Analysis In the end, the poor may decide
By PAUL JEFFREY
Special to the National Catholic Reporter Guatemala
City
The people of this country have gone to some painful lengths in
trying to decipher why 150,000 died during three decades of recently ended
guerrilla war and state terror. Now they have to witness a challenge to the
veracity of one of the primary voices for those who suffered under brutal
military regimes.
Those determined to get at the historical truth have opened
countless mass graves to detail what happened to the tens of thousands of
murdered and who disappeared during the years of brutality.
Guatemalans also are awaiting an extensive report from a United
Nations-supervised truth report. And they are still awaiting the outcome of an
investigation into the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, who oversaw the
exhaustive Interdiocesan Project to Recover the Historic Memory.
The new wrinkle in Guatemalas woes is a challenge to the
testimony of Rigoberta Menchu, the Kiche Maya woman who won the
1992 Nobel Peace prize and who became an international icon for those
struggling against military repression.
Menchu, whose autobiography provides an insiders view of the
era, is engaged in a dispute with a U.S. anthropologist who challenged the
veracity of her account, published in 1993.
I, Rigoberta Menchu is based on a series of recorded
conversations in Paris in 1982 between Menchu and the leftist Venezuelan
anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos. It became an instant hit among solidarity
activists in the North looking for a window into the life of an indigenous
woman who had suffered at the hands of Latin Americas homicidal military.
Yet even before Menchu won the Nobel a decade later, rumors had begun to
surface in Guatemala that her real story wasnt quite the same as what she
told Burgos.
Tracking contradictions
Among those who began to track down the contradictions was David
Stoll, a Stanford University anthropology student researching a book about the
effects of counterinsurgency violence a few kilometers away from where Menchu
grew up.
In previous books, Stoll debunked the assumptions of leftist
academics in the United States. His first major book, Is Latin America
Turning Protestant?, challenged popular explanations about the growth of
evangelicals in the South. He later wrote Between Two Armies, blaming
the Guerrilla Army of the Poor for convincing Ixil Maya peasants to rise up
against the Guatemalan military and then abandoning them when the military
started massacring everyone in sight.
In his most recent book, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All
Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press, 1999), Stoll takes on one of the most
revered figures of liberal activists.
He details the differences between Menchus published memoirs
and the reality of her childhood in a small village outside of Sab Miguel
Uspantán where the young Kiche Maya woman grew up. Stoll
reports that Menchus father, Vicente, rather than the oppressed peasant
turned indigenous activist that his daughter describes, was instead a village
leader who cooperated with non-revolutionary outsiders including Peace Corps
volunteers and Heifer Project staff.
Stoll describes how a major conflict over land, which got Vicente
jailed and beaten, was not with European-descended landbarons -- as his
daughter describes -- but rather with his indigenous in-laws. The discrepancies
continue, including details of how and where Rigobertas brother
Petrocinio was killed, and the details surrounding her mothers and
fathers violent deaths.
Stoll also describes Menchus years of Spanish-language
studies in Catholic boarding schools in San Miguel Uspantán and Chiantla
-- all experiences Menchu had denied when she told Burgos she had only recently
learned Spanish. Stolls research also leaves the reader doubting that
Menchu ever worked on the coastal export plantations, a backbreaking labor she
eloquently describes in her book, or as a maid to a hardhearted wealthy woman
in the capital.
Stoll acknowledges that Menchu was not fabricating history out of
thin air. What the 23-year-old Menchu related in 1982 was indeed experienced by
thousands of her fellow Maya, and her family members had indeed been killed by
the military.
Yet if Menchu was to become a Mayan everywoman, if her personal
saga was to include all the important details of indigenous oppression at the
hands of European descendants and foreigners, and, most important, if her story
was to motivate foreign readers to support the Guatemalan guerrillas, it was
necessary for her story to become more than what she had personally
experienced.
She exaggerated, producing a dramatic testimony that cut through
global indifference and mobilized tens of thousands of people abroad to speak
out against Guatemalas repressive military. That was almost two decades
ago. In the Guatemala of today, obsessed as it is with whose version of history
-- rich or poor, indigenous or outside -- will prevail, Stolls book and
Menchus emerging admissions of literary license have only fueled the feud
over who owns the past.
Knee-jerk reactions abound on both sides. The same is true among
Latin American experts in the North, where Stoll is alternately praised for
working hard at the thankless job of digging out the truth or damned for
applying inappropriate investigative journalistic techniques to understand how
indigenous peoples construct their reality.
In Guatemala, few have actually read Stolls book.
Thats not surprising since it is only in English and because it
ultimately has more to do with his fight with leftist academia in the North
than with the Nobel laureate.
But Menchu has been caught in the crossfire and wounded in the
process. Coupled with a financial scandal that plagued her foundation last
year, as well as the faked kidnapping of her nephew before that, analysts say
it has left her debilitated as a political leader and significantly weakened
her ability to run for president in the next millennium.
Beyond what the book may mean for Menchu, many worry it adversely
affects organized efforts to reconstruct the past. Read here in
Guatemala, the message of Stolls book is that Indians are excellent
narrators, they tell a lot of stories, but they lie and exaggerate, said
Gutierrez. Yet much of the interpretation of history as carried out by
REMHI [Interdiocesan Project to Recover the Historic Memory] or the U.N. truth
commission is based on those stories, on the memory of the Indians. So the
natural conclusion is that while some of the things may have happened, the
story has been symbolized, exaggerated and lied about, so maybe history
wasnt as bad as we say.
Even more afraid
Otilia Lux de Coti, a Kiche Maya like Menchu and the
only indigenous member of the three-person commission, gets angry at the
mention of Stoll. How can a foreigner come here into our culture and try
to show us what weve been living for centuries? His study is invalid.
People were too afraid to tell him the truth. If theyre still afraid
today, they were even more afraid then, she told NCR.
Theres an agenda behind this book. We in the commission interpret
this as a message to delegitimize the commissions report.
Rosario Pu is also a Kiche Maya woman and a member of
the board of directors of the Committee for Peasant Unity, a guerrilla-linked
organization that Menchu, in 1982, claimed her father helped found (another
item disputed by Stoll). Pu told NCR that Stolls book is an
offense to the dignity of Rigoberta, but argued that it is
Rigobertas own people who will have the last word, who will
pronounce judgment on whether her story is true or not.
Pu may be right. In this blood-soaked land, it may ultimately be
ordinary people who have the last word about history. Whatever official
commissions, criminal courts or even U.S. anthropologists declare, it is the
majority of Guatemalans who are poor and who were the victims of the conflict
who will ultimately declare judgment. And to them will fall the final decision
of whether to forgive.
That truth was brought home to President Alvaro Arzu on Dec. 29,
the second anniversary of the peace accords, when he spoke before a mostly
indigenous crowd in Santa Cruz del Quiché and asked forgiveness for the
governments complicity in violence against civilians during the war. Arzu
spoke in Spanish without a translator; the message, however, was obviously for
external consumption. Pu was present that day and called Arzus speech
a sham.
Mario Higueros, a Mennonite theologian in Guatemala City, called
it an attempt at cheap grace. He told NCR, Pardon is
only possible when you know who committed the violence. What the people who
rule this country dont realize is that only the victim can liberate the
offender. The victim cant begin that process of liberating themselves
from their bitterness until they know who killed their loved ones, who ordered
the torture. That means naming names, it means military leaders confessing
their sin. Until that happens, no political speech is going to begin to cure
the open wounds of our history.
National Catholic Reporter, March 5,
1999
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