So far much of the debate is not over my book. Here is the preface that outlines my argument...
Preface In 1992 a Guatemalan peasant won the Nobel Peace Prize. Except for people interested in Latin America or indigenous rights, the usual reaction was, Rigoberta who? Even for some acquainted with her name, Rigoberta Menchú was an unlikely peace laureate. Neither she nor anyone else had been able to end the civil war afflicting Guatemala since she was a child. Her public career had begun only a decade before, when she told an anthropologist in Paris the story of her life to the age of twenty-three. Born in a K'iche' Mayan village, Rigoberta never went to school and had learned to speak Spanish only recently. She told of working on plantations as a child, being evicted by landlords, and learning how to organize. Then she told what soldiers and police had done to her family, terrible stories of death by torture and fire. The book created from the tape-recorded interviews, I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), propelled her into a position of astonishing prominence for a person of her background. She became the most well-known representative of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a figure who could call on the pope, presidents of important countries, and the UN secretary-general. What if much of Rigoberta's story is not true? This is an awkward question, especially for someone like myself who thinks the Nobel award was a good idea. Still, I decided that it must be asked. While interviewing survivors of political violence in the 1ate 1980s, I began to come across significant problems in the life story she told at the start of her career. There is no doubt about the most important points: that a dictatorship massacred thousands of indigenous peasants, that the victims included half Rigoberta's immediate family, that she fled to Mexico to save her life, and that she joined a revolutionary movement to liberate her country. On these points, Rigoberta's account is beyond challenge and deserves the attention it receives. But in other respects, such as the situation of her family and village before the war, other survivors gave me a rather different picture, which is borne out by the available records. If part of the laureate's famous story is not true, does it matter? Perhaps not. Rigoberta won the peace prize on the five hundredth anniversary of the European colonization of the Americas. She has been the first to acknowledge that she received it not for her own accomplishments, but because she stands for a wider group of people who deserve international support. Whatever the facts of her particular life, the prize was intended to dramatize the historical debt owed to the native people of the Western Hemisphere. The prize was also intended to encourage peace talks in her homeland of Guatemala. While Rigoberta's village background is an interesting question, it is not the most important one. Despite Rigoberta's merits as a Nobel laureate, I decided that the problems with her 1982 account should be brought to wider attention. To some readers, a critical examination of I, Rigoberta Menchú will not be welcome. It sounds like giving ammunition to the enemy--in this case, the army that has dominated Guatemala's political life for decades and still has much for which to answer. If Rigoberta is fundamentally right about what the army did, why dissect a personal account that is inevitably selective, like any human memory of anything? If her story expresses a larger truth, surely a sympathetic anthropologist should not challenge its credibility. As a colleague reasoned with me: "Maybe it's the fault of the French anthropologist who edited her testimony. Maybe the accuracy of her memory was impaired by trauma. Maybe Mayan oral tradition is not grounded in the same definition of fact as a Western journalist's. It's not like she lied in court. She spent a week talking to someone in Paris! Maybe she was tired, maybe there were communications problems, maybe she was just doing what advocates always do--exaggerating a little." I agree that it would be naive to challenge Rigoberta's account just because it is not a model of exactitude. Obviously, stories can be true even if they are selective in what they report. Indicting a Nobel laureate for inaccuracy is not the point of what follows. Even though Rigoberta is a genuine survivor of human rights violations, even though this makes her an important symbol for victims of such abuses, the next most important issue is why. Why did such a catastrophe befall her family and village? This is a question meriting close examination, especially now that the war has ended, exhumation teams are digging up massacre victims, and truth commissions are publishing their findings. Where the contradictions between Rigoberta's version of events, that of neighbors, and the documentary record put her story into a different light is the problem of why the killing began locally. The most obvious answer--the well-attested brutality of the Guatemalan security forces--does not suffice as the only one. An underlying issue is far from settled. Was the guerrilla movement defeated in the early 1980s a popular struggle expressing the deepest aspirations of Rigoberta's people? Was it an inevitable reaction to grinding oppression, by people who felt they had no other choice? On these questions I, Rigoberta Menchú carries great authority, more than it deserves in my judgement. Although the laureate's views have changed considerably over the years, in 1982 she presented herself as an eyewitness to the mobilization of her people. There is no stronger claim to authority and most readers have taken her at her word, in a way that matters beyond the confines of her own country. For some of my colleagues, dissecting the legacy of guerrilla warfare is like beating a dead horse. It is indeed a strategy that much of the Latin American left would appear to have repudiated. But it continues to be romanticized, as illustrated by the aura surrounding Che Guevara, and it has hardly disappeared, as demonstrated by news reports from Colombia, Peru and Mexico. What I discovered in Rigoberta's home town is not very surprising in view of how celebrities and movements mythologize themselves. When the future Nobel laureate told her story in 1982, she drastically revised the prewar experience of her village to suit the needs of the revolutionary organization she had joined. In her telling, a tragic convergence of military moves and local vendettas became a popular movement that, at least in her area, probably never existed. Rigoberta told her story well enough that it became invested with all the authority that a story of terrible suffering can assume. From the unquestionable atrocities of the Guatemalan army, her credibility stretched farther than it should have, into the murkier background question of why the violence occurred. The result was to mystify the conditions facing peasants, what they thought their problems were, how the killing started, and how they reacted to it. That a valuable symbol can also be very misleading is the dilemma that obliged me to write this book. The problem does not exist simply on the level of what did and did not happen in one corner of Guatemala. It also extends into the international apparatus for reporting human rights violations, reacting to them, and intepreting their implications for the future--the world of human rights activism, journalism and scholarship. In a world swayed by the mass media, in which nations and peoples live or die by their ability to catch international attention, how do the gatekeepers of communication deal with the mixture of truth and falsehood in any movement's portrayal of itself, including those we feel morally obliged to support? Must we resign ourselves to be apologists for one side or the other? In Guatemala I learned that it was impossible to discuss political violence without trespassing upon powerful symbols that assume what needs to be discussed, cloaking the debatable with the mantle of unquestionability. Like any symbol of sacrificial commitment, Rigoberta's image commands loyalty by fusing together a great deal of experience, feeling and conviction. The destruction of her family stands for the deaths of thousands of others for whom justice could never be done. This was Rigoberta's purpose in telling her story the way that she did: it enabled her to focus international condemnation on an institution that deserved it, the Guatemalan army. But the condensing power of such a symbol comes at a cost. When a person becomes a symbol for a cause, the complexity of a particular life is concealed in order to turn it into a representative life. So is the complexity of the situation being represented. Sooner or later, in one form or another, what the legend conceals will force its way back to our attention. The contradictions glossed over by a heroic figure will not go away because we wish to ignore them. In Guatemala, much of what needs to be debated about the last half century of revolution and counter-revolution, bloodshed and peacemaking, is still wrapped up in symbols in ways that prevent their frank discussion. What was filtered out of I, Rigoberta Menchú, and what often gets filtered out of discussions about Guatemala, is the subject of this book. Not at issue is Rigoberta's choice as a Nobel laureate or the larger truth she told about the violence. Unfortunately, such distinctions do not mean much to Rigoberta and some of her supporters, who regard challenges to her version of events as racist. In 1997 she produced a new book about her life, especially the fifteen years since the last one. Crossing Borders was, according to rumor, going to correct factual problems with the previous account. As it turns out, the new book is revealing but not revelatory. While Rigoberta diverges from her earlier story in interesting ways, she makes no retractions. Earlier in 1997, I sent the laureate an outline of my findings, asked for an interview, and offered to send her a copy of the manuscript for this book. There was no reply. To a second letter by certified mail, the head of Rigoberta's New York office responded that Rigoberta was too busy for an interview. But he did ask for a copy of my manuscript, which I sent in June, again by certified mail. Half a year later, at year's end, Rigoberta attacked the editor of I, Rigoberta Menchú, the anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos. "That is not my book," she said of her first life story. "It is a book by Elizabeth Burgos. It is not my work, it is a work that does not belong to me morally, politically or economically." She accused Elisabeth of excluding her from the editorial process, depriving her of the royalties, and despoiling her of her testimony. "Anyone who has doubts about the work should go to Ms. Burgos," she said. Fortunately, I already had. What follows is not a biography of the Nobel laureate. Instead, I will compare her 1982 life story with local testimony and documentary sources. Then I will argue why the story took the shape it did, as well as why it appealed to an international audience, before being transmitted back home, where Guatemalans have made it part of a national debate about who they are. The first chapter describes how my interviewing in northern Quiché Department called into question the most widely read account of the Guatemalan violence. Published in 1983, I, Rigoberta Menchú used the compelling story of one family to personify the moral dualisms of a society at war with itself. With its noble Indians and evil landlords, ancestral ethnic hatred and revolutionary martyrdom, Rigoberta's story became a deeply influential portrait of the violence in Guatemala. Vicente Menchú and His Village (Chapters 2-3) The tragedies that befell families like the Menchús are undeniable. How these were understood by the revolutionary movement, its foreign supporters, and human rights activists is another matter. What guerrilla strategists wished to find among Mayan peasants were cohesive communities, in subjection to landlords and eager to take up arms. What they stepped into was rather different, as can be seen from the case of Rigoberta's father Vicente, his struggle for land, and who he had to fight to get it. Chapters 2 and 3 put the supposed imperative of guerrilla warfare in the context of one locality that, in Rigoberta's retelling, would become archetypal. I, Rigoberta Menchú encouraged the Guatemalan left and its foreign supporters to continue viewing the countryside as a contest between social classes, ethnic blocs, and structural forces. Meanwhile, the dramas played out in peasant villages burlesqued the grand paradigms. Popular Revolutionary War (Chapters 4-10) The central issue in this part of the book is how Rigoberta's father and neighbors responded to the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), an organization led by a friend and admirer of Che Guevara. Chapter 4 introduces army rule in Guatemala and the armed opposition, then describes how the two sides descended on Uspantán to commit the first political killings there in August 1979. The discrepancies between I, Rigoberta Menchú and local accounts raise a host of issues, among them: Why did the guerrillas want to make connections with men like Vicente Menchú? Did he and other Uspantán peasants have any idea of the sacrifices that the EGP expected them to make? Did they join for any reason but to defend themselves from the army's reprisals? A recurring question is, who to believe? How do we weigh the reliability of Rigoberta's account against the versions I collected and documentary sources? Chapter 5 compares various accounts of the murder of Rigoberta's brother Petrocinio, the emotional climax of I, Rigoberta Menchú. Although the laureate's version of what happened is true in important ways, I show that it cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be. Chapter 6 describes the death of Rigoberta's father, during a protest at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City, in a mysterious conflagration that took the lives of thirty-six people. A careful look at how the fire started will suggest the revolutionary movement's ability to turn an unfounded version of events into an internationally accepted fact. The next two chapers explore Vicente Menchú's relation to two revolutionary organizations, the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC) and the EGP, and how the war's arrival further divided his community. In Chapter 7, the key question is whether CUC was a grassroots response by an increasingly oppressed peasantry, or whether the EGP invented it as a way to lure peasants into confronting the state. Chapter 8 explores the implications of EGP strategy for Uspantán peasants, specifically the idea that they could be organized to defeat an army with a well-deserved reputation for brutality. Chapters 9 and 10 describe the climax of army repression in Uspantán, including the death of Rigoberta's mother and her brother Victor. While no single source on such a terror-filled situation can be taken as authoritative, I hope to convince readers that the EGP never developed the strong social base in Uspantán that Rigoberta would have us believe. Vicente's Daughter and the Reinvention of Chimel (Chapters 11-14): Whose war, then, was this? Until now, our main subject has been Vicente Menchú, the peasant patriarch eulogized in his daughter's story, and contradictory interpretations of his life. Chapters 11 and 12 return to Rigoberta; her whereabouts as her family was hunted down; and how she found a new home in the political apparatus of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Chapters 13 and 14 explore the question of whether I, Rigoberta Menchú was really her story. As soon as the book appeared, sceptics wondered how an unschooled peasant, illiterate and monolingual until a few years before, could be so fluent with concepts like class, ethnicity, culture, identity, and revolution. Suspicion was quick to fall on the anthropologist who tape-recorded Rigoberta in Paris and turned her stories into a book. Elisabeth Burgos was the wife of Régis Debray, the French Marxist who theorized that the rest of Latin America could follow the guerrilla road to revolution pioneered by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba. Promotion of Rigoberta's and Elisabeth's book by Cuba did not dispell suspicion that it was speaking for the guerrillas more than for peasants. The internecine struggles dividing Rigoberta's neighbors dropped out of the story, making armed struggle sound an inevitable reaction to oppression, at a time when Mayas were desperate to escape the violence. I, Rigoberta Menchú became a way to mobilize foreign support for a wounded, retreating insurgency. The Laureate Goes Home (Chapters 15-20) Rigoberta was not well-known in Guatemala until the campaign to give her the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet by this time, her story had translated rightwing terror in a small, obscure country into international symbolism that could be used to oppose it. Even though the army had won militarily and politically, the guerrillas fought on from the margins to maintain their claim to be a national bargaining partner. The more important war was fought abroad, through images, and it is the international propaganda war that the guerrillas won with the help of I, Rigoberta Menchú, as a testimonial linchpin for their claims. Chapters 15 and 16 follow Rigoberta's path to the Nobel Prize and the challenges she faced in the Guatemalan peace process, which did not halt the fighting for another four years, until 1996. As foreign activists focused on the army's abuses, peasant survivors complained that they were "caught in the crossfire"--from the guerrillas as well as soldiers. Rigoberta had to deal with metaphorical crossfire from four directions: the army, the EGP, the international community, and her own people. Although foreigners presumed that she was a leader, few Mayan peasants supported the armed struggle to which she was mortgaged. Chapter 17 addresses the question of why so many foreign activists and scholars have attributed such authority to her story. The larger-than-life Rigoberta I will explain as an icon, a quasi-sacred symbol that resolves contradictions for the people who believe in it, in a way that is not be questioned. Chapter 18 returns to Uspantán, to look at how Chimel's survivors overcame countless obstacles to resettle their land and how the Menchús are remembered locally. Chapter 19 describes how Rigoberta's efforts to represent her people have, since 1993, led her away from the guerrilla movement that launched her career. To show how misleading it is to take Rigoberta's story at face value, I will have to distinguish between what can be corroborated and what cannot, what is probable and what is highly improbable. However, identifying factual shortcomings is only a means to an end. The underlying problem is, not how Rigoberta told her story, but how well-intentioned foreigners have chosen to interpret it. Especially now that many academics are eager to deconstruct any claim to settled truth, Rigoberta's story should have been compared with many others. If she wanted to blame the violence entirely on the army and support the guerrillas, she had the right to a hearing. So did the many Mayas who also blamed the guerrillas for the violence and did not feel represented by them. Such differences begged for comparison. Instead, Rigoberta's version was so attractive to so many foreigners that Mayas who repudiated the guerrillas were often ignored or discounted. This bolstered the claim that the guerrillas represented the mass of Mayan peasants, long after there was good reason to doubt this. The air of sacrilege about questioning the reliability of I, Rigoberta Menchú gives us at least three reasons to do so. The first is what it can tell us about the Guatemalan violence, its popular roots, and how these were mythologized to meet the needs of the revolutionary movement and its supporters. The second is to challenge underlying romantic assumptions about indigenous people and guerrilla warfare, for which Rigoberta's people will not be the last to pay dearly. The third is to raise questions about a new standard of truth gaining ground in the humanities and social sciences. The premise of the new orthodoxy is that Western forms of knowledge, such as the empirical approach adopted here, are fatally compromised by racism and other forms of domination. Responsible scholars must therefore identify with the oppressed, relegating much of what we think we know about them to the dustbin of colonialism. The new basis of authority consists of letting subalterns speak for themselves, agonizing over any hint of complicity with the system that oppresses them, and situating oneself in relation to fashionable theorists. Certainly there is much to be said for listening, but which voices are we supposed to listen to? What I will show in the case of I, Rigoberta Menchú is that critical theory can end up revolving around romantic conceptions of indigenous people, mythologies that can be used to justify sacrificing them for larger causes. Acknowledgements In keeping with ethical norms in anthropology, particularly where sources could be subject to reprisal, I have avoided identifying them by name. For the sake of coherence, it will be necessary to identify certain families, particularly those involved in land feuds, but usually not individuals if they are still living. One of the few exceptions is Rigoberta's only surviving brother, who played a heroic role in recovering his father's land and could not remain unidentified without suppressing an important part of the story. I have also identified various living individuals, none currently living in the area or interviewed by me, who many Uspantános identify as assassins for the Guatemalan army. Unattributed quotations come from my interviews between 1988 and 1997, mainly in the municipio (district) of Uspantán. The interviewing was done primarily in Spanish, a language in which many K'iche' Mayas are proficient. From 1994 to 1996 I was often accompanied by Barbara Bocek, an archeologist from Stanford University working as a Peace Corps volunteer. Once I began to work with Barb, it became hard to understand how I accomplished much without her. Fluent in K'iche' Maya, Barbara took the lead in dozens of interviews, especially with widows who spoke little Spanish. Not everything we heard supports my argument, and what is incongruent has been reported as well, so that readers can draw different conclusions if they wish. Despite the limitations of what follows, I hope it will encourage more survivors of these events to speak out, which could lead to a better interpretation in the future. This book was written as part of a larger study of the impact of human rights symbolism on the peace process in northern Quiché Department. I am profoundly indebted to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, for two years of generous support; to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, for a year's fellowship; and to the Bellagio Center, for a month's residency at Lake Como. Over the last year, my colleagues at Middlebury College have provided encouragement on a number of occasions when it was needed. I would also like to thank my colleagues elsewhere, many of whom had doubts about the wisdom of this project or advised me to proceed differently than I did. I appreciate their disagreements as much as their suggestions. They include Jeffrey Ehrenreich, Stener Ekern, Henrik Hovland, Susan Burgerman, Abigail Adams, Antonella Fabri, Diane Nelson, Daniel H. Levine, Mitchell Seligson, Paul Kobrak, Pascual Huwart, Piero and Kate Venezia, Betty Adams, Lynn Roberts, Jan Lundius, David Holiday, Tanya Palencia, Jan Rus, Joseph Gaughan, Michael Brown, Mick and Tico Taussig, Rachel Moore, Kamala Visweswaran, Elizabeth and Jacqueline Sutton, Sharon Stancliff, Robert Carlsen, Duncan Earle, Erica Verrillo, Richard Wilson, Manuela Canton Delgado, Daniel Rothenberg, Victoria Sanford, Kathy Dill, Norman Stolzoff, Terri Shaw, Robert Packenham, Dave Thomas, Steve Tullberg, Elaine and Stephen Elliot, Mary Jo McConahay, Joel Simon, Colum Lynch, Victor Perera, Michael Shawcross, and Paul Goepfert. I am also indebted to Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Richard N. Adams, Ted Fischer and John Watanabe for their comments to Westview Press, with apologies that I was not able to follow more of their suggestions. Without Karl Yambert of Westview Press, this book would still be unpublished. Of the many people I interviewed, I am able to thank by name only two: Elisabeth Burgos and Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López. My gratitude to them is profound, but no more than to the many people of Uspantán who were so courageous in sharing their experiences with myself and Barbara Bocek. This book is dedicated to the memory of their loved ones.
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