arm the Guatemalans. Those who know Guatemalan politics

well blame the US for replacing one of Guatemala's first democratically elected

governments with a lawless military government in 1954, instilling Guatemalan elites

with an enormous fear of 'communism' together with the certainty that the US would do

whatever needed to support them against communism--i.e., helping to arm, train, and

provide intelligence to what had formerly been a poorly organized army, and advising

that army about guerrilla counterinsurgency techniques--such as drying up the ocean

(killing civilians), to eliminate the fish (the guerrilla). (Stoll occasionally mentions US

guilt in the situation, but invariably undercuts it.) There are, it would seem, a surplus of

people and groups to blame. I personally see the situation as a national tragedy that had

22
been brewing ever since a military government took power in 1954. Military

dictatorships motivated various forms of leftist protest, non-violent as well as violent,

and marks the period when death squads began to eliminate political activists, union

leaders, indigenous leaders, and Christian Democrats. Many such murders occurred

before there was a guerrilla presence. Racism accounts for the nature of the 'final

solution' in the 1980s--the huge massacres of indigenous people.

(2) Let us now consider how much the peasants blame the guerrilla for what

happened to them. Stoll bases his entire analysis of indigenous response to the guerrilla

and army on information from four municipios--three in the Ixil area plus neighboring

Uspantán, where Rigoberta's family lived. Hence I cannot use information I have about

the impact of and support for guerrilla warfare in other parts of Guatemala (mainly

Quezaltenango, Chimaltenango, and San Marcos), where circumstances were quite

different. Instead, I use a recent Ph.D. study undertaken by Paul Kobrak (1997) in a

municipio neighboring the Ixil, Aguacatán, to discuss changes in support for the guerrilla

there. In some respects Paul Kobrak, who Stoll seems to admire, is no more flattering to

the guerrilla operating in Aguacatán (also the EGP) than Stoll is of those in the areas he

covers. But he makes two extremely important points that Stoll fails to make. First, he

observes that support for the guerrilla in the remote and very poor K'iché-speaking

hamlets(4) was initially quite strong, even though the guerrilla spent relatively little time

in the area. Locals told him that the entire population could have gone either way

(Kobrak 1997:142)--i.e., with the guerrilla or with the army in mid-1982--but after

careful consideration as a group decided that it was much more dangerous to go with the

23
guerrilla because of the greater army brutality. Nonetheless, a large number of them

joined the CPRs (civilian resistance communities) in the Ixil area (Kobrak 1997:191).

Second, and most importantly, Kobrak provides a historical context for the period

when he was interviewing survivors in Aguacatán (roughly the same time Stoll was

working in the nearby Ixil area). As Kobrak describes it, the male civilian population

had been so militarized and exposed to army propaganda under the civil patrols (groups

of village men made responsible for 'protecting' their communities under the direction

and control of the army) that they had significantly reconstructed their local history.

Like Stoll, Kobrak notes the common use by villagers of the phrase "[we were] between

two armies" (Kobrak 1997:130), but he observes that this local construction was a way

for peasants in the patrols to "neutralize" their own position in the war:

In the 1990s context in which I collected these reconstructions of

the violence, the army was the preeminent power in Guatemala,
having decisively defeated the guerrilla movement and established
their civil patrols throughout the countryside. The army had committed
far more abuse against the civilian population, but the
army's victory made it easy (and satisfying) to vilify the rebels. With
their participation in the civil patrol system [which involved carrying
out many brutalities ordered by the army] villagers had a strategic
and psychic need to justify collaboration with the army. Residents of
civil patrol villages [and this included virtually all villages in the five
municipios discussed here] are most comfortable with rhetoric that
equates the two sides, putting them in the middle as unwilling
participants in the war, as spectators to the repression, rather than
as participants (Kobrak 1997:132).

The point here is that in the late 1980s and 1990s it was virtually impossible to

obtain a clear view of how villagers in the affected regions (where village civil patrols

operated 24 hours a day from 1982 to 1996) viewed the guerrilla or the army. Historical

memory in a time of extreme violence is volatile, all the more so when the victorious side

takes direct control of village life. (See Hale, 1997, who critiques Stoll's first book on

24
exactly this point). Almost certainly the victims of army brutality, who then had to

become directly complicit in army brutality, are going to put a different construction on

their history, on the army, and on the guerrilla--who are blamed by the army for all of

their suffering. I do not question that support for the guerrilla dropped off dramatically

everywhere (including the less affected areas I know best) after it became clear that the

guerrilla were unable to protect the people exposed to army retaliation. Even the

redoubtable EGP guerrilla comandante, Mario Payeras--who in 1984 broke away from

the EGP to co-found a non-combative group--thought the EGP strategy was a disastrous

failure (Payeras 1991). But that does not mean there was never support for the guerrilla

in Guatemala--or that Guatemalans blamed the guerrilla as much as the army.

What most differentiates Kobrak from Stoll is that Kobrak makes it clear that

indigenous peasants were not the dupes of either the army or the guerrilla. Many Indians

supported the guerrilla, but changed their position when they saw what happened to

guerrilla supporters and sought army protection. Others decided to flee the country under

guerrilla protection. Obviously not all succeeded in finding protection. But according to

Kobrak, the peasants had a fairly clear idea of what they were doing--they were not, as

Stoll would have it, "lured into confronting the state" (p. xii) in the absence of knowledge

about the state, which they had confronted in various ways for more than 200 years.

From what I know of indigenous peasants in western Guatemala, very few were

completely ignorant of Guatemala's violent political history in the1970s and early 1980s.

(3) The question now becomes, how intolerable was the poverty of Guatemalan

Indians in the early 1980s and what were its causes. This is something on which

institutions like the World Bank have information and comparative statistics; the World

25
Bank is also a good source for an evaluation of Guatemala's land distribution and its

significance, since it is rarely makes revolutionary recommendations. The World Bank

reports in two studies, one done right before the period of village massacres (1979) and

one just before the Peace Accords were signed (1995), that on virtually every indicator of

poverty (income, malnutrition, infant death, life expectancy, literacy) Guatemala was

close to or the most poor of all Latin American countries in both time periods. In 1995

the poverty rate of all Indians was 93 percent, whereas the poverty rate of urban Ladinos

was 40 percent. Even when they controlled for all the poverty indicators--like rural

locality and education--Indians had a 15 percent higher chance of being poor than

Ladinos did. More than three quarters of the indigenous population (81 percent) lived in

"extreme poverty," defined as lacking the income needed to purchase sufficient food.

My own work before the violence showed (as Stoll notes)(5) that many fewer

indigenous people in the western highlands were migrating to the South Coast to work

seasonally for wages on plantations than before. But that does not mean that they were

prospering. My work has always emphasized the significant differences between

peasants in the periphery (most of highland San Marcos, Huehuetenango, and El Quiché,

which includes the area covered by Stoll and Kobrak) and peasants in the core (the area

near Quezaltenango). Virtually no peasants from the core had migrated to plantations

since the 1960s, only peasants from the periphery. Commercial diversification occurred

in both parts of western Guatemala in the 1970s, but large numbers of people from the

periphery still worked on the plantations and many in the core were becoming

increasingly indebted. The statistics on poverty from the World Bank, which covers both

26
the pre-violence and post-violence periods, speak for themselves--the majority of

indigenous people were not getting enough food to eat!

What about the causes of poverty? Was it limited indigenous access to economic

and political power, caused by Ladino monopolies, which is what I argued? Was it the

extremely unequal distribution of land, as Rigoberta argued? Or was it uncontrolled

population growth among the Maya and their destructive farming practices, as Stoll

argues? My data on 124 municipios in western Guatemala from 1976 showed a higher

correlation between indigenous poverty and Ladino monopolies than with any other

municipal variable (e.g., population density, place in region, average indigenous

landholding, economic specialty). But Stoll could dismiss these data with the argument

that I am simply another scholar who "views the countryside as a contest among social

classes, ethnic blocs, and structural forces" (p. vii)--thus supporting the left interpretation

of economic reality.

The World Bank highlights land distribution--which puts it in the same

"structuralist" category Rigoberta is in. In Guatemala's 1979 agricultural census, the Gini

Index for land distribution was calculated to be 85.9, higher than any other Latin

American case. In fact, it rivals land distribution in pre-reform (1969) Peru. In all land-

size groupings, Indians held significantly smaller amounts of land than Ladinos. The

section of the report on land distribution concludes:

The dissatisfaction with poverty and inequality precipitated an

armed conflict that has lasted, with varying degrees of intensity,
for 40 years and has been estimated to have cost the lives of
approximately 100,000 people and displaced many more. Now
that negotiations are underway to end the conflict, Guatemala
must search for alternatives to violence and repression to deal
with problems and inequality that, in many respects, are as severe
as they were at the start of the conflict (World Bank 1995: v-vi).

27
The World Bank's three main recommendations for dealing with poverty and inequality

include providing greater access to land for the poor and supporting an increase in tax

revenue to improve education (human capital) and infrastructure in the rural areas. There

is no mention of introducing new ("less destructive") farming practices or population

control measures, policy issues with which the World Bank is quite familiar.

If land distribution is as important as the World Bank (and Rigoberta) think, why do

peasants fight each other over small amounts of it rather than fight the few major

landowners in the country (only 2.5 percent of the farm owners own more than 65

percent of the land)? This is Stoll's question. By implication the countless squabbles

over small amounts of land waste time, energy, and resources that could be better spent

in a more 'rational' attack on the big landlords. Stoll apparently does not know what

happens to peasants who attack major landlords in Latin America. Almost everywhere

they end up in jail--if they are lucky; as often they end up dead. Robert Williams (1986)

has a brilliant description of political relations between latifundistas and minifundistas

for all of Central America, including Costa Rica. Even without the guerrilla menace,

large landlords in Latin America viciously attack peasants who compete for their land,

usually with state support. In peasant battles, by contrast, a persistent smallholder (like

Vicente Menchú) has at least a 50 percent chance of winning against his neighbor.(6)

Most of us who work with peasants do not assume, as Stoll believes we do, that peasants

are noble. But we have discovered that they are relatively rational. I find it very odd that

Stoll asks the question he does about struggles between smallholders. Does he believe

that his (weakly supported) argument that these struggles are more common than

28
struggles against major landlords will prove that land inequality is not a major problem in

Guatemala?

Stoll's claim that the real development issues in Guatemala are uncontrolled

population growth and ecologically destructive farming practices is much more serious.

He is quite right that Guatemala's (especially its rural, indigenous) population has a high

rate of population growth. But what he appears not to appreciate is the difference

between cause and effect. Most population experts believe that the underlying cause of

high population growth is poverty and a primitive economy--where most income is made

through expenditures of raw, unskilled labor. It is now well known that in economies

where the rates of infant mortality, income inequality and land inequality are low, where

most children are sent to secondary school (true of a very small minority in Guatemala),

and where most women work outside of the home (again, Guatemala's rate is very low),

birth rates fall dramatically. In other words, transforming a country with a high

population growth rate calls for a "revolutionary" economic reform that Guatemala may

well never see--for the only political sector that has supported such an economic policy

has been the left. Such a radical economic reform in Central America has been most

fully achieved in Costa Rica (through land reform, high taxation, and high educational

achievement), where the birth rate has significantly fallen. High birth rates are not a

Church or cultural problem, as Stoll implies. Catholic Italy currently has the lowest birth

rate in the world, well below national reproduction.

A similar relationship exists, with some differences, between wealth and

ecologically sound farming practices. Farmers have to be rich enough to be able to

afford ecologically sound farming. Or they have to have been pushed out of full-time

29
farming. The farmers of San Miguel Totonicapán, where no one has had enough land to

be a full-time farmer for more than fifty years, are the only Guatemalan farmers I know

who have the time to terrace, rotate trees over their fields, and use organic fertilizer.

Those who are clearing new land in frontier areas (the situation of Vicente Menchú and

others in areas that Stoll knows) are probably in the worst possible situation in this

regard.(7) They have insufficient labor, very little infrastructural support, and a pressing

need to produce enough to keep their families alive each year. Under such

circumstances, clear cutting is typical--whether undertaken by a smallholding peasant or

by a larger plantation. Regardless of whether peasants or plantations are the worst

offenders in this situation, it seems rather bizarre to blame Guatemalan peasants for their

poverty by noting their "destructive" farming practices (not to mention uncontrolled

population growth). Stoll gives no review of the literature on either issue, and I very

much doubt that his analysis of Guatemala's poverty would be accepted as it stands for an

MA or PhD by any social science department emphasizing development issues. Blaming

the victims for their poverty in the case of Guatemala also seems utterly gratuitous.

(4) Objective reportage, according to Stoll, is no longer appreciated in the social

sciences, heavily influenced by literary theory, postmodernity, and a general post-

colonial or multicultural uncertainty about the trustworthiness of white first-world men.

Witnesses who represent the subaltern--people like Rigoberta, who are from oppressed

classes in third-world countries--are better sources on the oppressed and on the meaning

of their lives than are outside reporters. This has given Rigoberta an 'unfair' advantage

over Stoll--the objective reporter, just trying to get at the truth. Perhaps the best response

to this charge would be a brief synopsis of the discussion and debate around 'situated

30
knowledges' in feminist theory. This literature pointed out that men could not be trusted

to represent women, that white women could not be trusted to represent black women,

that anthropologists from the imperial centers could not be trusted to represent the

'natives'--not because they were less 'objective,' but because everyone is positioned and

situated in the world with bias so that they cannot fully see the reality of another world.

The subaltern herself sees the world through a distinct positionality or bias and thus

needs to be in dialogue with people and scholars who represent other positions and

positionalities. Hence the encouragement by most contemporary scholars to bring new

and different voices into the cannon that have not previously been represented--not just

Marx, Weber, and Durkheim on oppression and exploitation, for example, but Marx,

Weber, Durkheim, and Rigoberta.

Most scholars consider the argument about new voices, new ways of representing

the world, new ways of seeing such things as truth and responsibility to be a very

progressive move. There may have been excesses. And it is not always a sure bet that

the representative from the third world will have a more useful take on its problems than

a representative from the first world. But David Stoll's very positionality in the debate he

has set up between himself and Rigoberta Menchú makes it seem all the more important

that Rigoberta exists as one (not the only) voice for "all poor Guatemalans," and that

Stoll exists to represent the illusory truth of 'objective' reportage.

I have used Rigoberta's book for many years in my classes and have always

emphasized the phrase she uses on her first page: ..this is my testimony...[but] I'd like to

stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people... My story is the

story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people

31
(Burgos 1983:1). I tell my students to read the book as if it is a general rather than

particular depiction of life in Guatemala, noting that in testimonies it is typical for a

person to present the experience of a whole people as if it happened to a single

individual--because that may be the only way outsiders can understand and empathize

with another way of life. Even though I do not teach, and I doubt many students go away

with, the literalist reading that Stoll feels compelled to refute, my students learn a great

deal about a life of poverty, politicization, and struggle in Guatemala by reading

Rigoberta's book.

We read many other things, many different kinds of analyses, at the same time. On

the issues of poverty and revolution we read World Bank statistics, a David Stoll article,

and Robert Williams (1986). We also read articles by one of the first and most important

critics of guerrilla strategy in Latin America, Timothy Wickham-Crowley (1991,

1992)(8) and Mario Payeras (1983), who provides a frank account of guerrilla brutality.

I include a wonderful short article by Barrington Moore on the costs of peasant

revolutions postponed. Hardly a radical, Moore describes the high costs of any kind of

peasant struggle, and then compares those costs to the costs of unfulfilled revolution--in

terms of deaths by starvation, malnutrition, class and state murder and oppression, and

delay in achieving political and economic 'modernity.' The point is that in most courses

where various new subaltern or post-colonial voices are introduced, they are almost

always introduced in dialogue with very different perspectives. In the future I will

probably even introduce chapters from Stoll's exposé. The "postmodern and/or

postcolonial" move to add new voices to our experience is not an attempt to restrict the

32
repertoire of perspectives, it is an attempt to expand it to include voices never before

represented. Only reactionaries in the academy object to this move.

One reason we now emphasize the complexity of truth and the need to hear many

voices rather than a single 'objective' source is that facts do not speak for themselves,

they always have to be interpreted. Let me illustrate this point with one simple example

from Stoll's book. Stoll asserts that Guatemala's conservatives immediately recognized

the falsehoods in Rigoberta's testimony (p. 198), and it is almost certainly "factually true"

that most did reject her depiction of indigenous life in Guatemala from the beginning.

But on what basis did they recognize falsehoods? What do Guatemala's conservatives

know about Rigoberta's or Guatemalan peasant life? I was always shocked at how very

little they knew. What makes Stoll think that their rejection of Rigoberta's testimony was

anything other than a statement of their political convictions? To present conservative

knowledge as some kind of bolstering "factual" evidence for his own position without

any interpretation of who the characters are and why they believe what they do is

actually quite ludicrous. It seems to be little more than a rhetorical device--of which

there are a great many in Stoll's book. It, nonetheless, rests on an absurd kind of "truth."

For this reason, then, I have to conclude that if forced to take out one of the

perspectives listed above from a course on Central America it is more likely to be Stoll

than any of the others. The reason is that he is the least clearly positioned of all the

authors. He is positioned--having at least an anti-left, anti-postmodern, anti-structuralist,

and anti-solidarity position--but he claims not to be positioned and then tries to bolster

weak scholarship on the larger issues (Guatemala's guerrillas, historical memory,

poverty and its causes, and multiculturalism) with spurious claims of objectivity on

33
unrelated phenomena (who Rigoberta's father battled over land). Stoll basically produces

a polemic about Rigoberta and his four issues, which comes less from scholarly

conviction and more from personal frustration about losing a monopoly on authority.

This, I think, explains why Stoll wrote an exposé of Rigoberta Menchú. One wonders if

he will try to topple all the alternative voices on Guatemala with exposés.

- January 31, 1999

34
 Notes

1. Stoll argues that Vicente Menchú had little connection to CUC, a civilian front of the
EGP, but may have been directly connected to the EGP. Though the chapter treating
Vicente and the EGP makes it clear that the evidence supporting this allegation is very
thin (a few neighbors’ accusations versus denials by many others), this does not prevent
Stoll from describing Vicente as a guerrilla collaborator without qualification later in the
book (p.277). This is not a-typical of the way that Stoll argues.

2. This is only Stoll’s speculation, for which there is little or no evidence -- though Stoll
devotes a chapter to it. Stoll’s evidence is not always so weak, but the mixture of
arguments on which there is some, none, and a great deal of evidence makes his case
seem much stronger than it actually is.

3. According to Stoll, any army is likely to treat with brutality any population whose
loyalty is uncertain (p.154). Yet the army carried out no massacres of the plantation
populations, certainly not of plantation owners, even though their revolutionary “taxes”
were much more substantial than the small amounts of subsistence goods peasants
provided the guerrilla. In other words, it is far too simplistic to see army brutality against
civilians as a mere effect of their uncertainty about the enemy.

4. These K’iche’ speakers were the poorest people in Aguacatán, unlike the situation of
K’iche’ speakers in Uspantán, thus contradicting Stoll’s essentialist image of the K’iche’
(p.17). The people living near the pueblo in Aguacatán had very little contact with the
EGP, though some of them were still heavily attacked by the army.

5. This is about all Stoll uses in the way of evidence for his claim that the economic
situation of the Indians was improving before the revolutionary attempt. He essentially
has no data on indigenous poverty.

6. Stoll makes an enormous point of the fact that Vicente Menchú mainly fought his
indigenous in-laws over land rather than large Ladino-owned estates in Uspantán, as
Rigoberta suggests in her book. While this might very well be the case, it is quite likely
that Rigoberta’s father spoke often and critically of the large estate owners in the
vicinity, several of whom were known to pay extremely low wages to their indigenous
workers.

7. Throughout his book, Stoll describes Vicente Menchú as the owner (holder of a title)
of 2,753 hectares--an enormous amount of land in the context of Guatemala--and
continuing to fight for 151 hectares with his in-laws. It appears, however, from Stoll’s
own discussion, that Menchú is holding the title for at least 45 families, if not more, as is
typical in an INTA land settling operation; that most of the land except the disputed piece
is poorly watered; and that making this land productive will take decades of hard labor.

35
8. On the logic and negative features of guerrilla warfare, Wickham-Crowley develops a
much stronger and more reasoned argument than Stoll by presenting a fuller picture of
variation. He notes, for example, that Guatemala’s record of peasant massacre and
murder by the government in both the 1960s and 1980s went well beyond the records
established in any other case of guerrilla warfare. Stoll uses Wickham-Crowley to
support his argument that guerrilla warfare is costly to peasants, but never mentions this
caveat about the case of Guatemala.

-----

References

Burgos-Debray, Elizabeth, ed.

1984 I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian Woman in Guatemala. New York: Monthly

Review Press.

Dunkerley, James
1988 Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America. New

York: Verso.

Hale, Charles R.
1997 “Consciousness, Violence, an the Politics of Memory in Guatemala,” in
Current Anthropology 18:5 (Dec.), pp. 817-838

Kobrak, Paul
1997 Village Troubles: The Civil Patrols in Aguacatán, Guatemala. Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Of Sociology, U of Michigan.

Payeras, Mario
1993 Days of the Jungle. New York: Monthly Review Press.

1993 Los fusiles de octubre. Mexico City: Juan Pablos.

Palma, Gustavo and Clara Arenas

1999 Identidades y Racismo en Guatemala, FLACSO, Guatemala.

Stoll, David
1993 Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Wickham-Crowley, Timothy P.
1991 Exploring Revolution: Essays in Latin American Insurgency and
Revolutionary Theory. Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe

36
 1992 Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America. Princeton, N.J., Princeton
University Press.

Williams, Robert
1986 Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America. Chapel Hill, U. North
Carolina Press.

World Bank
1995 Guatemala: An Assessment of Poverty. Report No. 12313. Washington, D.C.

37
pp. 29-37 in 1999 printed version

Of Strawmen and Stereotypes:

Why Guatemalan Rocks Don’t Talk

by
Norma Stoltz Chinchilla
California State University, Long Beach

Long before David Stoll's book actually appeared, and New York Times journalist

Larry Rother gleefully proclaimed it a definitive expose of Guatemala’s only Nobel

Prize winner since writer Miguel Angel Asturias (and the only indigenous female, let

alone Guatemalan, to become an international icon), there were articles and interviews

purporting to summarize Stoll’s argument and motives for advancing it. From exposure

to a few of these, I formed my first impressions of David Stoll's project, and was willing

to give his motives for devoting ten years of his life to it the benefit of the doubt.

I seriously questioned the timing of a book that would, most certainly, tarnish the

reputation of one of the few objects of international pride Guatemalans have had over the

last few decades and worried that its appearance would make an already difficult process

of reconciliation for peace more difficult. But I was willing to concede that Stoll's

inquiry, however, uncomfortable and disagreeable, might lead to a useful reexamination

of the idealizations that inevitably emerge during a war. I was interested in honest

discussions of a revolutionary strategy that, in retrospect, had underestimated the power

of the enemy and carried such a high cost in human lives, particularly indigenous

Guatemalans. I knew, from experience, that complexities, nuances, and contradictions in

a society are typically overlooked or go unmentioned in the course of mobilizing support

for one or another side in a war or in efforts to stop widespread human rights violations.

38
 If all Stoll intended to do, I reasoned, was to show how Rigoberta's autobiography

might have been partly a composite biography or an oversimplified account, crafted in

the midst of an historical context which required a certain amount of clandestinity and

dissimulation to survive, that could be useful information for those who study and use

oral histories. Or, if hers was an account partially shaped by the international audience to

whom she was trying to communicate–the “First World” anthropologist to whom she

first told her story, and later the audiences in the United States whose sympathy on behalf

of the plight of indigenous peoples, human rights victims and activists for change she

sought–that might be important to know. Furthermore, different regions of Guatemala

had undoubtedly experienced the Army, the revolutionary movement and the violence

differently, and reconstruction of events in specific communities could be useful in spite

of methodological difficulties such as the fact that many witnesses are dead and survivors

tend to shape interpretations to fit those of the victors (in this case, the Army).

Reconstruction of village experiences might be useful even if, as in this case, the villages

were not representative of those most sympathetic to the revolutionary movement or

those most subject to Army retaliation.

Revisionist History

Reading the book, however, disavowed me of my original generosity about Stoll's

agenda and intentions. Here, more than in the excepts and press coverage, the full

dimensions and intent of his intellectual project and its ideological underpinnings

become clear. Not only is it his goal to question whether or not Rigoberta Menchú

herself was an eyewitness to the events she narrated, and whether or not the story she

tells about her family and community coincides with that of other family members and

39
villages, but whether or not her testimony, even if viewed as a composite one, is a valid

account of how the violence began, whether Indians who sided with the revolutionary

movement did so out of conviction or, as Stoll believes, out of pragmatism, fear and

manipulation, whether solidarity and human rights activists bought into a mythical

interpretation of the origins of the war, and whether Rigoberta's telling of "her" story

around the world actually prolonged the war as Stoll, recklessly and without foundation,

in my opinion, alleges.(1)

More important than "exposing" an international icon is Stoll's desire to advance a

revisionist version of recent Guatemalan history, one supported by few other sources

other than Army apologists. His version of history is one in which the real cause of

poverty is not conflicts between impoverished peasants, mostly Indian, and landed

oligarchy, mostly ladino, but rapid population growth. In Stoll's narrative, the primary

source of conflict in the countryside is inter-indigenous tensions over land and the real

cause of genocide is not the systematic implementation of counter-insurgency plans

devised in consultation with U.S. military advisors (such as "Plan Ixil" and Ríos Montt’s

Plan Victoria ‘82") by military officers trained by the U.S.in the 1960's and 1970's, but

the actions of “panicked” soldiers and “a homicidal sector” of the officer corps baited by

the guerillas. The "indiscriminate" massacres of many innocent civilians, in Stoll's view,

were an understandable, if regrettable, response to the strategy of "irregular war" in

which combatants and civilians cannot be clearly distinguished. Army and guerilla

violence are roughly equivalent, the result of evil people acting against rural people who

are mostly victims. Stoll never discusses historic links between Guatemalan Army

violence and U.S. training and advising, or why torture, extra-judicial disappearances,

40
and attacks on unarmed civilians have been hallmarks of counter-insurgency campaigns

in Latin American countries without rural insurgencies or why the repression extended to

villages with little direct involvement in the revolutionary movement.

Revolutionary Strategy

In Stoll’s version, Guatemalan Indians were recruited to a strategy which had

“failed” even before in the heyday of the movement’s growth in the 1970's and and the

Army massacres of the 1980's. Stoll implies that guerilla leaders “knew” of the potential

risks involved but failed to give peasants and Indians adequate “consumer protection

warnings” before joining. Anyone who knows the history of armed revolutionary

movements in Latin America knows, however, that the defeat of Che in Bolivia was little

to do with the of the Guatemalan guerilla movement in the 1980's. Che and his band

never managed to get to first base with Bolivian peasants. But Guatemalan

revolutionaries incorporated Indian as well as Christian (liberation) philosophy into their

theoretical frameworks, knew local languages and took years to understand local

conditions, and, unlike Che in Bolivia, recruited successfully from local populations in

the areas of their greatest strength. One was based on the “foco” guerilla war perspective

and the other on “popular war” more akin to the Vietnam experience (which eventually

resulted in independence.)

Given the long history of racial/ethnic divisions, state-sponsored repression and

generalized mistrust in Guatemalan culture, what is extraordinary is the degree of support

the revolutionary movement had among rural Indians and ladinos in the 1970's and early

1980's.(2) Not all rural Indians and ladinos, perhaps not even the majority, supported

the revolutionary movement. Rarely does any social change movement that involves a

41
high degree of risk successfully mobilize a majority of those who are supposed to benefit

from it. Nor was there a perfect fit between the goals and dreams of those who supported

the movement and those who led it or a homogenity of motives among the active and

passive supporters affiliated with it at different times in different places. There never is.

Gaps between the rhetoric or coherent narrative of leaders and the agendas and

experiences of followers are a given in social movements as are exaggerated claims of

representation. But what is undeniable is that, after the victory of the Sandinista

revoution in 1979 and prior to the Ríos Montt coup which implemented a coherent

counter-insurgency strategy and centralized military command in 1982, both the CIA and

revolutionary sympathizers believed that the Guatemalan revolutionary movement was a

real contender for power. Throughout the 1970's, popular (unarmed) movements

demanding land, better wages and working conditions, and en end to repression were

strong, heterogeneous and broadly based. It was partly their strength, particularly in

indigenous areas, and, later, the threat of an indigenous insurrection, rather than the

threat of the guerilla alone, that caused the Army’s response.

Thus, the armed revolutionary strategy adopted in the 1970's did not appear as

doomed as it might appear now. If, in retrospect, it is important to question whether the

strategies were justified, given the human costs, the counter-insurgency capacity of the

Army, and the international context (particularly the resolve of the U.S. not to let another

Nicaraguan revolution take place in the region), as some ex-guerilla strategists and

activists themselves have done, this is done with the benefit of hindsight and what we

know about the course Guatemalan history actually took. And, if the adoption of an

armed revolutionary popular war strategy actually closed off other paths and cause

42
missed opportunities for other forms of resistence, this was not evident in the 1970's

when organizing within this framework began.

The Human Agency of Indigenous Revolutionaries

Despite denials to the contrary, Stoll seems to believe that Indians who joined the

revolutionary movement in the 1970's, or participated in the beginnings of rural

insurrections between 1979 and 1982 (not led or directed by the URNG ), were not

really capable of pursuing their own political agenda but were misled or used. Indians,

like other poor people, are thus better understood as victims or dupes, rather than

historical agents. He also seems to believe the presence of economically “better off”

rural or urban leaders or intermediaries (priests, nuns, missionaries, university and high

school students, middle peasants, etc.) undermines a movement’s claims to be fighting

poverty, illiteracy and inequality. More literate and educated people always are catalysts

for social movements on behalf of the poor, disenfranchised, and dispossessed. Few

social movements would qualify if we removed those led by individuals who came from

more literate and economically comfortable backgrounds.

Stoll recognizes that a number of Indians were guerilla combatants and cadre,

including middle level leaders, in several revolutionary organizations. But he uses the

fact that leaders at the highest levels were ladino to discredit the significance of their

participation as an indication of agency. While we can and should critique the relative

absence of women and Indians in high level leadership positions in the Guatemalan

guerilla movement, such absences should not serve to discredit the significance of the

hundreds who joined the movement with agendas that both paralleled and diverged from

those of top leaders. Women, for example, frequently saw participation in the revolution

43
as a vehicle through which sexism and discrimination could be addressed (despite the

reluctance of leaders to raise these issues directly) (see Chinchilla 1998), and Indian

women and men joined the revolution to address issues related to racism as well as

economic exploitation.

Rigoberta and the Human Rights and Solidarity Movements

There is no doubt many people in the United States who met Rigoberta for the first

time in the early 1980's were impressed, moved, and even transfixed by her. She was

young, articulate, and intelligent. For those of us who knew Guatemala, the fact that an

Indian, specifically an indigenous women, from a country where Indians had been

marginalized and subordinated, could connect so well to audiences of people so different

from her was nothing short of extraordinary. Rigoberta left lasting impressions, as well,

on cynical journalists and television interviewers.

Powerful as Rigoberta’s book, and even more importantly her persona, were in

reaching uninitiated audiences, heads of state, and international diplomats, however, I,

Rigoberta Menchu was hardly the human right’s and solidarity movement’s "little red

book." And Rigoberta was never its titular leader. If it turns out to be true that scholars

were not skeptical enough about Rigoberta's representation of her particular family and

village, it is because the outlines of her account coincided with those of many other

reputable sources, including a landmark study of land concentration and landlessness by

the U.S. Agency for International Development published in 1982, and eyewitness and

second hand accounts by missionaries, priests, nuns, ministers, anthropologists, Peace

Corp volunteers, journalists, refugees and immigrants, and U.N. workers.

44
 While it may be true that the popularity of Rigoberta's book on college campuses

made her a key source for some students and teachers who knew little else about

Guatemala, for the Guatemalan solidarity, human rights and scholars’ groups, Rigoberta

was hardly the only or even the most important source of information. At the national

and international level, people concerned about Guatemala were never dependent solely

on URNG represenatives for their information about political conditions and human

rights. Amnesty International, Americas Watch, scholars, journalists, and a myriad of

church groups took great pains to document the situation and design campaigns to stop

the repression.

Even the National Network in Solidarity with Guatemala (Nisgua), formed in the

early 1980's, had a wide range of groups and members as its affiliates--pacifists, armed

struggle supporters, liberals, socialists, human rights activists, atheists, clergy,

missionaries and ordinary church goers, students and professionals, Spanish teachers,

artists, anthropologists, archeologists, world travelers, hippies, (U.S.) Native Americans,

weavers and importers of indigenous crafts, etc. The URNG analysis of events and

strategies was always available in Nisgua but it was not always accepted and it certainly

was not embraced without question. The most enduring point of unity in Nisgua was

working to end serious human rights violations and changing U.S. policy. As Marilyn

Moors, who worked closely with Washington D.C. Nisgua groups and the national office

told me in recent a conversation, "Never have I known a network made up of more

contentious groups and individuals than Nisgua in the 1980's." Her observation

coincides with my own first hand experience.

45
 Groups affiliated with the solidarity and human rights networks included many

Guatemalan activists, some of them recent immigrants, representing a variety of ages and

class, ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds. In Los Angeles, the Guatemalan

solidarity committee in which I worked always had access to a wide variety or opinions

and voices from families of committee members and the large Guatemalan immigrant

community, numbering somewhere between 100,00 and 200,000, including some 2,000-

3,000 Q’anjob’al Indians. These voices ranged from URNG supporters and combatants

to ex-soldiers and deserters, Q’anjob’al Indians who had worked with the EGP and those

who claimed to have been victimized by them, priests who supported the movement and

those who didn't, Guatemalans who were Marxists and those who were staunch anti-

Communists, and a variety of political party activists, from right to left. People in the

solidarity movement who had grown up in Guatemala or who had deep roots there were

very familiar with the complexities, contradictions, and many levels of meaning, overt

and hidden, of a social reality more characterized by repression and instability than

democracy and trust.

Likewise, the Guatemala Scholars Network, which began with some twenty

members in the early 1980's and grew to its present size of some 350 affiliates, has

always been a politically and philosophically diverse group, as Stoll, who himself has

been a member for some years, undoubtedly knows. The Scholars Network included

well-informed individuals with long time experience in Guatemala. If we add together

the Guatemalan activists, the scholar activists, and other students, journalists, and ex-

missionaries and clergy, we undoubtely had more people who had first hand knowledge

of Guatemala, in all its complexity, than any other similar support movement in recent

46
history–Vietnam, Chile, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua or El

Salvador.Behind the activism was a deep appreciation for historical context that Stoll,

despite his anthropology Ph.D training surprisingly lacks.

If Stoll wishes to be taken seriously, he must do more than substitute one

superficial, unidimensional stereotype for another. His portrayal of the Guatemala

solidarity movement and the network of activist scholars who took up various aspects of

human rights and solidarity work in the 1980's is little more than a caricature of a reality

he claims to have witnessed.

Reaction to the Book in Guatemala

Stoll asserts that anyone who subscribes to an historical view of the origins of Army

violence by dating it back to the 1960's or to elite fears generated by land reform and the

mobilization of workers and peasants during the 1944-54 reform movements (violently

brought to an end through a CIA-supported coup) and anyone who believes that poverty,

discrimination, repression and inequality created fertile ground for revolution has

“bought into” the URNG line.(3) Human rights agencies, solidarity organizations, the

United Nations, European governments, scholars, religious people, and ordinary citizens

have fallen for this URNG-propagated myth, Stoll believes, because Rigoberta's

testimony has given it credibilty. Rigoberta's claim to tell the story of “all poor

Guatemalans” scholars and solidarity and human rights activists has given this version of

history a credibility that it would otherwise not have.

But this version of history, in one form or another, is also shared by many

Guatemalans, including those not necessarily sympathetic to the revolutionary

movement. Guatemala’s Foreign Minister, who recently spoke at my university, for

47
example, cited poverty, discrimination, political repression, inequality and a lack of

democracy as the principal reasons for the war. The local Deputy Consul General talks

in similar terms. Furthermore, most Guatemalans believe that Rigoberta’s narrative is

eseentially true, if not for her and her family, then for the many other Indians who

suffered during the war. They question, furthermore, the naivete of a white North

American anthropologist traipsing through the areas controlled or previously controlled

by the Army that have suffered repression asking questions about politics and clandestine

organizations. They are stunned, to learn, for example, that a trained anthropologist,

could ask the mayor of Uspantán if people in his town had been organized by the

Committee for Campesino Unity and take his answer ("I don’t recall anyone calling a

CUC meeting”) at face value. Like indigenous poet Humberto Akabal they believe that

“In Guatemala, it is not that the rocks can’t talk; it is that they don’t want to.”

This is why the debate over Stoll's critique of Rigoberta's book in Guatemala has

been dramatically different from that in academic journals and the mass media of the

United States. The debate in the Guatemalan press was intense for little more than two

weeks and then became insignificant. More importantly, few Guatemalan writers or

politicians, including notoriously conservative and anti-communist ones such as Jorge

Skinner-Klee and Carlos Manuel Pellecer have found little in Stoll's argument with

which they could identify.. Skinner-Klee went so far as to call Rigoberta’s book “a

Guatemalan epic” on the order of The Odessy or The Iliad.

Stoll's version of the U.S. human rights and solidarity movements, likewise, is naive,

at best, and opportunistic, at worst. He must impeach not only Rigoberta, but all of the

human rights and solidarity movements to create space on the stage for his idiosyncratic

48
version of recent Guatemalan history. He attempts to do this by turning the solidarity

and human rights movements into caricatures and convincing us that Rigoberta’s

testimony was their centerpiece. His has done so without little consideration of how his

own positionality might have shaped his choice of a lens (Rigoberta and the Guatemalan

revolution) through which to pursue his intervention in developed country cultures wars.

He is brashly unapologetic for his use of an inherently problematic methodology and

insufficiently concerned about how the time and circumstances of his first entries into the

region (in the middle of the worst of the war in the early 1980’s when only the Army and

people sympathetic to them reportedly trusted him) might have shaped his understanding

of rural indigenous Guatemala or how his conducting interviews in a areas where he does

not speak the local language might influence what people choose to tell him. In the end,

it is Stoll the journalist, rather than Stoll the scholar who pursues what some have called

the “symbolic impeachment” of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony.

-May 24, 1999

49
pp. 38-46 in 1999 printed version

Between Rigoberta Menchu and La Violencia:

Deconstructing David Stoll's History of Guatemala
by
Victoria Sanford
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University

In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, David Stoll discounts

lived experiences of state terror in general, and Rigoberta’s experiences in particular,

presenting conjecture and hearsay as fact in order to attack details of Rigoberta’s

testimony. His explanation for scrutinizing Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú, however,

though somewhat buried in the work, is not to quibble about details but to contest her

entire representation of the guerrilla movement and La Violencia of the late 1970s and

1980s. Although he does obliquely acknowledge the army’s violence against Maya

civilians in the final chapters of his book, his take on La Violencia is that the guerrilla

bears responsibility for having elicited the army’s atrocities. If Rigoberta’s

representation of these events is accurate, he tells us, then his own previous work “was

wrong about Ixil country.” On the other hand, if his construction is correct, he expresses

“hope” that his re-examination will “help the Latin American left and its foreign

supporters escape from the captivity of Guevarismo.” (1999:pp.12,282)

With these purposes in mind, let us look at Stoll’s evidence. One of the most

egregious assertions in Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans is

Stoll’s representation that a massacre at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala in 1980 was

actually a self-immolation coordinated by student and indigenous leaders of the peasant

protesters occupying the embassy (pp.71-88) -- a fallacy recently repeated in the Times

Literary Supplement by Ilan Stavans in his review of Stoll’s book.(1) Both Spanish

50
military investigators in their 1981 report on the massacre, however, and the recently

published findings of the Commission for Historical Clarification conclude that the army

carried out a premeditated firebombing of the embassy. Indeed, all accounts of the event,

except for the Guatemalan Army’s and David Stoll’s, charge the army with responsiblity

for this massacre in which Vicente Menchú, Rigoberta’s father, was killed. In addition to

blaming Vicente Menchú and the other victims of the massacre for their own deaths, at

different points in his narrative, Stoll labels Menchú “a thief,” “an illegitimate child,”

“not supplicatory,” “bitter,” and a “myth.”(pp.25,32,104) Here as elsewhere, his

narrative strategy appears to be to distract attention from the army’s culpability for its

atrocities -- a difficult task given that these range from selective assassinations to such

public acts as the firebombing of the Spanish Embassy and massacres of 626 villages,

acts which finally claimed the lives of more than 200,000 Guatemalans. At the same

time, he tries to make suspect any sympathy one might feel for the victims and survivors

of what the Commission for Historical Clarification has qualified in legal terms as a

genocidal campaign against the Maya. In the words of the CEH, “agents of the State of

Guatemala ... committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people ... all these

acts committed ‘with intent to destroy [them] in whole or in part.’” “...with great

consternation,” the CEH concluded, such “massacres ... obeyed a higher, strategically

planned policy, manifested in actions which had a logical and coherent sequence.” (CEH

1999: pp.40-41) Of the Spanish Embassy massacre in particular, it determined that

“agents of the state” were responsible for “the arbitrary execution of those inside the

Spanish Embassy” and that “the very highest levels of authority of the government of

Guatemala are the intellectual authors of this extremely grave violation of human rights.”

51
Moreover, the CEH specifically noted that “the hypothesis that victims immolated

themselves has no foundation.” (CEH 1999 Caso Ilustrativo 79: p.14)

While Stoll challenges the details of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial epic and casts

suspicion on the character of Rigoberta and Vicente Menchú, he is quite generous in his

descriptions of generals who held the presidency and were in command of the

Guatemalan army at the height of state terror. Despite extensive documentation of army

abuses under the presidency of General Kjell Laugerud (1974-1978), for instance,

including the May 29, 1978 Panzós massacre, Stoll claims that under Laugerud “the

army scaled back terror.”(50) Laugerud’s successor, General Romeo Lucas García

(1978-1982), in turn, ushered in the epoch which would come to be known as La

Violencia, beginning with selective assassinations and later metastasizing into massacres

in Maya villages throughout the country. Even an October 5, 1981 Department of State

Memorandum classified as “Secret” acknowledged that dictator General Romeo Lucas

García believed that “the policy of repression” was “working,” a conclusion which the

state department official writing the memo went on to explain was based on a definition

of a “successful” policy of repression as one that led to the “extermination of the

guerrillas, their supporters and sympathizers.”(2) This would be the same General Lucas

García whom Stoll describes as “doddering.”(p.51) During General Lucas Garcia’s

dictatorial reign as president, his brother Benedicto served as Minister of Defense. In

addition to Romeo’s discussions with the US Department of State about his “successful

policy of repression,” his brother Benedicto, who is credited with the design of the

scorched earth campaign, received “Combat Intelligence” and “High Military Command

Training” at the United States Army’s School of the Americas.(3)

52
 Though Stoll claims that General Ríos Montt, who became president following a

military coup, was able to “rein in the death squads around the capital”(p.147), all

evidence is to the contrary. Under Ríos Montt, (1982-1983), massacres as a key tool of

military policy continued and intensified in rural Guatemala while urban repression

became so extreme and paranoid that, in May of 1982, the army illegally detained and

tortured 11 adolescents in Guatemala City. After two weeks of torture in a clandestine

jail, only eight of the youth survived.(4) During Ríos Montt’s regime, along with

teachers, students, labor organizers, health workers, priests, nuns and catechists, even

children were considered “subversive.”

Critical to understanding why massacres in Maya communities constitute genocide

is the fact that massacres were not a singular tactic of one military regime. Rather, the

army combined the institutionalization of massacres with a “scorched earth” campaign

which included not only the complete destruction of villages and surrounding fields, but

also the relentless hunt for survivors with army helicopters dropping bombs on displaced

civilians in the mountains and ground troops encircling and firing upon those fleeing the

aerial attacks. Such “tactics” were used right through the regimes of Laugerud, Lucas

García and Ríos Montt. With a highly sophisticated national strategy under the tight

control of the army command from Guatemala City, and with military bases spanning the

country but concentrated in the predominantly indigenous highlands and lowlands,

ground troops and aerial forces carried out orders to massacre Maya hamlets and then

saturate the mountain with firepower in the army’s attempt to exterminate the unarmed

Mayan men, women, children and elderly who had fled the massacres and destruction of

their communities.

53
 For massacre survivors who fled to the mountains, and later surrendered to the

army, rebuilding their villages and lives under army control, surviving state terror has

meant living daily life in extremely militarized circumstances for up to fifteen years

following a massacre. Even when the overt expressions of militarization are withdrawn,

internalization of encounters with terror continues to shape and define individual

relationships within families and communities, as well as community relationships with

the nation-state. Survivor testimonies viewed in the context of the discourse and practice

of the various phases of state terror, can help us to understand that while the torture

victim’s missing tooth may be interpreted as a sign of survival and the empty army base

as a victory for peace, each also represents a living memory of terror that continues to

shape and define daily life. Under these circumstances, discrepancies encountered in

testimonies taken in the field should not be taken to indicate a faulty memory, an

invention or a lie. Rather, these contradictions should “lead us through and beyond facts

to their meaning” as experienced by survivors and witnesses.(5)

Moreover, regardless of whatever contradictions the researcher in the field may

come across, we now have wide access to an ample and broad range of primary and

secondary resources, including declassified CIA and State Department documents,

municipal archival records, far-reaching investigations carried out by the Archbishop’s

Office and the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), as well as the forensic

reports of nearly fifty exhumations of clandestine cemeteries. These documents offer

factual and evidentiary corroboration to the context of the terror provided by the

testimonies.

54
 A declassified “Secret” CIA document from late February, 1982, states that in mid-

February of 1982, the Guatemalan Army had reinforced its existing forces and launched

a “sweep operation in the Ixil Triangle. The commanding officers of the units involved

have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the

Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources of resistance.”(CIA Feb.

1982: p.1) Point one of the memo claims that civilians “who agree to collaborate with

the army ... will be well treated.” Yet, in point three of the memo, the CIA acknowledges

that “a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.” Moreover, point

three is concluded with “COMMENT: When an army patrol meets resistance and takes

fire from a town or village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is

subsequently destroyed. . . . An empty village is assumed to have been supporting the

EGP, and it is destroyed.” Therefore, those who had heard of army massacres in

neighboring villages and abandoned their villages to save their lives had their villages

destroyed. Point four of the CIA memo cynically concludes that the Army High

Command is “highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep operation and believes it

will be successful.” Significantly, the CIA then clarifies that “the army has yet to

encounter any guerrilla force in the area,” and goes on to conclude that the army's

“successes to date appear to be limited to the destruction of several ‘EGP-controlled-

towns’” and “the killing of Indian collaborators and sympathizers.” It must be noted that

forensic evidence from exhumations of more than 50 clandestine cemeteries confirms the

absence of army/guerrilla combat and verifies massacre survivor testimonies that

massacres were not the outcome of an exchange of fire between the army and guerrilla,

or civilians caught in crossfire. Rather, massacres were carried out by the Guatemalan

55
army on unarmed Maya men, women and children. Finally, point four justifies the

massacres of Ixil civilians and destruction of their villages with “COMMENT: The well

documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has

created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants

and non-combatants alike.”(ibid: pp.2-3).

In the month of January, 1982, prior to the internal circulation of these CIA

documents, a minimum of 399 civilians were killed in army massacres and operations in

24 different Maya communities in seven different departments. In two reported

massacres, the number of victims was unknown. All of this is before the army began its

“sweep operation” so cynically, but aptly, described in the CIA documents. In the month

of February, at least 327 civilian men, women, children and elderly were killed in army

massacres in 22 different Maya communities. The number of victims in four of the

massacres still remains unknown.(6)

If anything, CIA documents, despite their convoluted language and censored

presentation, acknowledge Guatemalan army massacres of civilians and also concur with

the Guatemalan army that all Ixiles are “pro-EGP.” This concurrence between the CIA

and the Guatemalan army that all Ixiles are “pro-EGP” represents the official conflation

of political affiliation and ethnicity. Thus, the US embassy and its officers in Guatemala,

the US State Department and the CIA justify Guatemalan army destruction of the social,

political and material culture of the Maya in general, and the Ixiles, in particular. This

justification based on the concocted idea that all Ixiles are “pro-EGP.”

While negating the reality of state violence documented by the CIA earlier that

same year, a November 1982 internal State Department document analyzing international

56
human rights organizations reflects the sentiments of the CIA’s February 1982 Secret

document which affirmed the Guatemalan army would “give no quarter to combatants

and non-combatants alike” based on the idea that anyone who did not support the army

must support the guerrilla. This now infamous internal State Department document

claimed that respected international human rights organizations such as Amnesty

International (AI) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) had

“successfully carried out a campaign of Communist-backed disinformation.”

Significantly, the State Department concluded that human rights reports documenting

Guatemalan army massacres of unarmed civilians were “a concerted disinformation

campaign waged in the United States against the Guatemalan government by groups

supporting the left-wing insurgency in Guatemala.”(7)

The veracity of the human rights reports of AI, WOLA and others can no longer be

credibly contested and, in fact, recent comprehensive investigations conducted by the

Archbishop’s Office and the Commission for Historical Clarification now confirm that

victims of the violence far exceed the commonly cited: 440 villages burned off the map

by the Guatemalan army; one and a half million people displaced; 150,000 fled into

refuge; and, 100,000 - 150,000 dead or disappeared. Indeed in its recently published

report, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) concluded that 626 villages

had been massacred; that more than 200,000 people were dead or disappeared; that 1.5

million Guatemalans were displaced by the violence; and that more than 150,000 had

fled to refuge in Mexico. Further, the CEH found the state responsible for 93 percent of

the acts of violence and the guerrilla responsible for 3 percent. All told, 83 percent of the

victims were Maya and 17 percent were ladino.(8)

57
 Nonetheless, there are those who continue to conflate human rights workers with the

guerrilla. Not surprisingly, this reduction is easy to come by among Guatemalan army

officers. One high-ranking officer told me that when he thought of human rights

workers, he envisioned someone “wearing a Che Guevara beret with a star and carrying a

machine gun.” That is to say that in his mind’s eye, there was no difference between an

armed insurgent and a human rights worker. Unfortunately, this view is not limited to

the Guatemalan military and their advisors. In his book on Rigoberta Menchú as well as

in an earlier article on human rights activism (1996), David Stoll reflects the

Guatemalan army’s rhetoric and practice of blurring the distinctions among guerrilla

combatants, land rights activists, religious workers, and anyone else challenging the

military regime or local non-Maya landholding elite to a single category.(9) The same

kind of language and identification were used by the army to justify killing off all local

leaders including Mayan priests, literacy promoters, teachers, health workers -- and land

rights activists such as Rigoberta’s father Vicente Menchú. As in the internal 1982 State

Department analysis of human rights organizations, Stoll groups solidarity activists with

anti-intervention activists, with human rights workers, with academics carrying out

research (1999: pp.10-11; 1997: pp.187-188). Within this political schema, anyone who

disagrees with Stoll is homogenized into someone who supported or supports the

guerrilla. Interestingly, though Stoll both constructs and deconstructs Rigoberta Menchú,

his own book about Rigoberta cannot withstand the type of scrutiny to which he

subjected her book. And, significantly, the places where this US trained academic’s

research falls apart is in exactly the places where concrete primary documents are

available.

58
 One example of such a lapse is Stoll’s review of recent Guatemalan history in which

he claims there was a lack of relationship between the United States government and the

Guatemalan military regime in the 1960s.(p.48) This is a curious summary of an era

which saw a continuation and expansion of counterinsurgency and intelligence training

for Guatemalan military officers at the School of the Americas. In fact, School of the

Americas documents date this training relationship with Guatemala back to 1947! (10)

Additionally, in the 1960s, meetings of Central American ministers of the interior (who

have jurisdiction over police and internal intelligence) were organized and led by the US

State Department with assistance from the CIA, AID, the Customs Bureau, the

Immigration Service and the Justice Department. These meetings were “designed to

develop ways of dealing with subversion,” according to William Bowdler, who

represented the State Department at the gatherings.(11) And they led to the parallel

development of paramilitary organizations throughout Central America with death

squads known as the Mano Blanco (White Hand) in El Salvador, and the Mano (Hand) in

Guatemala. The extreme terror waged against civil society in Guatemala in the 1960s

killed thousands of peasants and distinguished Guatemala as the first country where

“disappeared” came to be used to describe the political condition of being kidnapped by

government death squads, tortured to death and buried in a clandestine grave.

Finally, David Stoll must be held accountable for his choice of the persons upon

whom he relied to contest Rigoberta's story. Although he does not generally refer to his

key informants by name, he gave a list of them to journalist Larry Rohter for his report in

the New York Times (December 5, 1998, p.A-1). One such informant is Alfonzo Rivera,

whom Rohter introduces “as the clerk for the municipal government [who] for thirty

59
years kept all official records.” In the Times article, Rivera is critical of Rigoberta

Menchú, and his criticism is presented as having special authority because of his

responsibility in the local government of Uspantán. What isn’t mentioned in Rohter’s

story or Stoll’s book is that Rivera was removed from office and jailed in 1994 under

charges of corruption and misuse of public funds. Nor do they mention the type of

collusive relationship local functionaries had to maintain with the military in order not

only to keep their jobs, but simply to stay alive during La Violencia. This probably

explains why former military commissioners in Uspantán identify Rivera as a trusted

friend while Uspantecos from surrounding villages are suspicious of his ties with the

army and many who live in town simply describe him as “corrupt.”

It is ironic that Stoll undermines testimony as a resource for history when his own

reconstructions of history lack credible sources. Testimony has been and continues to be

the principle avenue by which semi-literate and non-literate people can communicate

their world to those who wish to understand their struggles. Rigoberta Menchú, like her

father Vicente, never claimed to be apolitical. Testimony is itself inherently political and

Stoll attacks the very essence of Rigoberta and I, Rigoberta Menchú which is the right of

the Maya in general, and Mayan women in particular, to political consciousness, self-

representation and political action.

-May 18, 1999

60
 NOTES

This essay greatly benefited from the close reading, insight, feedback and editorial
comments of Ramiro Avila Santamaría, Phyllis Bech, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick,
Julia Lieblich, Jan Rus, Rich Stahler-Sholk and Joan Kruckewitt. Special thanks to the
students in my course “Human Rights in Latin America” for their careful reading of Stoll
and Menchú. Any shortcomings are mine alone.

1. See Stavans, Ilan. April 23,1999, “The Humanizing of Rigoberta Menchu,” Times
Literary Supplement.

2. Unclassified United States Department of State Document Memorandum, October 5,

1981, Reference No. 6366, pp. 1-2.

3. School of the Americas yearly lists 1947-1991 of Guatemalan Military officers trained
at SOA released by the Department of State.

4. See Sanford, Victoria. 1997. Mothers, Widows and Guerrilleras: Anonymous

Conversations with Survivors of State Terror. Uppsala: Peace and Life Institute, pp.1-5.

5. Portelli, Alessandro. 1991. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories -- Form
and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, p.2. See
also, LaCapra, Dominick. 1998. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. And also, Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies - The
Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press.

6. Number of massacres victims based on Oficina de Derechos Humanos del

Arzobispado de Guatemala. 1998. Nunca Más, Tomo IV, Víctimas del Conflicto -
Informe Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, Guatemala
City: Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala; Guatemalan
Forensic Anthropology Foundation Forensic Reports on Exhumations 1994-99;
Denuncias filed with Defensoria Maya and CERJ through September 1997. See also
Shelton Davis and Julie Hodson. 1982. Witness to Political Violence in Guatemala.
Impact Audit 2. Boston:Oxfam America; and, Amnesty International Reports 1982,
1984; Americas Watch Reports 1982, 1983, 1984.

7. United States Department of State , Nov. 1982. "Guatemala: Human Rights

Analysis." pp. 1-3.

8. See Carmack,Robert, ed. 1988. Harvest of Violence: Guatemala's Indians in the

Counterinsurgency War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; Falla, Ricardo. 1992.
Masacres de la Selva: Ixcan, Guatemala (1975-1982). Guatemala City: Ediotrial
Universitaria; Manz, Beatriz. 1988. Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of
Counterinsurgency in Guatemala. Albany: State University of New York Press; Smith,
Carol. 1990. Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988. Austin: University of

61
Texas Press; among others. See also CEH, 1999. Guatemala - Memory of Silence -
Conclusions. http://hrdata.aaas.org/ceh/report/english/intor.html , p.3.

9. Stoll, David. 1996. "To Whom Should We Listen? Human Rights Activism in Two
Guatemalan Land Disputes." In Richard Wilson, ed., Human Rights, Culture and
Context: Anthropological Perspectives, pp.187-215. London: Pluto.

10. United States Army School of the Americas yearly lists 1947-1991 of Guatemalan
Military officers trained at SOA released by the Department of State.

11. Nairn, Allan. 1984. The Progressive, pp.21. Nairn's 1984 analysis of the US role in
developing paramilitary organizations throughout Central America is further confirmed
by the following declassified CIA and State Department documents: United States
Embassy in Guatemala Memoranda to the Secretary of State on September 15, 1962;
March 13, 1963; and, January 23, 1964. See also Memorandum of the Special Group
September 25, 1963; Telegram from US Embassy in Guatemala to the State Department
January 5, 1966; Public Safety Division USAID/Guatemala, Operational Rescue of
Terrorist Kidnapping and Guatemala Police Activity to Counter, December 1965; CIA
Memoranda dated March and April 1966. Note: all declassified documents cited in this
essay are now available from the National Security Archive in Washington, DC.

62
pp. 47-52 in 1999 printed version

Stollwerk or Bulwark?
David Meets Goliath and the Continuation of the Testimonio Debate

by
Georg M. Gugelberger
University of California, Riverside/UNAM, Mexico

“Gingerly, I was feeling my way into”(1) David Stoll’s recent book, Rigoberta

Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), after having read an excerpt in

the literary journal Brick, responses to it, as well as the by now (in)famous piece in the

New York Times and others, the last one todate probably in The Nation. Curiosity

obviously was rising as to the full length study. When I finally received a copy of the

book I attempted an arabic reading of it, from the bibliography to the book’s beginning.

At first I was impressed by the bibliography. At a second glance, however, David Stoll’s

study reveals numerous problems of scholarship. The impressive bibliography quickly

turns into a catalogue of substantial lacunae: David Stoll does list (thank you!) my recent

book on the testimonio debate, The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin

America (1996), for instance, but all too quickly it becomes apparent that he is only

familiar (as he had only listened to the first tapes of Rigoberta Menchú’s voice at the

home of Elizabeth Burgos-Debray) with the collection’s earlier essays. Meanwhile he

indicates almost complete lack of awareness of the critical discussions of the third

testimonio phase (represented by Alberto Morairas, Gareth Williams, Jorge Sanjinés, and

others). The more theoretical and dense essays are apparently too complicated for our

simplifier. One can easily draw the conclusion that Stoll must be resistant to recent

literary theory despite contemporary anthropology’s increasing dependence on literary

theory in the past decade. The author also lists the Latin American Perspectives’ special

63
issue on testimonio, “Voices of the Voiceless,” but unfortunately only its first volume

completely dismissing the second volume with its very short and yet emotional piece by

a student whose response to a reading of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio indicates the

enormous power of this literary text. Regrettably it is this kind of response which from

now on will be less possible due to Davis Stoll’s intervention. Most of the essays in the

special issue of Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana (1992) are also not cited

although the issue as such is properly listed. What good, one may ask, are

bibliographies in books which only indicate that the compiler has obviously not read

them?

These lacunae are quite telling, for through them it becomes obvious that the

academic who so easily attacks the scholarship of others regarding the controversial

production of testimonio and testimonio criticism could easily be accused of sloppy

scholarship himself. The minimum one should expect of a self-declared “sociocultural

anthropologist” (Stoll, 1999:12) is that if he writes on literary issues he properly informs

himself about testimonio or testimonial literature (yes, literature!). This is a complex

genre at the threshold of other genres which continues to defy definition. One would also

expect an anthropologist not to confuse this relatively new genre with autobiography, life

story, and documentary. And finally, one would assume that the author would

familiarize himself with studies of the testimonio beyond the early definitions by John

Beverly and George Yúdice which Stoll indeed cites. It does not suffice to merely buy

into Beverly’s definition of a testimonio as a story “by a narrator who is also a real

protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts” (Stoll, 1999:242) or “similarly

Beverly’s colleague George Yúdice’s” definition as “an authentic narrative, told by a

64
witness...” (ibid.) These were early attempts at a definition. However, there are no

sacrosanct definitions. Testimonio is a hybrid and much more complex genre (which we

must know by now at least after facing the misreadings by anthropologists such as David

Stoll), closer to literature than to documentary. Traces of the real, “huellas de lo real,”

was a definitional attempt which came much closer to the understanding of the genre.

By now testimonio is probably better understood in light of the burgeoning production

of novels of testimony and resistance such, for example, as Manlio Argueta’s works

from El Salvador, and others. (2) An anthropologist closer to this genre due to his own

involvement with it through translation and editing, Paul H. Gelles, is certainly correct

when he states: “While Stoll’s piece is provocative (Gelles speaks of the earlier

publication of part of Stoll’s book in Brick) and brings to light valuable information on

the ethnography of testimonial production, his lack of attention to the production of

testimonial narratives and the way he singles out Menchú for blame raises serious

questions” (Gelles, 1998:16). Gelles points out that “Stoll ignores the incisive work in

literary criticism” (ibid.).

Suffice it to say that, to my mind at least, the best response to Stoll’s critique of

Rigoberta Menchú’s “false memory” was made years ago by Shoshana Felman and Dori

Laub in their study Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and

History (1992). John Beverly, in an essay with which Stoll claims to be familiar, quoted

a significant and extensive passage from their book and actually alludes to an

anthropologist named David Stoll who at that time was not yet known. It is interesting

that David Stoll does not want to heed the implications of this passage I am about to cite

again. The passage has to do with the case of a woman survivor and the eyewitness

65
account of the Auschwitz uprising she gave for the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust

Testimonies. The “narrator” recounts that all of a sudden she (or rather “we”) saw four

chimneys going up in flame, exploding. Some historians (of the Stoll kind) at a later

point inspected this video but could see only one chimney. Therefore the witness’s

account must be inaccurate. The comment by Felman and Laub is as follows:

A psychoanalyst who had been one of the interviewers of the

woman, profoundly disagreed. “The woman was testifying,”
he insisted, “not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but
to something else more radical, more crucial: the reality of an
unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up at Auschwitz
was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the
fact of the occurrence. (Felman and Laub, 1992: 60 and cited
in Gugelberger, 1996: 276).

This is precisely what Rigoberta Menchú has done. She commented on the reality of an

unimaginable occurrence. It does not matter so much if every detail is accurate. She

called attention to the horrors of a situation and she makes us re-experience through her

particular wording the horrors of these unimaginable occurrences. What more can we

expect of a twenty year old women living in exile? Similarly Arturo Arias observes

regarding the psychological situation of Rigoberta, age 20, out of her country, and

dictating during a gray and cold winter day in Paris what was to become her famous

testimonio. It must have been a manuscript full of fantasies, “fantasmas” in a

psychological sense and full of confusions. According to Arias it was an endless

monologue of the type Yo el supremo by Roa Bastos. “Only a puritan like Stoll,”

comments Arturo Arias, “the Henry Hyde of Anthropology, could get something out of

such things” (Arias, 1999). Stoll’s emphasis on numbers and inaccuracies, his insitence

that Rigoberta could not have seen everything she claims to have seen, his petty

discussions of how much Spanish Rigoberta with 20 years of age really knew when she

66
got to Paris (after all she had been in Chiapas before leaving for Paris) are all exemplary

of hair-splitting of the worst kind if not a total refusal to permit the work of the human

psyche. The anthropologist who already professed his dislike of literary theory now also

appears to deny the subtlety of human psychology.

About Menchú’s new book Rigoberta: La Nieta de los Mayas (1998) Stoll

comments only very sparingly and very depreciatively: “The new book is revealing but

not revelatory” (Stoll, 1999: xi). Here we have again Stoll’s infuriating tone, this

hairsplitting characteristic of his study, ‘it is revealing but not revelatory.’ From the

beginning of the book, Stoll’s manner is deprecating. From the first “gingerly” to the

constant belittling, there is a very questionable intentionality at work. What are we to

make of such statements as: “given the Nobel laureate’s obvious gifts as an orator and

protagonist,” (Stoll,1999: 183) or “she became a professional balancer of ethnic and

class perspectives” (Stoll, 1999:204), or of Rigoberta’s “aura of unchallengeability”

(Stoll, 1999: 195), “Rigoberta has long been chary of interviewers with tough questions”

(Stoll, 1999:227), her ability “to transfix foreigners”(Stoll, 1999:197) and on and on.

This simply is a pedestrian, pretentious, and pompous way of writing. The chapter

headings by Stoll or his editors are equally questionable: “Rigoberta Breaks with

Elizabeth” (Stoll is on first name basis with friend and foe alike!), “Rigoberta’s Secret “

(without ever expressing a critical understanding of the numerous essays by Doris

Sommer of the same title- in plural, of course!), “Rigoberta Becomes A Symbolic

Substitute,” “The Laureate Goes Home,” “Peace with Justice or a Nobel for More War,”

“The Lonely Life of a Nobel Laureate,” and on and on. If this is meant to be ironic or

even sarcastic it hardly works. Even where Stoll is accurate, and, undoubtedly in many

67
instances he very well may be, the tone of this book makes it virtually unreadable.

Stoll’s efforts simply backfire into a “detailed, sometimes fascinating and often tedious

attack,” as Tim Golden called it in the New York Times (Golden, 1999).

What are we to make of the observation that Menchú hardly uses the term Maya:

“But the term “Maya” is so new in Guatemalan discourse that Rigoberta barely

mentioned it in her 1982 account” (Stoll, 1999:17). Or again “I should reiterate that the

term “Maya” is almost missing from the published text of I, Rigoberta Menchú...” (Stoll,

1999:207). I wonder why Stoll does not observe the frequency of the term Maya in the

new book? It is there from the title on, Rigoberta: la nieta de los mayas,” but David Stoll

prefers to use the English title, Crossing Borders. Why? Has he not come across

Rigoberta’s attempt to situate herself when she states:

I am not a philosopher. I am quite simply a grandchild of the

Mayas. Probably not a daughter, because a daughter is too close
in family terms. A grandchild, on the other hand, implies having
grand parents, implies having a history, a past (Rigoberta
Menchú, 1998:130. Translation mine).

Contrast this with the tone of David Stoll: “My computer search came up with just three

references, two of which are in the editor’s introduction. Rigoberta’s only use of the

term is in reference to old musical instruments” (Stoll, 1999:208). Is this the new kind of

academic scholarship?

I am actually convinced that Menchú’s second book is considerably more revealing

than Stoll seems to think. I even tend to believe that it was partially conceived as

response to the book Stoll planned since he sent a manuscript to the Rigoberta Menchú

Tum Foundation but never received a response. So David Stoll is miffed that Rigoberta

Menchú never entered a dialogue with him as Elizabeth Burgos is miffed that she was

68
not invited to the Nobel Prize festivities. And Rigoberta Menchú is miffed that the first

book is not her book. In short, everybody is angry at everybody else. A very lamentable

situation indeed. The second book, a memoir and not a testimonio (3), makes substantial

“corrections” and permits some of the observed silences of the first book to speak out

loud and clear. Relatively little is said about the co-author Burgos-Debray, but quite a bit

is revealed about the actual authorship. While David Stoll mentions in a brief aside that

Rigoberta Menchú singles out Arturo Taracena as her main co-author (Stoll does quote

this passage in a long footnote, Stoll 1999: 301 n.8) we are lucky by now to know that

Arturo Taracena finally broke his silence. In an important interview with Luis Aceituno

in the Guatemalteco daily El Periódico , Taracena is quite explicit and claims that Stoll’s

view of the testimonio is quite askew (“una visión sesgada” in the original). He singles

out four protagonists in the production of the testimonio: the interviewer, the interviewee,

the transcriber, and the editor. In this particular case, Taracena insists, “we were actually

four persons who were involved” (Taracena, 1999). According to him I, Rigoberta

Menchú is a collective work and the errors and even horrors which can be part of such a

process of composition are the result of this multiple authorship. Anyhow, as Taracena

correctly insists, in each biography there are inexactitudes, lies, be they intentional or

not. Taracena calls Stoll’s book a product of the Cold War. He also points out the

significance of the tapes to which David Stoll listend to for one or two hours. Had he

continued he may have been able to perceive the voice of Taracena. Elizabeth Burgos-

Debray made all tapes available to him. Incriminating himself, Stoll only claims that:

“Where it not for bad planning on my part, I could have listened to the entire sequence”

(Stoll, 1999:1880). Why, actually, did neither Burgos-Debray nor Stoll follow up on the

69
real co-authorship of I, Rigoberta Menchú? While everybody by now is understandably

miffed by the behavior of the other, the real loser, it seems to me, is someone who was

central in the production of the testimonio, Arturo Taracena.

Meanwhile the facts don’t go away: in the course of suppressing Guatemala’s

guerrilla movement, 150,000 were killed, 150,000 more disappeared, and there remain

one million exiles and refugees, as well as 200,000 orphans and 40,000 widows --

virtually all of these, as everyone now admits, Maya non-combatants killed by the army.

It was, and possibly still is, due to Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio that attention was

finally drawn to these atrocities, and certainly her book helped significantly to alter this

situation. Why does Stoll have to insist on often insignificant details? What are the real

motivations for his study? Why did Stoll only listen to the first hours of the tapes made

available to him and not -as the scholar he claims to be - to the tapes in their entirety?

Why did Stoll leave out a key protagonist in the production of this testimonio? Why

does this Maya scholar not speak Maya himself, and why does he have to rely on an

interpreter in a country which according to his own words “runs on rumors” (Stoll,

1999:264) and in which no one trusts strangers? Only when these questions have been

asked and answered

70
might we truly be able to balance (out) the deficiencies of the two books.

To this day there are numerous responses to David (Stoll)’s attempt to dethrone

Rigoberta Menchú excluding the New York Times piece (1998) by Larry Rohter which

initiated the (in)famous controversy, and the response by Rigoberta Menchú in Madrid’s

El País (1999). They include a more recent article again in the Times by Tim Golden

which strongly distances itself from the first Times piece, a somewhat vitriolic piece by

Arturo Arias (a well known Guatemalteco writer residing in San Francisco), the long

expected response by Taracena, a very emotional piece by Eduardo Galeano, a short

piece by anthropologist Paul Gelles in the Anthropology Newsletter, and in the pages of

the same journal another piece by Greg Grandin, as well as a long essay again by

Grandin together with Francisco Goldman in The Nation, and others. What all these

pieces have in common is a strong negative response to Stoll’s book. I recently

presented a paper on Menchú’s second book and its relation to Stoll’s work at the

“Primera Conferencia Internacional de Cultura y Literatura Centroamericana” at Arizona

State University (April 1999). Of those present, including such such scholars and writers

from Guatemala and Central America as Mario Roberto Morales, Arturo Arias, Manlio

Argueta, Rodrigo Rey Rosa and others, none rose to defend Stoll’s point of view or

study. At a deeper level, those who know the case simply do not appear to find either

credible.

But perhaps the controversy is best put to rest by the words of none less than

Eduardo Galeano who poignantly observed to those who in light of David Stoll’s book

suggested that the Mayan writer return the Peace Nobel Prize:

Patas arriba: el mundo al revés discute ahora si Rigoberta merecía

71
 ese premio, en lugar de discutir si ese premio la merecía (Galeano,

1999:11)(4 ).

-June 6, 1999

-----

NOTES
1. I am here merely copying the haughty opening sentence of David Stoll’s study.
2. See in particular the recent study of “novels of testimony and resistance” by Linda J.
Craft, 1999.
3. For a more comprehensive discussion of Rigoberta Menchú’s second book, a memoir
and not a testimonio, see Gugelberger, 1998:62-68.
4. “What a world! Being upside down it now discusses whether Rigoberta deserved the
prize instead of asking if the prize deserved Rigoberta!

-----

REFERENCES
Aceituno, Luis
1999 “Arturo Taracena rompe el silencio,” Entrevista a Arturo Taracena sobre
Rigoberta Menchú, in “El Acordeón,” of El Periódico, Guatemala, January
10.
Arias, Arturo
1999 “Desde San Francisco”
(http://207.82.250.251/cgibin/getm...G918939361.8&start=86577&len=18792)
Craft, Linda J.
1999 Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America. Gainsville:
University Press of Florida.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub
1992 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.
New York and London: Routledge.
Galeano, Eduardo
1999 “Disparen sobre Rigoberta,” La Jornada, México, D.F., January 16, p.11.
Gelles, Paul
1998 “Testimonio, Ethnography and Processes of Autorship,” in “Ethical Dilemmas,”
Anthropology Newsletter, March, pp.16-17
Golden, Tim
1999 “A Legendary Life. Is Rigoberta Menchú’s Personal History Too Bad To Be
True?,” The New York Times, April 18.
(nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/reviews/990418.18golden.html).

72
Grandin, Greg
1998 “She Said, He Said,” Anthropology Newsletter, April, p.52.
Grandin, Greg and Francisco Goldman
1999 “Bitter Fruit for Rigoberta,” The Nation , February 8
(http://thenation.com/issue/990208/0208granding.shtml).
Gugelberger, Georg M. (ed.)
1996 The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
1998 “Remembering: The Post-Testimonio Memoirs of Rigoberta Menchú Tum,”
Latin American Perspectives, Issue 103, Volume 25, Number 6, pp.62-68.
Menchú, Rigoberta
1998 Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas. Mexico City:Aguilar.
1999 “Los que me atacan humillan a las victimas,” Entrevista a Rigoberta Menchú,
El País, Madrid, Spain, January 24, pp.6-7.
Rohter, Larry
1998 “Special Report: Tarnished Laureate. Nobel Winner Accused of Streching
Truth in Her Autobiography,” The New York Times, December 1998.
Stoll, David
1997 “The Construction of I, Rigoberta Menchú: Excerpts from A work in Progress,”
Brick: A Literary Journal, number 57, Fall 1997, pp.31-38.
1998 “Life Story as Mythopoesis,” in “Ethical Dilemmas,” Anthropology Newsletter,
April, pp.9-11.
1999 Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press.

73
pp. 53-63 in 1999 printed version

The Story of a Testimonio

by
Elizabeth Burgos,
translated by Robert Austin

A zeal for transcendence was the sentiment Rigoberta Menchú transmitted to me at

our first meeting in Paris one January afternoon in 1982. She was accompanied by Marie

Tremblay, a Canadian doctor and collaborator of the guerrilla group Organización del

Pueblo en Armas (Organization of the People in Arms, ORPA.) To understand our

encounter, one has to go back to another, also in January, but in the year 1966, during the

Tricontinental Conference in Havana. The aim of the Tricontinental had been to

coordinate the armed struggle on the three continents in what was then known as the

Third World: Asia, Africa and Latin America. Rigoberta Menchú, of course, was not

among the participants; at the time she would only have been seven years old, and one

must suppose that she could not have imagined the future which awaited her.

Nevertheless, her destiny was set in motion in Havana during that memorable gathering.

I myself had just been expelled from Venezuela, my homeland, to which I had tried to

return after a year-long stay in Bolivia. Also attending the conference was an important

Guatemalan delegation under the young guerrilla leader and ex-army officer Luis Turcios

Lima. Together with the Guinean leader Amilcar Cabral, they were the conference’s

stars.

There are encounters which lay out and determine the course of a life, and such was

my case with a Guatemalan couple who were also at the Tricontinental. Ricardo

Ramírez and Aura Marina Arriola were their real names, and right away we became

inseparable friends. Both were leaders of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo

74
(Guatemalan Labor Party, PGT), and intellectually and in human terms they were an

exceptional pair. Aura Marina was an anthropologist, and an advocate for the

participation of indigenous people in Guatemala’s revolution, which she argued was

crucial for its success. The most suitable model for Guatemala’s armed struggle, she thus

believed, was that of the popular revolutionary war as developed in China and later in

Vietnam. Those long evenings debating with Marina and Ricardo in Havana were what

inspired my partner to write his famous book Revolution in the Revolution? (1)

Years later, the scene had changed. I next met Aura Marina in 1969 in Europe. She

had come with the mission of organizing support networks for the new phase of the

guerrilla, which was to commence at the beginning of the seventies. Turcios Lima had

died by this time, and the guerrilla focos of the sixties had been destroyed. Ricardo had

abandoned the PGT and had returned to Guatemala to establish a new guerrilla

movement, an effort which gave rise to the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla

Army of the Poor, EGP.)

Naturally I joined Aura Marina in the action she had undertaken in Europe, even

though I had by that time already experienced the failure of the guerrilla in Venezuela

and, above all, the defeat of Che in Bolivia, and would later witness the coup that felled

Allende.

When Marie Tremblay arrived at my home with Rigoberta Menchú that afternoon in

January 1982, then, I was neither surprised nor did I think it exceptional. Many of those

who came to Paris in the stampedes of Latin Americans brought on by the dictatorships

passed through my house. Moreover, I had already been working with Marie Tremblay

trying to stimulate a movement in solidarity with Guatemala in France. Rigoberta

75
Menchú's presence in Europe had nothing to do with an anthropological project, but a

political one: it was intended to sensitize public opinion to the terrible repression that

hung over her country, especially its indigenous communities. The terror reigning in

Guatemala was so atrocious that not even foreign journalists dared to get close to it.

Exiles, fearing reprisals against their families, abstained from talking; silence covered

that kingdom of death.

The fact that Marie Tremblay was a collaborator of the guerrilla group ORPA led

me to think at first that Rigoberta Menchú was also a member of that group. However,

Arturo Taracena, a cousin of Aura Marina and an EGP collaborator in Paris, explained to

me that the organization guiding Rigoberta Menchú’s trip was not ORPA, but his own.

Initially, no one spoke about a book. What was proposed was simply a journalistic

interview, which I wrote and published thanks to Ruth Valentini, Angel Parra's partner

and a writer for Le Nouvel Observateur. It was the first interview with Rigoberta

Menchú published in a press outlet of any significance, and it was reproduced in a

number of important European newspapers.

As our meetings had progressed, however, I had become aware of the fascination of

Rigoberta’s testimony and her own talents as a narrator. At first, Arturo Taracena had

accompanied Rigoberta to my house each morning, and come to collect her every

evening. But Rigoberta had to continue her tour -- the next stop was Holland as I recall -

-and Taracena was very busy with his doctoral thesis. To make everyone's life easier,

then, he decided that Rigoberta should stay at my house. We began the recording

sessions very early, interrupting them only to eat. Dinners were moments of

76
companionship: my daughter was then five years old, and we were sometimes joined by

my Venezuelan friend Giovanna Mérola, who was at the time passing through Paris.

Although I had begun the project that became the book as a political action and not

as anthropological research, my education with the Hungarian anthropologist and

psychoanalyst Georges Devereux led me to apply his teachings. For Devereux, the

practice of interviewing was essential to research; his teachings were based on

anthropology and psychoanalysis, and his approach differed from the journalistic and

sociological. He believed that the interviewer should intervene as little as possible;

questions should serve to induce the generation of words by the interviewee, giving free

reign to the unconscious. That is, to free association, respecting silences until the

interviewee interrupted them.

After transcribing the cassettes, I eliminated the questions, as I am accustomed to do

when writing up an interview, and prepared thematic index cards indicating the page on

which each topic appeared in the manuscript. To construct the book, I searched for

themes, cut and began to re-assemble: what one now does with the "cut" and "paste" on

the computer. Having established the structure based on the assembling of themes, I

proceeded with the task of stringing things together, which consisted of looking for rare

pearls: those sentences or words deferred for later examination, lost in the middle of the

debris which must be eliminated so that spoken language continues to transmit a voice

and is, at the same time, readable. That which is not boring, which reads like fiction. In

reality I was more inspired by cinematographic montage than literary techniques,

concretely by Chris Marker and Costa Gavras, whom I had had the opportunity to

observe while they were in the process of editing film.

77
 The procedures involved might also be likened to spinning fibers into yarn and then

knitting. It was a method I learned in the company of Hélene Cixous, whose seminar I

frequented at the beginning of the seventies. She taught me the need to break the barriers

of texts, to go in search of the memory of literature, the memory of its past and, at the

same time, its prophetic memory. These lessons allowed me to perceive the conjunction

between Rigoberta’s Spanish and her mother tongue. This was the main challenge I

confronted: to transform the oral translation that Rigoberta Menchú made from Quiché

to Spanish, into written language.

Very quickly I realized that Rigoberta Menchú wanted to talk about herself, to go

beyond just an account of repression. I therefore opted in favor of delving deeply into

her customs, her vision of the world -- as much political as religious -- and, above all,

into the issue of identity. Of course, taking the interviews in this direction had much to

do with my preoccupations; Rigoberta's desire to express her personal experiences and

issues in my own life coincided. Nevertheless, everything which appears in the book is a

product of the faithful transcription of Rigoberta Menchú's words. Naturally there is a

subtext in which traces of my own autobiography are implicit, as there is also in the form

in which the book was published and in which its launch took place.

Had I not been able to count on the help of friends I had made during my life as a

"professional revolutionary", I would never have been able to bring out a book on an

unknown indigenous woman with the most prestigious publisher in France, nor present

an interview in the most influential French weekly, nor produce a television program --

the first film on Rigoberta Menchú. I thus came to publish with Gallimard thanks to my

friendship with Ugné Karvelis, the second wife of Julio Cortázar, who was responsible

78
for the section on foreign literature. Similarly in Spain, publication was thanks to my

dear friend Manuel Scorza, who sent the manuscript to his literary agent in Barcelona,

Ramón Serrano, who in turn enlisted the help of Carlos Barral. And in London it was

published by Robin Blackburn, whom I had also met in Cuba during the Tricontinental.

Once the process of writing was finished, I gave the manuscript to my closest Latin

American friends to read. I wanted to be sure the text was comprehensible in any

country of the continent. I listened to the suggestions of all, taking some into account

and others not. The voice that I had closest at that time, though, was that of my

Venezuelan poet friend Carol Prunhuber. On the practical level, Arturo Taracena

contributed by assembling the glossary.

The Argentine poet Juan Gelman gave me confidence in myself by supporting my

wish not to exclude the chapters about customs that others suggested reducing to

appendices. The common opinion was that those chapters would interfere with the

drama of the account of repression. Gelman also supported my decision to preserve the

language and political turns of phrase in the original text. I remember that we spent a

whole day re-reading the text, listening to it aloud. For Gelman, this experience was

painfully wrenching: his own son and pregnant daughter-in-law had been abducted by

the military in Buenos Aires and were never heard of again.

Through such collaborations the cloth of solidarity with Guatemala was woven,

centered on the persona of Rigoberta Menchú.(2)

There was never a clear break between me and the EGP after this period, only a

gradual drifting apart. Aura Marina eventually left Europe and my correspondence with

her was interrupted; later I would learn that she had abandoned the organization.

79
 Meanwhile, some time after the publication of the book, I began to hear that there

were those who argued that the provocative policies of the guerrilla [ed: “determinismo

voluntario”] had much to do with the army’s massacres in indigenous communities.

Moreover, that due to this same voluntarism, an important split had occurred at the heart

of the EGP. I was given no explanation for any of this. When Rigoberta Menchú passed

through Paris during that period, she maintained the most absolute silence. Only once

did she refer to it indirectly, saying "We indigenous people always pay very dearly for

everything." A manifest unease, translated into silence, had taken hold of the guerrilla.

Indeed, no one spoke of the “guerrilla” anymore, but of repression. And so it remained

until 1986, when the democratic opening appeared and the possibility of peace was put

forward for the first time. Even then, however, the “peace process” dragged on for ten

more years. This was the period during which Rigoberta Menchú reached her greatest

international influence.

Then in 1989 there was the trial of General Arnaldo Ochoa and Antonio de La

Guardia in Cuba. I expressed my disagreement with their sentence, sending -- together

with others -- a telegram to Fidel Castro asking him not to execute them. This placed me

definitively in a position of political incorrectness, which is unpardonable in such circles.

Following the publication of the work La guerra en tierras mayas by the French

sociologist Yvon Le Bot (3) -- an analysis which provided the answers the EGP had

failed to offer of the guerrilla’s consequences for the indigenous communities -- I wrote

an essay endorsing his theses, an act which did nothing for my situation as a "dissident."

I must emphasize that at no time did Rigoberta Menchú personally express any

disagreement with me right up to the eve of the Nobel Prize. We saw each other

80
whenever she passed through Paris, and never did she express even the slightest

reproach. Only when the presentation of the Nobel Prize for Peace grew near did I begin

to hear echoes of her declarations to the press attacking my participation in the writing of

the book. Then, secondhand, I received a folder from the Committee in Solidarity with

Guatemala in Paris -- at the time dedicated to the campaign on Rigoberta's behalf for the

Nobel Prize -- in which my name had disappeared, not only from authorship of the book,

but also from the Casa de las Américas prize, which was now listed as having been

awarded to her alone. Something had occurred in the shifting of her political alliances --

as we know, such things are malleable and elastic -- such that my name was considered

undesirable from that time on. Or perhaps the fact that I was not Guatemalan was

thought counter-productive by her communications consultants; something of that nature

emerges in La Nieta de los Mayas.(4) Who knows? For me it remains unexplained to

this day.

Since that time Rigoberta Menchú, who is not frugal with her versions of events, has

offered several explanations of the way in which the book was generated and written.

She has proceeded to adapt these stories according to the moment and the circumstances.

First she claimed that "Elizabeth Burgos had been somewhere nearby at the time of the

interviews," but that it had been she herself who wrote the book in Mexico "with the help

of comrades." Then she spread the rumor that I had interviewed various indigenous

people and synthesized the story into one, taking her as the sole persona. This version

coincided with the appearance on the scene of the anthropologist David Stoll, who

communicated to Rigoberta Menchú that he was undertaking research on her and that

some aspects of her life did not coincide with what she herself had reported. At the same

81
time she began to denounce anthropologists and affirmed that she did not consider

herself reflected in that book whose author was Elizabeth Burgos, "because I did not

have the right to say whether I liked the text or not, or whether it was true to the details

of my life. Now my life is mine, for which I consider it opportune to say that that book is

not mine."

However, I had the good fortune to have a meeting with my old friend Ricardo

Ramírez, maximum leader of the EGP, in April, 1998, in Guatemala. Aside from the

emotion of seeing him again --I did not imagine that it would be the last time, but he died

in July of that same year-- his words calmed me. He assured me that his feelings toward

me had not changed, that the EGP had had nothing to do with the position adopted by

Rigoberta Menchú with respect to me -- that in any case, she had ceased to be an EGP

militant. He also confirmed that he had read the manuscript of the book when I sent it to

him for the organization’s approval before publication. He did not clarify in which

country he had been: whether in Mexico, Nicaragua or Guatemala.(5)

I felt liberated. It would have hurt me greatly to know that a friendship as charged

with meaning as ours had been stained by the infighting which so often overcomes

political movements after a war. Such periods are filled with guilt, resentment and

opportunism. Some of my detractors -- among them professional historians -- seem to

have realized too late the opportunity they missed when they passed up the chance to be

the author of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio. Now they hope to recapture the lost

moment, to create for themselves a personal myth. It is not very ethical, but I understand

it; it is human...

82
 The last time that I met Rigoberta Menchú was in Paris, in February 1993. I had

asked for the meeting -- I had tried to see her various times, sending innumerable letters

and faxes, without reply -- because I wanted her to explain to me what was happening,

why in addition to casting doubt on my role in the book’s production, she had also

declared that I had never sent her any royalties. On this latter theme, let me affirm here

that I never considered the book my individual project; indeed, I decided on my own,

without any prior conditions before undertaking writing, that all of the eventual royalties

would go to Rigoberta Menchú. What had happened was that in the early years

Rigoberta Menchú had had neither a bank account in Europe nor a fixed address; in those

years, she lived semi-clandestinely, at least insofar as her place of residence was

concerned. Unfortunately, the Committee in Solidarity with Guatemala, which she had

first selected as the recipient of the royalties, was not recognized as a tax-exempt

organization, which meant it would have had to pay high taxes on the royalties if it had

received them directly. The funds thus remained on deposit with the publisher Gallimard

until a formula could be developed to get them to Rigoberta Menchú. For legal and tax

reasons, and by mutual agreement with Rigoberta Menchú, it was finally decided that

Gallimard would transfer the funds to the Fondation France Libertés-Danielle Mitterand,

with which Rigoberta Menchú maintained close relations. The Spanish royalties, on the

other hand, she received directly, given that she had gotten in touch with the Spanish

literary agent, Ramón Serrano.(6) In Spain, after the first edition sold out, the book was

not re-published until the awarding of the Nobel Prize.

Now when we did finally meet, she told me that "times have changed,” and asked

me to legally renounce authorship of the book. She gave me two reasons:

83
 1. She had offers from important North America publishers who wanted to pay a lot

of money but, as she was not the legal author, it was impossible for her to sign contracts,

especially because Gallimard had the world rights; and

2. The president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had proposed placing the

Nobel Prize medal and the book which narrated her life in the confines of the Templo

Mayor in Mexico City. But since I was not indigenous, my name could not appear on the

book’s cover.

The lawyer for Gallimard explained to me that if I accepted what Rigoberta Menchú

was asking, I would be in breach of contract, not only with Gallimard but also with all

the publishers with whom I had signed contracts over a period of more than ten years,

and that, of course, I would risk the legal consequences. Beyond the slanders of which I

was the object, I was not prepared to see myself involved in a lawsuit. I wrote an

extensive letter to Rigoberta Menchú explaining the situation to her, and suggesting that

she leave things as they had been established ten years earlier and write a new book in

her own hand narrating her experiences as an international activist. When I received no

reply, it was clear that contact had been broken. I thus suspended the transfers of money.

Solidarity does not imply having to humiliate oneself.

The new book Rigoberta Menchú has published, La Nieta de los Mayas, would have

been a good occasion to take steps to resolve the contradiction she confronts between the

history she narrated in 1982 and the course of her life since then. She owes her existence

as a public figure to that earlier narration; nonetheless she is not the same person today.

She is that person plus all the life experience accumulated with the passage of time. But

no, in the new book she wanted to repeat the same scheme as the first. She has thus

84
produced a European object, abetted by European scribes, with the difference that the

first time it was justified by her own situation and the circumstances of the period in

Guatemala. Instead of a life narrative accompanied by reflections-- which at forty and

following the richness of her experiences she should be in condition to bring forth -- she

has limited herself to producing a mirror image, taking the first book as a model with the

sole object of supplanting it. Not a very ambitious objective, nor a politically astute one,

it betrays a great shortsightedness; what it achieves, in relation to the first book, is a

pallid reflection which does not withstand comparison. Neither the book's contents

justify it, nor does it have the originality of the first. Instead of updating the persona

historically and politically, it corrals her even more in the role of a character playing

herself. It simply fails on every count. Moreover, while in the present situation no one

would have impeded her writing and publishing and launching it first in Guatemala --

indeed, there is now a Maya publishing house -- one must ask why she did not write it

with the help of Mayan intellectuals, who also exist. Given that she claims to speak for

and embody all indigenous people, certainly it would have been more congruent with her

political position to have published in Guatemala with the help of Mayan writers. That

alone would have amply justified the existence of the book, making it more than simply

another mediated exercise.

-----

My reference point is France, given that it is the country in which the circumstances

of life have placed me. Since 1955 there has been a collection in France created by the

anthropologist Jean Malaurie, Terre Humaine, dedicated exclusively to publishing

85
testimonial texts; already it has sixty-four titles. Gallimard also has a series, Témoins

(“witnesses”), created and directed by the historian Pierre Nora -- the same one that

includes Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio. In neither of these is there a dogma about

authorship. If the narrator is the one who has written the book, as regularly happens, she

or he of course appears as the author. If the text has been done on the basis of

interviews, on the other hand, the author is the person who does the work of writing.

And if it is the case that the narrator intervenes in an active way in the writing, then both

appear as authors or co-authors. There is, in other words, no rigid norm which designates

the authorship of a book in this genre; it depends on the circumstances in which the book

has been written.

It should be noted that I alone have been reproached for appearing as the author of a

testimonial book. The best exponents of the genre in Latin America have been exempt

from this reproach: Miguel Barnet, Roque Dalton, Elena Poniatowska, Claribel Alegría,

Margaret Randall, García Márquez, etc. Undoubtedly Rigoberta Menchú and her

aficionados have their own reasons for wanting to exclude my name. But how to explain

the discriminatory treatment exercised by academics? None of these other authors, with

the exception of Roque Dalton and his Miguel Mármol, put the actual name of the

interviewee in the title: all opted for generic titles. Perhaps that was my mistake: if

instead of giving it the name of Rigoberta Menchú, I had opted for Habla una India de

Guatemala, history might have treated me differently.

Still, I was careful that the name of Rigoberta Menchú, rather than that of an author,

would be the sole subject, occupying the entire space. That is why her name appears in

the title in capital letters. The subtitle designates neither a geographic nor ethnic

86
belonging; it expresses a metaphysical idea which situates her in the universal. The title

reiterates the identity of the subject, an act which is repeated in the first sentence of the

narrative. There is neither the least hint of ambivalence nor neutrality about her identity.

Before beginning to read, the reader has already established contact with the narrative

voice. Of course I refer to the title in Spanish, which is the only one for which I am

responsible.

As Roberto González Echevarría has explained well, for every moment of crisis in

Hispanoamerica there is a text which emerges as the "global representation" of the crisis.

Rigoberta Menchú's testimony filled that role of "global representation" for the Central

American crisis. In it, the North American Left found an anchor point on which to center

its own passion. Rigoberta, for her part, became assiduous in touring US universities.

As a result, she became more than just a book or an image: in her, her audience had

access to an indigenous person in flesh and blood, a person whom they turned into a

living icon, a sacred totem, tangible proof of the "absolute otherness." Perhaps that is

why my own mestiza presence aroused phobic reactions in certain quarters. David Stoll's

book, in spite of its polemic nature, has the merit of having retrieved Rigoberta Menchú's

testimony from the realm of scholasticism and returned it to life. The testimony still

holds a richness of hypotheses and analyses that are far from being exhausted.

There is a tendency in the media where ideological debates are conducted to prefer

integral, “essentialist” categories -- a tendency which leads to the vehement rejection of

mixed, or “mestizo” thinking. However, if one has in mind -- as one should -- Rigoberta

Menchú's profound Christian faith, it ought to be clear that the Church has been the most

important factor in implanting “mestizo thinking” among the Amerindians. This was not

87
because the Church constructed the image of the Indian -- that image has been

constructed in a dynamic way, in the continuous process of negotiating identity to which

the Amerindians have been subject since the discovery. This is a process to which all

cultures submit when they enter into relations with others; such has been the dynamic of

all processes of civilization. Europe itself is a portentous example of that dynamic. The

greatest delusion is to believe in "pure otherness"-- a creed which leads rapidly to the

ethnic cleansing so much in fashion these days, and whose consequences we know.

The icon into which Rigoberta Menchú has been converted has contributed to the

fact that the just demands of indigenous peoples have become just one more fashion,

emptied of content. She has been transformed into a tree which hides the forest; instead

of being a representative she is, rather, a personification of representation. That voice

which denounced has been transformed into an invitee of the establishment, distancing

herself from the popular movement as Rosalina Tuyuc declared to me last April in

Guatemala City.(7)

Nevertheless it is not impossible to imagine a future in which there are moments of

extreme tension between Guatemala’s ladino and indigenous peoples, and in which

Rigoberta Menchú -- given her power to attract attention internationally and ability to

weave alliances with the ladino world -- could become the just the person to re-establish

equilibrium between them.

-May 2, 1999
-Translator: Robert Austin,
Universidad ARCIS, Santiago de Chile
(Notes and author’s revisions translated by Jan Rus)

88
 Notes

(1) Debray, Régis, ¿Revolución en la Revolución?, Cuadernos de la revista Casa de las

Américas, La Habana, 1967.

(2) Unfortunately, acknowledgment of those who aided me failed to appear in the

French translation because the corresponding pages were lost, either by the translator or
the publisher. Those editions in other languages that flowed from the French committed
the same error, although this was by no means my intention. The proof is that there are
nine editions of the book that do contain the original acknowledgments and dedication:
three Spanish, as well as Cuban, Mexican, Brazilian, Flemish and Swedish, and the
French pocket edition.

(3) Le Bot, Yvon, La guerra en tierras mayas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México,
1995. (The French original was La Guerre en Terres Mayas: Communauté, violence et
modernité au Guatemala, Kharthala, Paris, 1992.)

(4) Menchú, Rigoberta, Rigoberta, La nieta de los mayas, El País-Aguilar, Madrid, 1998.
The English edition, Crossing Borders (Verso, London and New York, 1998), has cost its
editor and translator, Ann Wright, charges of “intellectual piracy” for having appeared as
editor on the cover. The anathemas directed at Wright come from the usual academic
detractors. In spite of these “specialists’” opinions, however, a book of testimony is not
simply a transcription of cassettes: no one can simply “dictate” a three hundred page
book, no matter what they think.

(5) So there will be no doubt, I shall cite Ricardo Ramírez’s own words: “...A mi me
altera mucho ese tipo de cosas. Yo evito tocar ese tema. Pero te voy a decir
sencillamente, ninguna de las cosas que ha hecho Rigoberta al respecto, fue autorizada
por mi, ni por la Dirección. Una vez fue a la montaña; nos entrevistamos, sentí en ella
contradicciones; me habló de la cuestión del libro. Le dije que ‘lo que tuviera que
solucionar al respecto lo hiciera directamente con Elizabeth porque ella tiene toda mi
confianza.’ Y allí terminó toda la relación, no sólo mia, sino también del EGP, con el
libro. Ya nunca más me volvió a hablar Rigoberta del libro. ...Con ella mantengo una
relación cordial, fraterna; ya ella, hace algún tiempo que no es miembro del EGP y por lo
tanto dejó de recibir orientación de nuestra dirección. Esas polémicas interminables no
me interesan. Tu me conoces bien, para mi lo único que cuenta es el curso de la
Revolución... Yo quiero que tengas la seguridad de que sabemos que eso ocurrió así
[como tu lo cuentas/EB]; tu cuentas con mi respaldo en lo que declaraste [se refiere a la
entrevista que acordé al diario Siglo XX ese mismo día en Guatemala/EB], porque
efectivamente eso fue así. Las relaciones entre ustedes ya no me conciernen; y eso no
debe ser el punto central de nuestra relación.” [Letter summarized by LAP editor.]

(6) Among my personal records I have documents -- letters from the publisher, account
balances, etc. -- to support what I have said here. In addition, I might mention that I also
have the following, which I am in the process of negotiating a place for in a library so
that someday it will be available to qualified scholars: the 16 cassettes of the original

89
interviews with Rigoberta, fifteen of ninety minutes, and one of 120; a complete
transcription of the recorded material, faithfully following the interviews; the original
edited version of the manuscript that became the basis for dividing the book into
chapters, including scratch-outs and added phrases in my own hand, each chapter in a
separate folder; the notecards by topic and page that I used to move from the transcribed
text, and later to do the editing by cutting with scissors and reassembling with scotch
tape; the press-books from the publication of the book and movie; a copy of the movie
aired by Channel 3 of French television, with the title Pour quoi ils nous tuent?; a dossier
of documents about relations with publishers and royalties; as well as assorted letters and
other papers.

(7) Rosalina Tuyuc is a courageous indigenous woman, a Congressional deputy today

and founder of the Asociación de Viudas de Desaparecidos (Association of Widows of
the Disappeared, CONAVIGUA) during the worst period of the repression; a woman
who herself never left the country

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pp. 64-69 in 1999 printed version

Rigoberta Menchu and Her Epic Narrative

Gary H. Gossen
Institute for Mesoamerican Studies
Department of Anthropology
University at Albany, SUNY

I would like to address three themes that link Rigoberta Menchú's narrative to the

politics of ethnicity and cultural pluralism in modern Mesoamerica: 1) a contextual

appreciation of the larger picture of the cultural and political transformation of the Maya

communities of Mexico and Guatemala, of which Rigoberta Menchú's book is a key, but

far from most important, part; 2) the role of epic literature in this transformation, an issue

that places Rigoberta Menchú's narrative at center stage; and finally, 3) the truth status of

events that typically underwrite epic narrative in general and Maya storytelling in

particular. I shall address each of these topics briefly and will stress throughout that the

tempest about the truth, lies, or propaganda that may inform Rigoberta Menchú's

testimony amounts to a moot issue. What does matter is that she and her editor,

Elizabeth Burgos, have created a modern epic narrative that has served as a catalyst for

raising the collective consciousness of the Maya people and for provoking a lively debate

within the Maya intellectual community about what constitutes Maya identity and

history. Western scholars' fulminations about its truth and authenticity are but a

sideshow.

A recent journalistic commentary has highlighted the import of the Menchú/Stoll

controversy against the backdrop of the February 25, 1999, release of the Historical

Clarification Commission's report, Guatemala, Memory of Silence. This editorial

comment notes that the Commission's document generally corroborates virtually all of

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Menchú's generic claims, and also testifies to the magnitude of the controversy about

who "owns" Maya history.

While the report is a definitive statement about what happened during the war, it

is not expected to end the struggle to determine who will write Guatemala's history.

Whoever controls the windows to the past will strongly influence the future.

This war is being fought on several fronts. On one battleground, the veracity of a

political icon's life [Menchú] has come under fire. (Latinamerican Press 31:1-8, March 8,

1999)

This issue matters a great deal to the greater Maya community. Prior to I,

Rigoberta Menchú, there was no charter text that spoke to modern Maya identity as a

shared identity. Even the famous Popol Vuh, the great Quiché sacred narrative dating

from the mid-16th century - now adopted as a kind of generic Maya Bible, a charter text,

by some Maya intellectuals and many lay people in the greater Native American

community - indulges in fiercely partisan politics. It exalts Quiché moral and political

authority over all others, including the Quichés' erstwhile chief enemies, the Cakchiquels

(also Mayas). Now all the Mayas have I, Rigoberta Menchú, complete with its own

political biases. It may indeed be a partisan propaganda document, as Professor Stoll

alleges; it may be a conflation of the stories of many into the voice of one, as even she,

Rigoberta, now acknowledges; and it clearly does not incorporate the point of view of all

modern Maya people. Nevertheless, it stands as the most important Maya literary

document of the modern era. In my effort to appreciate its singular stature, I prefer to

approach it not as testimony, nor as history, nor as autobiography, nor as biased political

propaganda. It should be evaluated in the domain where it belongs: epic literature.

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Rigoberta's Text as an Account of a Formative Era

Like virtually all epic texts, I, Rigoberta Menchú records events from an era of

trouble and conflict-as experienced by one or several individuals-that transforms public

sensibilities into a vivid awareness that "we're in this together," so to speak. This book

belongs to a series of events in the last two decades that mark-as causes and effects-the

emergence of an extraordinary pan-Maya cultural, intellectual, and political

consciousness in our time.

This larger context goes well beyond particulars of Guatemala's civil war to

include both Mexico and Central America. Key events include the following: Mexico's

conscious tilt, in the 1980s, toward political and economic policies-dubbed

neoliberalism-that are hostile to the interests of the rural poor; the end of the Cold War

(1989-1991); the controversial Columbus Quincentenary and the (not unrelated) 1992

award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchú in that same year; the beginning of

the Maya Zapatista insurrection and the inaugural day of NAFTA, both on January 1,

1994; the Zapatista-sponsored National Indigenous Forum (January, 1996); the formal (if

not actual) end of civil conflict in Guatemala (December, 1996); and the Zapatista-

sponsored national referendum on indigenous rights (March, 1999)--which yielded a

non-binding 95% victory for indigenous rights among 3 million Mexicans who

participated.

Although I am not arguing for a chain of causally linked events, ALL OF THE

ABOVE have produced a fundamental transformation in the way many Maya

communities in Mexico and Guatemala view themselves today: not only as villagers

loyal to local customs and local saints; but some, also, see themselves as members of a

93
larger pan-Maya community that has its own agenda, an ownership of a common past,

and its own nationally specific programs for interacting with the Guatemalan and

Mexican states.

Rigoberta's Text as Epic Narrative

Rigoberta Menchú's testimony follows a typical rhetorical device of epic

narrative: the return of the hero. Her text reproduces this familiar pattern: the hero

leaves the comforts of youth and home; the hero becomes aware of a critical problem

afflicting his/her people, usually political oppression; the hero, persecuted, is forced into

exile to obtain wisdom and perspective; he/she returns home again, in life or in death,

apotheosized as a quasi-god, determined to change the social order. Menchu's highly

personal narrative of her youth, her witness of atrocities and family tragedy, her

politicization in Guatemala, and her experiences as a refugee in Chiapas, where she lived

as a member of the household of Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas-all follow this classic

heroic plot. Bishop Ruiz served as an important mentor to Rigoberta in exile, just as he

has been a steadfast ally of the Maya Zapatista Movement in its quest for social justice.

Rigoberta has returned to Chiapas on at least one occasion to offer her support for the

Maya Zapatista cause. More important, also following another classic heroic motif, she

returned to Guatemala as an international celebrity, widely mentioned as a plausible

candidate for President of the Republic.

What does all of this mean? It means that Rigoberta and her book are local and

international icons in the debate about Indian identity and indigenous ethnic politics in

the Americas. There are undoubtedly better and more authentic works of indigenous

scholarship and artistic creativity, but no work reaches the popular stature and emotional

94
appeal of this work. It must be understood in these terms. I have already stated that

Menchú's text accomplishes some of the ideological purposes for the Maya present as the

Popol Vuh provides for the Maya past. As a self-conscious effort to address the

condition of "all poor Guatemalans," there is no modern text that compares with it in

magnitude or visibility or true epic proportion.

It is worth noting that many of our best-known epic and sacred texts in the West

have taken shape and become canonic in circumstances not unlike those of Guatemala in

the past two decades. The most ancient case is the Torah, and specifically, the Book of

Genesis, which makes a highly biased case for a unified Hebrew nation, under a

monotheistic god, against a myriad of difficulties, both internal and external. Internal

troubles range from sibling rivalry to tribal conflict for power, while external threats

emanate from state-level societies-Babylon and Egypt-both of which are stronger,

initially, than the aspiring Hebrew nation. By the end of the book, Babylon is destroyed

and Egypt is co-opted under Joseph's stewardship. Jacob, after a "struggle with God," is

eventually renamed "Israel," sire of the twelve tribes of Israel. A "new era" is in place.

The great epics of the West follow a similar pattern of struggle for sovereignty

and ethnic integrity against formidable external adversaries. In the cases of The Chanson

de Roland and the Cantar del Mío Cid, the enemy is the expanding Islamic empire. In

both of these texts, the heroes do battle with alleged Muslim infidels to defend the Holy

Roman Empire (in the case of Roland), and to defend Christian Spain (in the case of El

Cid). In both cases, the heroes die as martyrs, and in both cases their "cause," Christian

Europe, prevails. The point is that heroic narratives are borne in times of threat, peril and

great sacrifice in the quest to defend nations and peoples from annihilation. These

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narratives also vest the biography and body of the hero with the person of the nation or

people that he/she represents.

Extending this model to Rigoberta Menchú, we see that her own life history

becomes heroic not only in the construction of the story line, but also in the theme of

violent sacrifice of virtually her entire family at the hand of the purported enemy--the

white Guatemalan State and its allies. Initial acknowledgement of Rigoberta Menchú as

a hero came neither from her fellow Mayas, nor from Ladino Guatemalans; it came from

the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Now, however, she is the national celebrity par

excellence. Love her or hate her, Guatemalans cannot ignore her. Nor can we.

Truth in Heroic Narrative

All of which calls to mind my concluding question-historical truth in epic

narrative: does it really matter? Probably not. Consider the cases we have examined.

The book of Genesis, a composition attributed to many authors, one of whom labored

heroically in the fourth or fifth century A.D. to edit many versions to achieve a plausible

story line, trying to get rid of discrepancies and contradictions regarding the "truth" of

events. He succeeded for the most part; yet Genesis as we know it, still has many

irreconcilable contradictions: Was humanity created once or twice? Did Abraham give

Sarah (both his sister and his wife) to Pharoah as a concubine or as a platonic friend? In

either case, how can this act be rendered as honorable? The text of Genesis leaves these

and a number of other questions completely open to our interpretation and imagination.

Likewise, with Roland and El Cid. Both stories deal with a murky and shifting

frontier zone between Christian Europe and the Islamic Empire on the Iberian Peninsula.

Many scholars regard the story of Roland in Iberia as one of many comparable, minor

96
skirmishes that came to be remembered as emblematic of a difficult time in French

history. The truth of the circumstances of the martyrdom of Roland matters far less than

its power as a distillation of an era in the persona of one individual.

I know from personally examining original manuscripts of hundreds of ballad text

transcriptions from which Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal synthesized the definitive version

of the Cantar del Mío Cid in the 1930s, that the story of this great hero and his deeds, his

life and times, has hundreds of variants, many of them radically at variance with one

another regarding "what happened." Don Ramón, eminent scholar and artist,

cut and pasted from hundreds of alternatives, to assemble a good story that is now

accepted as the "canonic text." Rigoberta Menchú has engaged in the first generation of

such selective editing of a key period in modern Maya history. She has told a good and

compelling story of epic proportion that has riveted the attention of the world.

Furthermore, the generic facts corroborate her story.

In evaluating the "truth status" of this text, it is easy to forget that this epic

narrative flows from Maya sensibilities and storytelling conventions. This is surely so

even though Elisabeth Burgos and other ideologically motivated Westerners were

involved in the production and promotion of the book. The Maya cultural and cognitive

universe from which this story flows follows a number of what Rigoberta herself calls

"our secrets." Critics have called this romantic hype. I think not.

One should note her adamant use, again and again, of "we" as opposed to "I" in

phrasing her testimony. She states the plural, collective voice again in a recent interview

that appears in the Guatemalan Scholars' Network (January 30, 1999; my translation

from Spanish):

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 Q: They condemn you for pretending to have life experiences that are not your

own.

A: I can't oblige them to understand these things. All of this, which for me is the

history of my own life, is also the history of my own community. I am not a

pitiful solitary bird who came from the wilderness, the child of only a mother and

a father who are alone in the world. I am the product of a community, and not

just the Guatemalan community.

In the Chiapas variant of this world that I know well, the earth itself speaks via its

minions, the earthlords; animals still speak to one another and to humans; causality does

not fully flow from human agency, but from co-essences that live outside the body; dead

historical figures return to help the living; even Spanish is relegated to the primitive

lingua franca of all people in antiquity. I believe that Rigoberta Menchú's narrative

comes in large part from a Maya cultural universe. When the dust settles from the

current controversy, I think the work will assume its rightful place as a major charter

document for the Maya cultural and political renaissance that is occurring in our time.(1)

-April 20, 1999

-----

NOTES

1. This essay was initially presented at a forum on “Rigoberta Menchú and her Critics,”

held at Russell Sage College, Troy, New York, April 8, 1999. I am grateful to my

graduate student and colleague, Matt Samson, for calling my attention to the current

literature that is cited herein.

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pp. 70-80 in 1999 printed version

Rigoberta and the Last-Resort Paradigm

by
David Stoll
Middlebury College

Many people have asked whether I am surprised by the furor over my book. The

answer is no, not really--except for the reaction from some of my colleagues in Latin

American studies. I am surprised that, seventeen years after Rigoberta told her story and

two years after the Guatemalan peace agreement was signed, Carol Smith, Victoria

Sanford, Norma Chinchilla and Georg Gugelberger object to my reexamination of I,

Rigoberta Menchú. Ordinarily a Nobel peace laureate is subject to scrutiny much earlier

in her career. In Rigoberta's case, she expects to run for president of her country. Truth

commissions, exhumations, and the declassification of state documents are providing

courtroom-quality evidence about the violence that turned her into an international

figure. When it comes to the army's crimes, my critics welcome the search for facts. But

they have doubts about interrogating the single most widely read book about Central

America. While they expect Guatemalan army officers to consent to being tried for mass

murder, they do not think Rigoberta should have to face the fact that she went to middle

school.

On second thought, there is no reason to be surprised. After returning from a year

of fieldwork in northern Quiché Department in 1989, I was full of what violence

survivors had told me so many times. They wanted the war to end. Unfortunately, that

was not on the horizon, because a vestigial guerrilla movement was holding out for

concessions that a powerful army was unlikely to make. I could have decided that

99
peasant neutralism was just a function of conquest and hegemony. On the grounds that

peasants were too afraid of the army to tell me how they felt, I could have discounted

what they said. Perhaps this was just another tough chapter in the popular struggle--so

what if it wasn't very popular? Instead, I decided that what peasants said about their

experiences challenged our usual presumptions about the war. Was this insurgency

really driven by the needs of Mayan peasants? Not from what they told me. Rightly or

wrongly, I thought that questioning the usual assumption that the violence came out of

the very structure of Guatemalan society might help end a stalemate for which Ixils were

paying a high cost. So I published a book called Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns

of Guatemala. For anyone whose thinking has been shaped by the solidarity movement,

the international support network for the Central American left, the idea that Mayan

peasants could be caught entre dos fuegos was controversial, even though this is an

expression they often used. Since solidarity thinking has had an obvious impact on

Guatemala scholarship and human rights work, my book was more excoriated than read.

That is why I decided to examine the popular roots of the insurgency in a second case, of

a particular family and village that became the war's most well-known victims through

the pages of a beloved book. Was the guerrilla movement that Rigoberta joined, and

whose version of events she gave us in 1982, a grassroots response to oppression?

Should the conflict be understood primarily in social terms, as the inevitable outcome of

centuries of oppression suffered by Guatemala's indigenous population? Or is it better

explained on the political level, as the result of particular decisions by particular groups?

Was this a disaster that could have been avoided?

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 Such questions disturb four of the contributors. They would have you believe that

to ask how our thinking about the violence has been affected by sympathy with the

guerrillas, and revulsion against the army, is to discredit the victims and become an

apologist for the army. So, what about the specifics of Rigoberta's story--is my evidence

really ludicrous? What are the implications of my argument for how we understand the

violence in Guatemala? Am I trying to deflect the army's responsibility for mass killing?

Finally, what does the anger over my book tell us about the room for disagreement in

Latin American studies?

My impression is that Smith, Sanford, Gugelberger and Chinchilla were so offended

by my book that they invested the rest of their time in composing denunciations, without

checking the result against what I wrote. It's hard to think of another explanation for

some of Sanford's assertions, e.g., that I "obliquely acknowledge" the army's violence

against civilians. Did she read Chapter 9 ("The Destruction of Chimel") and Chapter 10

("The Death Squads in Uspantán")? Her attack on Uspantán's ex-town secretary Alfonso

Rivera is ill-informed and unfair; while it is true that Alfonso went to jail for graft, so did

four other members of the pro-Rigoberta town council; and while The New York Times

quoted him criticizing Rigoberta, he was always a defender of the Nobel laureate, her

father and family in his conversations with me.

If Gugelberger had grasped my argument, he would realize that I am the first to

minimize the significance of a detail like whether four chimneys or one blew up at

Auschwitz. However, the most systematic distortions of my argument are by Smith, one

of our senior scholars on Guatemala, from whom we have the right to expect better.

When I argue that rapid population growth as well as inequitable land tenure is a factor in

101
poverty, she accuses me of blaming poverty on population growth. When I show that

peasant support for the guerrillas was more limited than we supposed in the early 1980s,

Smith accuses me of arguing that there was little or none. When I quote Ixils and

K'iche's who blame the guerrillas as well as the army for the violence, Smith accuses me

of blaming the guerrillas. When I insist on comparing Rigoberta's version of events with

others, Smith scare-quotes me for claiming to be "objective"--a claim nowhere to be

found in my book.

Before going further, I should correct the misapprehension that it took me ten

obsessive years to track down the problems with Rigoberta's story. Half an hour with a

relative or neighbor is enough to raise major questions. The bulk of my interviewing

occurred between 1993 and 1995; even then, half my time was in Ixil country. As I have

often pointed out myself, oral testimony from a repressed town like Uspantán could be

affected by fear of the army or distrust of myself. That is why I checked what

Uspantanos told me against other sources. Smith, Sanford and Chinchilla complain that I

rely on mere hearsay (i.e., oral testimony like Rigoberta's), but they ignore the

documentary evidence backing up my assertions. The reason I doubt that Rigoberta's

father belonged to the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC) is not just the denials by

his relatives and other Uspantanos. The reason is also that, when CUC published

obituaries for the five members who died at the Spanish embassy, it failed to include

Vicente. Even though the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) elevated him to the

revolutionary pantheon, by naming a new organization of revolutionary Christians in his

honor, no one claimed him as a CUC member until his daughter did in Paris, two years

after his death.

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 In contrast, the evidence connecting Vicente to the EGP is anything but thin.

Everyone agrees that the EGP visited Chimel. Of the four sources who told me that they

had witnessed the first meeting between the guerrillas and the villagers, three said that

Vicente welcomed the visitors, for reasons that I carefully expain did not necessarily

include pleasure at their arrival. The reason that Vicente died as a guerrilla collaborator

is that the fatal occupation of the Spanish embassy was led by EGP cadres from the

Robin García Revolutionary Student Front. Even if Smith wants to maintain the old

circumlocutions in how we refer to guerrilla political structures, the Vicente of I,

Rigoberta Menchú is a guerrilla supporter: have I committed some indecency by showing

that his involvement was later, and perhaps more tentative, than portrayed by his

daughter?

The fire at the Spanish embassy can be attributed to the Molotov cocktails of the

occupiers--probably as wielded by the students rather than the peasants--thanks to the

sole survivor, the Spanish ambassador, who was so sympathetic to the protesters that the

Guatemalan right scapegoats him for the incident to this day. To understand the debate

over who started the fire, readers must visualize Dr. Máximo Cajal y López pleading

with the riot police not to break into his office, into which the protesters have herded

himself and the other hostages. As Cajal argues with the police through the crack

between the door and the frame, the thirty-seven people in the room behind him are

going into panic.

According to Cajal--as he reiterated to the international press, to the Spanish

government, and to me--he saw a protester smash a Molotov cocktail on the floor and

throw a match which he himself stomped out. Some minutes later, as the police began to

103
break in, he was propelled through the doorway and out of the room by an explosion that

occurred behind him, among the protesters and their hostages. When I asked about a

rumor that the riot police had shoved a red canister through the door where he was

arguing with them, this is what Cajal faxed me: "Nunca dije haber visto --ni ví,

naturalmente-- a un policía con un artefacto metálico rojo. Sólo ví hachas, revólveres y

bocas de canoñes de metralletas. Fue, creo, la revista Cambio la que habló de ello;

quizás lo vieran quienes estaban en la calle siguiendo desde fuera los acontecimientos

(público, bomberos)."(1) If the fire started among the protesters behind the ambassador's

back, how could it have been started by an incendiary device that he never saw being

shoved through the door?

Getting back to the main issue, solidarity explanations derived considerable

plausibility from the army massacres of the early 1980s. Why would the army do so

much killing unless the guerrillas had lots of popular support? As Sanford points out in

her analysis of several declassified documents, this was not necessarily the case. But

even after many of us grasped the limitations of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary

Union (URNG), the coalition of the EGP and several other guerrilla organizations, we

continued to assume that masses of peasants joined because they saw no other way to

escape poverty and oppression. We continued to believe that the EGP and the rest of the

URNG had ridden a groundswell in Guatemalan society. So did I--until I had the

privilege of interviewing hundreds of violence survivors in a former EGP stronghold.

Since Smith, Sanford and Chinchilla are reluctant to distinguish between solidarity

work, human rights investigation, and sociohistorical analysis, let me repeat why this is

important. Human rights is the most effective arrow in the solidarity quiver. But while

104
the goal of solidarity is usually to support a political movement, the goal of human rights

work is to improve respect for law. The two often go together, but they can also collide,

putting activists into awkward situations. In Guatemala solidarity/human rights

supporters were sometimes embarrassed when the guerrillas turned out to be commiting

violations of their own.(2)

As a legal discourse, human rights focuses on specific acts of commission or

omission, by agents of the state or a presumed state-in-formation like the URNG. Since

a human rights violation is a specific criminal act, why the perpetrator did it, or what he

was reacting to, are secondary issues. Ignoring motivation is reasonable in many legal

proceedings, but it is not a good way to understand a history of violence because it

isolates acts from their context. Recently the Guatemalan truth commissions have

gathered a staggering array of testimony about the violence. Both have had to juggle a

human rights focus, on specific criminal acts, with a broader focus on sociohistorical

process. The latter requires as much context as possible. But that complicates the moral

simplicities of solidarity and the criminal responsibilities of human rights violations, as

becomes apparent in my account of how political killing spread to Uspantán.

Solidarity ends up being a poor basis for scholarship because of the need to justify a

political orientation and its claim to innocence. For scholars accustomed to justifying

their presence in Guatemala through solidarity, it has been hard to deal with evidence

that, for example, the guerrillas committed the first political murders in Rigoberta's

municipio or that student protesters started the fire at the Spanish embassy. That puts the

blame on the wrong side, the guerrillas, when the purpose of solidarity thinking is to put

all the blame on the other side. Significantly, the issue of "blame" that so concerns

105
Smith, Chinchilla and Sanford matters only in solidarity work, not in human rights

investigations or sociohistorical analysis. Whether or not villagers collaborated with the

EGP, the army had no right to kill them in non-combat situations. Even if the student

protesters started the fire at the Spanish embassy, the dictatorship was still responsible

for the incident, because it violated diplomatic sanctuary by storming the embassy over

the ambassador's protests.

Solidarity work in Guatemala has always been broader than support for the URNG

party line. But it always has been difficult and unpopular to challenge certain

convictions that seemed to be validated by the mass killing of the early 1980s. It also has

been too easy to discount peasants who fail to live up to expectations. One hallmark of

solidarity writing about peasants is frequent reference to "silence," exemplified here by

comparing them to mute rocks. While some indeed have been silenced, others have lots

to say. Here are several assumptions they led me to question:

1) Did support for the insurgency spring from the steady immiseration of the poor?

As Smith herself has reported, along with Paul Kobrak, myself and others, many Mayas

felt they were making modest political and economic gains through the Catholic Church

and other institutions in the 1970s. No one claims they were not poor, so I don't see the

point of stuffing my mouth or theirs with a World Bank report. The point is, the complex

tapestry of conditions that Mayas faced is not compatible with the ideological

requirements for justifying the enormous cost of armed struggle, i.e., that the poor are

being pounded into the ground.

2) Was the Mayan population on a collision course with the state? Was armed

struggle a "last resort" for peasants with their backs to the wall? The last-resort paradigm

106
fits some local situations, but regionaly it is not compatible with what we know about the

origins of the Maya movement, which is led by people who are taking advantage of

expanding opportunities. Nor is the last-resort paradigm compatible with the typical

Mayan critique of the guerrillas as well as the army: that both sides imposed the war on

them. If the insurgency was an inevitable response to centuries of oppression, then the

guerrillas would hardly be guilty of imposing it. Finally, last-resort claims are

contradicted by our knowledge of how difficult it often was to recruit Mayas.

3) Should blame for starting the violence be laid exclusively at the door of the

Guatemalan army? Here I must insist on what so many peasants have told me: while the

army did most of the killing, the first people who they saw in uniform were often

guerrillas who wanted to spread the war into new areas. Contrary to Smith's invective, I

do not use the word "natural" to describe the army's response to guerrilla organizing. But

it is very likely given what we know about how armies respond to an irregular enemy,

that is, one that makes up for its lack of military strength by blurring the distinction

between itself and nearby civilians. In the absence of an identifiable enemy,

counterinsurgents tend to retaliate against nearby civilians. While the Guatemalan army

is a particularly brutal example, there is no shortage of others.

I question how well the violence is explained by racism because (1) this is a conflict

where the first shots were traded inside the officer corps of the Guatemalan army (the

first guerrilla commanders were rebel army officers), and (2) the army could be just as

brutal to ladino peasants as indigenous ones, as corroborated by the truth

commissions.(3) As for why guerrilla leaders should have known what would happen to

their civilian collaborators, Chinchilla forgets that what the army did in western

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Guatemala in the 1980s was only a replay, on a larger scale, of what it did in eastern

Guatemala in the 1960s. While she and Sanford accuse me of failing to put my local

studies into historical context, this is an example of how I provide more history than they

wish to remember.

My books are controversial because they portray more of the intense localism in

rural Guatemala than will fit into the assumption that armed struggle was a last resort.

However, my findings are hardly unique. While the EGP was stronger in the Sierra

Cuchumatanes than elsewhere, the region's other ethnographers (Davis 1988:24-26,

Watanabe 1992:179-83) have had doubts about the depth of its support, as has Smith

(1992) herself. Paul Kobrak's dissertation (1996) provides the most convincing evidence

of all: it is the finest local study of the violence to date, which is why I have been

badgering him to publish it and why my book about Uspantán imitates it. His account of

how K'iche's learned to use the civil patrols and neutralist rhetoric to distance themselves

from the war built and improved on mine. Far from contradicting my portrait of how

peasants responded to the EGP and the army, Kobrak reports hearing from K'iche's what

I heard from Ixils, doubling my evidence. Like me, he reports that most land conflicts

were between peasants (p.70-1); like me, he reports that they looked to the future with

guarded optimism (pp.76-7); like me, he reports little continuity between prewar activism

and the guerrilla movement (p.113); like me, he reports peasants complaining about how

the guerrillas maneuvered them into confronting the army (pp.111-12).

If Chinchilla thinks that even guerrilla leaders could not be expected to foresee the

army's vicious reprisals, why does Smith think that peasants like Vicente Menchú could?

Does Smith think that EGP cadres warned men like Vicente that they were risking

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everything they had? What my critics refuse to face are the military/political realities of

guerrilla warfare, which depends upon deceiving friends, foes and ultimately yourselves.

They also fail to acknowledge that, as a revolutionary model applied to one country after

another, guerrilla warfare became a self-destructive form of anti-politics. We shall see

whether the Zapatistas in Mexico are an exception. Instead of building up the grassroots

left, guerrilla warfare usually destroys it.

The gap between the stories told by Rigoberta and her neighbors raises questions

about what Yvon Grenier (1999:9-17) calls the "dominant paradigm" in scholarship on

contemporary Central America. This is the assumption that injustice + reactionary

governments = revolution. Political development never strays far from socioeconomic

reality in this structuralist conception of history. Analysis tends to consist of filling in

the boxes of a functionalist model, in which inequality leads the poor to demand change,

whereupon they meet with repression and realize that armed struggle is the only path

forward. In Guatemala there are indeed locales where individuals, factions and villages

were quick to welcome the guerrillas as a solution to intractable problems. One that I

describe is San Juan Cotzal, where Ixils hoped that the guerrillas would help them

recover a large coffee plantation (Stoll 1993:68-71). But once you descend to the local

level and listen to the recollections of lived experience, the generalizations of the early

1980s become very hard to sustain. More often than not, large-scale support for the

guerrillas came only in reaction to the army's indiscriminate reprisals. Even then, much

of the population escaped to the coast, hung back or went over to the army.

Smith is right that, of the three revolutionary movements in Central America, the

Guatemalan proved to be the weakest. In Nicaragua the Somoza dictatorship was

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overthrown in a national revolt; in El Salvador the Farabundo Marti National Liberation

Front came much closer to victory than its Guatemalan counterpart. Still, Yvon Grenier

asks an interesting question: why have Latin America scholars lagged behind others in

studying revolution in terms of culture, ideology and agency? Why are "structuralist,

mostly economistic and often mechanistic approaches to political change" still celebrated

in Latin America? Grenier's study of the role of the Salvadoran universities and

political-military organizations suggests an answer. The dominant paradigm removes

important actors from scrutiny. Ironically, the Cuban model was premised on the idea

that making a revolution depended less on objective conditions than on commitment,

struggle and vision. Yet mechanistic Marxism relieved the comandantes of responsibility

for disasters. So do structural explanations for insurgencies. This is part of the stubborn

legacy of Guevarismo in Latin American studies--not foco theory exactly, or enthusiasm

for guerrilla warfare, but a pessimistic, self-righteous structuralism that wards off

embarrassing questions.

My book makes no sense in terms of Guatemalan politics, Chinchilla argues, and

she may be right on the level of Guatemala City, where there is little room for peasants

except as they serve the needs of other groups. I, Rigoberta Menchú is important to

question precisely because of the monumental confidence that it inspired in how the left

views peasants. This is a book that we knew was true because it was what we expected

to hear. It made a disastrous political strategy look like an inevitable expression of

peasant needs. It allowed us to discount peasants who did not measure up to a high-cost

agenda. It enshrined a mythology that, in the name of serving peasants, served the urban

left. Even if am wrong about important points, it ought to be possible to argue that

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guerrilla warfare was an avoidable tragedy without being subject to an anathema from

Carol Smith. Her concluding remarks on "positionality" illustrate one of the ironies of

postmodern thought. The same reflexive lexicon that can be used to open up discussion

can also be used to shut it down. What's the tell-tale sign? The dismissal of unwelcome

evidence or arguments on the grounds that the bearer has fallen into a colonialist

storyline or, more crudely, is not of the correct class, ethnicity or gender to get a hearing.

If someone wants to throw you out of court, no amount of self-positioning will save you.

While more can always be said on the subject, my book on I, Rigoberta Menchú contains

as much of it as most readers are going to tolerate. If you over-indulge, they get the

impression that you care more about your soul than your subject.

Since one of my book's arguments is that solidarity assumptions have made it hard

to look at the Guatemalan violence critically, I feel vindicated as well as disappointed.

The debate over my book suggests that room for disagreement in Latin American studies

is smaller than we make out to peers, institutions and funders. To stay on good terms

with some of your colleagues, you must be prepared to suppress information and

questions that they will find offensive. There was no shortage of good reasons to

document the problems with I, Rigoberta Menchú, but this is surely one of them.

One of the final issues I should address is the book's authorship. Because Rigoberta

told her story to a Parisian intellectual, skeptics have wondered whether Elizabeth

Burgos put words in the mouth of the future Nobel peace laureate. The evidence that this

was Rigoberta’s story is considerable, as laid out in my book. But Georg Gugelberger

takes me to task for failing to listen to all the available tapes of the January 1982

interviews. Now that I have been able to listen to the eighteen hours, I am pleased to

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report that they bear out my earlier conclusion, as well as the most recent of Rigoberta's

own statements, that this is indeed her story. In view of Elizabeth's explanation that she

shifted some of the episodes to maintain chronology, what most surprised me about the

tapes is how closely the book ended up following the order in which Rigoberta laid out

her life.(4)

What do my findings mean for I, Rigoberta Menchú in the classroom? This is a

work that many students find accessible, that some find inspirational, and that can be

used to introduce a range of issues in a memorable way.(5) Precisely because of the

many questions it raises, the book is just the kind that we should be assigning and

debating. However, my findings have complicated the task of teaching it, especially in

the short span of a week or so that is usually the only time available in introductory

courses. The problem with presenting it as a testimonio, as Gugelberger and colleagues

have defined it, is that the genre carries a strong connotation of eyewitness truth that he

and other advocates have not wanted to see put to the test.(6) Instructors have been left

dangling between the book's basis in fact and its imaginative qualities.

If I had to pick out the most constructive suggestion of the last few months, it would

be Gary Gossen's in this journal. Maybe it is time to liberate Rigoberta's 1982 story from

the category of testimonio. That is how the story started out, but it seems to have turned

into something else. Let us instead teach it as an epic, and not just as a Mayan one,

because no small number of ladinos identify with it too. According to Gossen, epic

narrative is about a time of tribulation; has a basis in historical fact; is told from a very

partisan point of view; yet becomes a charter for national identity. This is how most

Guatemalans hear Rigoberta's story, as an Exodus narrative about a village girl who loses

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her parents to the army, flees abroad and returns home in triumph. As a national epic,

her story is indeed beyond refutation. But that does not mean that we should avoid

historical exegesis of it. Latin American studies is no place for fundamentalism. If I,

Rigoberta Menchú is becoming national scripture for Mayas and other Guatemalans, that

is all the more reason for scholars to be producing the historical criticism for which they

will be asking us.

-June 18, 1999

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NOTES

(1) Fax sheet from Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Embassy of Spain in Paris, January 31,
1996.

(2) The final, most devastating case occurred in October 1996, on the eve of the final
peace agreement, when a ransom kidnapping was traced to a URNG comandante. The
UN truth commission did not believe the URNG's claim that it did not know about the
operation (CEH: Caso Ilustrativo 103).

(3) One of the largest massacres of the war was of 178+ ladinos in the Petén village of
Dos Erres in December 1982 (CEH: Caso Ilustrativo No. 31).

(4) Gugelberger also brings in the role of Arturo Taracena, the EGP liaison in Paris who
introduced Rigoberta to Elizabeth, then participated in other ways that were not
acknowledged at the time to avoid implicating his organization. Arturo never responded
to my requests for an interview. Before Gugelberger reassigns the book's authorship on
the basis of Rigoberta's new memoir Crossing Borders, he should guide us through the
differences between what Rigoberta and Arturo say happened.

(5) This is not to say that all the reasons that the book appeals to students are the best
ones. Here is what John Watanabe has to say. "I ceased teaching the book a good
number of years ago precisely because I found it rang true for students for all the wrong
reasons by playing on their romanticized stereotypes of egalitarian--and oppressed--
Indians who spontaneously rise up against their oppressors, just as we would like to
imagine we would do in their place. No community, Indian or otherwise, could prove as
ideal as Ms. Menchú describes before the violence, or as spontaneously mobilized once it
began, but her story had the power to erase an entire term's discussion of the more
complex ways such communities could be both cooperative and divisive, nasty and nice

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to themselves and others as complex, contradictory collections of ‘real’ human
individuals." (Letter to the Editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 45, no. 23, p.B3)

(6) While Gugelberger and his associates want us to take I, Rigoberta Menchú as a valid
representation of Mayan experience, they are not amused by the idea of comparing it
with what other violence survivors say. The usual response is to accuse me of holding
Rigoberta to objectivist truth standards, a falsehood that Gugelberger repeats here.
Buried in the jargon, he makes a significant concession: that testimonio is "much closer
to literature than documentary." That was not obvious from his previous contribution on
the subject, a book with Rigoberta on the cover called The Real Thing (Gugelberger
1996).

-----

REFERENCES

Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH)

1999 Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio

Davis, Shelton
1988 "Introduction: Sowing the Seeds of Violence," in Robert M. Carmack, ed.,
Harvest of Violence, pp.3-36, Norman: University of Oklahoma.

Grenier, Yvon
1999 The Emergence of Insurgency in El Salvador: Ideology and Political Will,
University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gugelberger, Georg M.
1996 The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, Durham. North
Carolina: Duke University Press.

Kobrak, Paul Hans Robert

1997 Village Troubles: The Civil Patrols in Aguacatán, Guatemala, Ph.D
dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan.

Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHA)

1998 Guatemala Nunca Más, Informe Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de
la Memoria Histórica

Smith, Carol A.
1992 "Maya Nationalism." NACLA, Report on the Americas. 25(3):29-33.

Watanabe, John
1992 Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, Austin: University of Texas
Press.

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