Greg Grandin on Rigoberta Menchú

It Was Heaven That They Burned

Greg Grandin
The Nation
September 8, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/article/154582/it-was-heaven-they-burned

Editor's Note: A longer version of this essay will
appear as the introduction to Who Is Rigoberta Menchú?,
forthcoming from Verso in 2011. The essay was
commissioned as the preface to a new edition of I,
Rigoberta Menchú, but the essay was excluded from the
volume when it appeared earlier this year. The author's
rights to I, Rigoberta Menchú are held by Elisabeth
Burgos, who conducted most of the 1982 interviews in
Paris that would serve as the basis of Menchú's memoir.
As rights-holder Burgos retains the right to veto any
new editions; after reading the essay, she exercised
her veto. She has not offered an explanation of her
decision.

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

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Dante's Inferno "is out"; I, Rigoberta Menchú "is in,"
the Wall Street Journal wrote, in late 1988, of
Stanford University's decision to include third-world
authors in its required curriculum. "Virgil, Cicero and
Tacitus give way to Frantz Fanon," the paper said,
concerned that Stanford's new reading list viewed "the
West" not through the "evolution of such ideas as faith
and justice, but through the prism of sexism, racism
and the faults of its ruling classes." Herewith began
the metamorphosis of a young and relatively obscure
Guatemalan Mayan woman into something considerably more
than a witness to genocide.

Since its publication in Ann Wright's English
translation in 1984, Rigoberta Menchú Tum's memoir had
been assigned with increasing frequency in university
courses in the United States and Europe. Historians
taught it as a primary source documenting revolution
and repression in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin
America, anthropologists as first-person ethnography
and literary theorists as an example of testimonio, a
genre distinct from traditional forms of autobiography.
But Menchú's mention in the Journal thrust her further
into the escalating culture wars, with conservatives
holding her up as an example of the foibles of the
multicultural left. "Undergraduates do not read about
Rigoberta," wrote the American Enterprise Institute's
Dinesh D'Souza in 1991, "because she has written a
great and immortal book, or performed a great deed, or
invented something useful. She simply happened to be in
the right place and the right time."

The place was Guatemala's Western Highlands, inhabited
by some 4 million people, the majority poor indigenous
peasants living in remote, hardscrabble villages like
Chimel, Menchú's hometown. The time was the late 1970s,
when the Guatemalan military was bringing to a climax a
pacification campaign, the horror of which was matched
only by historical memories of the Spanish conquest. By
the time it was over, government forces had taken the
lives of Menchú's parents, her two brothers and 200,000
other Guatemalans. And though this campaign may have
been "unfortunate for her personal happiness," D'Souza
said, it was "indispensable for her academic
reputation," transforming Menchú into a fetish object
onto which "minority students" could affirm their
"victim status" and professors could project their
"Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian
culture."

Then in 1992, on the 500-year anniversary of
Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas, Menchú
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and whatever ability
she had up until that point to maintain the integrity
of her particular story gave way to the burdens of
representing the victims of imperialism everywhere. She
was given the prize, the Nobel selection committee
noted, not just for her work exposing the murder and
mayhem committed by US allies in Guatemala but for
serving as a "vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation"
in a world still scarred by European colonialism.

It is safe to say that most who read her book did not
interpret her tale as "an explicit indictment of the
historical role of the West or Western institutions,"
as D'Souza feared, but rather as a saga of individual
resilience in the face of great hardship, much like
Anne Frank's diary. If anything, Menchú held out the
possibility of redemption, as the Nobel committee
suggested. Unlike Anne Frank, she survived. And
following the end of the cold war, many intellectuals
and policy-makers hoping to construct a pax neoliberal
were willing to acknowledge that victory over the
Soviet Union had entailed some moral compromises.
Support of "widespread repression" was "wrong," said
President Bill Clinton in 1999, a "mistake" the "United
States must not repeat."

Yet as far as irreconcilables on the cultural and
political right were concerned, the Peace Prize might
as well have been given posthumously to Frantz Fanon or
Che Guevara. Trapped as they are by the fallacy of
consequent logic, where to admit A would mean accepting
Z, those most hostile to Menchú believed that to
acknowledge her legitimacy would indeed indict the
whole of the West and all of its works. The attacks
came fast after she won her Nobel, with detractors
working hard to expose Menchú as an Indian with an
agenda. They demanded that she "come clean" about her
involvement with Guatemalan guerrillas, renounce her
support of the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua and
denounce human rights violations in Cuba. D'Souza
thought it suspicious that Menchú met her "feminist
translator"-Elisabeth Burgos, once married to Che's
comrade Régis Debray-"in Paris, not a venue to which
many of the Third World's poor routinely travel," and
that her "rhetoric employs a socialist and Marxist
vocabulary that does not sound typical of a Guatemalan
peasant."

What truly irked, though, was not the language but the
details. "No details! Never bother me with details!"
pleads the archbishop in Jean-Paul Sartre's The Devil
and the Good Lord (1951), hoping to be spared the
specifics of a violent military suppression of a
peasant revolt. Sartre's sixteenth-century cleric knew
what cold war triumphalists feared: "A victory
described in detail is indistinguishable from a
defeat." Menchú provided too many details.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum was 23 years old when she arrived
in Paris in January 1982, when she gave the interview
that would produce her memoir. The worst of Guatemala's
civil war was yet to come. The roots of the crisis
reached back to five years before Menchú was born, to
the CIA's 1954 overthrow of democratically elected
Jacobo Arbenz. The agency objected to the fact that
Arbenz had legalized a small communist party and
implemented an extensive agrarian reform. Following the
coup, Washington promised that it would turn Guatemala
into a "showcase for democracy." Instead, it created a
laboratory of repression. After the costly Korean War,
US policy-makers decided that the best way to confront
communism was not on the battlefield but by
strengthening the "internal defense" of allied
countries. Guatemala, now ruled by a pliant and venal
regime, proved a perfect test case, as Washington
supplied a steadily increasing infusion of military aid
and training. US diplomats often signaled a desire to
work with a "democratic left"-that is, a noncommunist
left. But the most passionate defenders of democracy
were likely to be found in the ranks of Washington's
opponents and singled out for execution by US-created
and -funded security forces.

By the late 1970s, more than two decades after the
overthrow of Arbenz, the Guatemalan government stood on
the point of collapse. Repression against reformist
politicians, a radicalized Catholic Church, indigenous
activists and a revived labor and peasant movement
swelled the ranks of a left-wing insurgency that, by
the end of the decade, was operating in eighteen of
Guatemala's twenty-two departments. Between 1976 and
1980, security forces killed or disappeared close to a
thousand Social and Christian Democrats, trade
unionists, university professors and students. By 1980
death squads were running rampant in Guatemala City and
the countryside, and mutilated bodies piled up on the
streets and in ravines.

In the indigenous highlands, violence against activists
had been commonplace since the 1954 overthrow of
Arbenz, and steadily increased through the '60s and
'70s. Menchú's brother, Petrocinio, was murdered in
late 1979. Repression of Catholic priests and
catechists reached such a pitch that the church
shuttered its diocese in the department of El Quiché in
1980; the first of many assaults on Menchú's village
took place that year on Christmas Eve. The massacres
started in 1981 and at first were not linked to a plan
of stabilization or rule. Then in March 1982, shortly
after Menchú's Paris interview, a military coup in
Guatemala brought an even more vicious, yet more
competent, regime to power. In an effort to eliminate
the insurgent threat without generating wider circles
of radicalization, military analysts marked Mayan
communities according to colors: "white" spared those
thought to have no rebel influence; "pink" identified
areas in which the insurgency had a limited presence-
suspected guerrillas and their supporters were to be
killed but the communities left standing; "red" gave no
quarter-all were to be executed and villages destroyed.
"One of the first things we did," said an architect of
this plan, "was draw up a document for the campaign
with annexes and appendices. It was a complete job with
planning down to the last detail."

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

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

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

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

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

In one passage, Menchú recalls hiding in the capital
before her flight to Mexico, sick with ulcers, unable
to rise from bed for days at a time, finding
consolation that she "wasn't the only orphan in
Guatemala" and that her grief was the "grief of a whole
people." For a moment, she is bearing the burdens of
"all poor Guatemalans" not to predict triumph but to
accept loss. Having unexpectedly reunited with her 12-
year-old sister, Menchú demands to know what kind of
world could produce such misery: "How is it possible
for our parents to be no longer with us?" Her anguish
leads her to fantasize about succumbing to some unnamed
"vice," a "depravity," so that she would no longer
"have to think or bear life." Menchú would go on to
escape Guatemala and achieve international recognition.
Here, though, she glimpses the oblivion that was the
fate of some war widows and orphans. The vices
available to Mayan women were sex and drink, and
starting in the late 1970s, indigenous prostitutes,
refugees from decimated families, began to haunt the
margins of Guatemala City's downtown, many still
dressed in native traje. A more common fortune was to
struggle on in solitude, trying to hold what was left
of one's family together. Menchú's despair, however, is
fleeting. "What has happened is a sign of victory," she
reports her sister telling her; "a revolutionary isn't
born out of something good" but of "wretchedness and
bitterness." Having confirmed her commitment to the
struggle, this triumphalism is obviously less
propaganda than deflection, a way for Menchú to put off
reckoning with incalculable loss and barely controlled
rage. "We have to fight without measuring our
suffering," her sister said.

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

Two of Stoll's charges concerning Menchú's life do have
merit. First, he documents that she received some
education, contradicting a claim that her father
refused to send her to school because he did not want
her to lose her cultural identity. Second, Stoll
presents evidence that Menchú falsely placed herself at
the scene of her 16-year-old brother's murder.
Petrocinio Menchú was kidnapped by the military when
his sister said he was, and was brought along with
other captives to the town of Chajul, accused of being
a guerrilla and murdered to intimidate the population.
Menchú's account of the execution, Stoll believes, "can
be considered factual." Except she did not witness it.
As to Menchú's equally harrowing description of her
mother's killing, Stoll grants that "Rigoberta's
account is basically true."

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

For his part, Stoll seemed caught off guard by a
controversy that was quickly escaping his control,
offering contradictory statements to explain the point
of his research. His book dedicated a chapter to
proving that Menchú could not have witnessed her
brother's execution, yet he now said that "how one
member or another of her family died" was a minor
issue. Stoll confirmed the "essential factuality of
Menchú's account of how her brother and mother died"
yet complained to a reporter that she was "still
displaying a lack of candor" in answering his charges.
He distanced himself from the right, defending Menchú's
status as a Nobel laureate, and flailed at the left,
complaining that members of the "Menchú cult" had
called him "everything except an infidel Jew."

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

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

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

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

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

It is hard, though, to hang such a grand interpretation
on the personal motives of one disputatious indigenous
peasant and the imaginative license of his 23-year-old
orphaned daughter. But Stoll does try, insisting on
tracing nearly every act of aggression Menchú
attributes to Ladinos, planters or security forces back
to an original provocation committed by her father.
Nowhere is this shadow narrative more perversely
applied than in his account of an event that serves as
the climax of both Menchú's memoir and Stoll's riposte:
the January 1980 firebombing of the Spanish Embassy,
which resulted in the death of Vicente Menchú and more
than thirty other peasants and university students who
were protesting escalating military repression in the
countryside, including the killing of Petrocinio
Menchú. Investigations by the Spanish government, the
Catholic Church and the United Nations all confirmed
Menchú's description of events, and in 2005 a Spanish
judge issued an arrest warrant for a former Guatemalan
interior minister accused of ordering the bombing.

But on the signal event in the civil war, a naked
display of unyielding power when many Guatemalans
realized that no reform would be tolerated or petition
considered, Stoll cannot help but weigh in. He
speculates that the protesters might have intentionally
killed themselves to reinforce "the Guatemalan left's
cult of martyrdom." It's hard to overstate how
extraordinary this statement is, especially coming from
a researcher who bases his legitimacy on championing
his own fact-based, empirical argumentation over the
deductions of a politicized left. There is no tradition
of tactical suicide among Guatemalan leftists, and
there is not one piece of evidence, not one witness,
not even among those critical of the protesters, to
support the possibility that the embassy massacre could
have been a "revolutionary suicide that included
murdering hostages and fellow protesters." But the
logic of his argument, if not the facts of the case,
compels Stoll to consider it, and in so doing he
transforms Vicente Menchú from victim to victimizer.

Subsequent research over the past decade has proved
Stoll's provocative thesis about Guatemala's civil war
to be largely wrong, while confirming Menchú's
interpretation of events. The definitive refutation has
come from the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento
Histórico-the aforementioned UN truth commission-which
released its findings in early 1999, shortly after the
Menchú controversy broke. Based on more than 8,000
interviews and extensive archival and regional research
conducted by a staff of more than 200, the CEH, like
Stoll, understands that the escalating civil war
emerged from the fault lines of local conflicts,
including petty family grievances and parochial land
conflicts, often among peasants and between indigenous
communities. But it places its examination of any given
clash within the broader context of a militarized
plantation economy where nonindigenous elites fought to
hold on to their monopoly control over land, labor,
markets, credit and transportation. As to the town of
Chimel, commission investigators recognized local feuds
between peasants but also found evidence that Ladino
planters did play a crucial role in instigating
violence and dispossession in the 1960s and '70s. On
the key point of chronology, which is ultimately the
hook on which Stoll's case dangles, the CEH documents a
clear pattern of repression enacted by planters,
Ladinos and security forces in the indigenous highlands
well before the arrival of the guerrillas in the 1970s.
Stoll says the army showed up in Chimel only after the
EGP guerrillas executed two Ladinos in the spring of
1979, thus laying blame for the ensuing spiral of
events that claimed the life of Menchú's brother and
mother and the destruction of Chimel at the feet of her
father's allies. But CEH researchers found that the
military's arrival in the region, and the start of its
harassments, predated these killings.

The CEH is concerned less with identifying who fired
the first shot in any one skirmish than with
understanding the larger causes of the civil war.
Starting with an introduction that provides staggering
statistical evidence of inequality-Guatemala's health,
education, literacy and nutritional indicators
continued to be among the most unjust in the world
despite an abundance of natural wealth-the CEH's final
report offers a damning analysis of Guatemalan history:

From independence in 1821, an event led by the
country's elite, an authoritarian state was created
that excluded the majority of Guatemalans; it was
racist in theory and practice and served to protect the
interests of a small, privileged elite.... State
violence has been fundamentally aimed against the
excluded, the poor, and the Maya, as well as those who
struggled in favor of a just and more equitable
society.... Thus a vicious circle was created in which
social injustice led to protest and subsequently to
political instability, to which there were always only
two responses: repression or military coups.

Contrary to those who would blame the romance of
revolution for the insurgency, the commission concluded
that the state, confronted with movements demanding
reform, "increasingly resorted to violence and terror
in order to maintain social control. Political violence
was thus a direct expression of structural violence."

To questions concerning her schooling and her brother's
execution, Menchú has offered straightforward answers.
In a 1999 interview, she said she omitted discussing
her experience as a student and servant in the Colegio
Belga because she hoped to protect the identities of
the Catholic nuns who were involved in the kind of
pastoral activism associated with liberation theology.
"How I would have loved to tell of all the experiences
I had," she said, but "the last thing I would have
wanted during those years was to associate the Belgian
school with me." Menchú did not study with the rest of
the students, and she took classes part time a few days
a week in the afternoon, working as a maid to pay for
her room and board, cleaning the school in the morning
and evening, earning twelve quetzals a month (about
$12). She admits she did not witness the murder of her
brother, but she relates an account of his killing,
including the disputed fact that he was burned alive,
from her mother. "And in response to whether my
brothers, my father, were rich," she said to
accusations that her family was relatively well-off,
"go to Chimel and you will see for yourself."

Menchú would not be the first partisan or literary
notable to rearrange events in his or her life. Think
of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. The untruths of
Henry Kissinger, also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, are
legion, yet no publisher would feel the need to include
a preface setting them in their proper context before
reissuing one of his many books. A more appropriate
comparison would be with Betty Friedan, author of The
Feminine Mystique (1963), who portrayed herself as an
alienated, apolitical housewife when in fact she was a
longtime activist who hailed from a family with deep
roots in the left labor movement. Few would consider
using Friedan's narrative manipulations to cast doubt
on the reality of the experience she was describing.

More than a decade after the scandal, what is notable
about I, Rigoberta Menchú is not its exaggerations but
its realism. Menchú had arrived in Paris emotionally
brutalized, her feelings raw, her sense of urgency to
tell a compelling story high. She spoke halting Spanish
and had come from a society in which most information
was transmitted orally, where hearsay and rumor, not
documented fact, prevailed. Her memoir is filled with
references to the ways paperwork was used to trick or
entrap peasants, along with stories of endless days
wasted by her father traveling to the capital to sign a
succession of meaningless government forms. One passage
in particular highlights the impotence of peasant
patriarchy when set against state bureaucracy: Menchú
recounts that, as a child, her father took her to the
government land office, told her to remain absolutely
still, and then took off his hat and bowed to a man
sitting behind a typewriter. "That's something else I
used to dream about-that typewriter," she recalled.

Added to this, she had just survived more than a year
of hiding in exile, a period that demanded self-
censorship. At the same time, her experience speaking
to reporters and solidarity delegations before her
Paris interviews had led her to realize the value
audiences place on eyewitness accounts. The need to
draw attention to Guatemala, which, compared to
neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador, was being
ignored by the international press, must have tempted
her to place herself at the scene of the many crimes
she describes. Menchú did not know her interviews with
Burgos would produce a book, much less an international
bestseller. She had no experience with the publishing
industry. And she certainly did not foresee that every
one of her statements would be subject to fine-tooth
scrutiny. And yet her narrative hews closely to a
truthful chronology, and even her most serious
embellishment-that she witnessed her brother being
burned to death-"can be considered factual," according
to her principal fact-checker.

Scholars commonly discuss I, Rigoberta Menchú as
reflecting the communal nature of Mayan society, where
oral storytelling blurs the line between individual and
group experience. Historians Christopher Lutz and
George Lovell reach deep into the past to argue that
sixteenth-century indigenous accounts of the Spanish
conquest were often written in the collective voice,
and that when Menchú, on the first page of her memoir,
cautions that her memory is poor and that the story she
is about to tell is "not only my life, it's also the
testimony of my people," she means it literally. "I
can't force them to understand," Menchú repeated in her
1999 interview. "Everything, for me, that was the story
of my community is also my own story. I did not come
from the air."

But over the past decade, as greater light has been
thrown on the process that led to the publication of I,
Rigoberta Menchú, its author has emerged even more as a
determined, distinctive individual. In one account,
Elisabeth Burgos, then working toward a doctorate in
ethnopsychiatry-a new discipline used to treat Paris's
burgeoning immigrant population, many from France's
former colonies-had wanted to interview a generic
"Guatemalan Mayan woman," not Menchú in particular. And
aside from supplying the testimony, Menchú was not
involved in the transcription, editing, revising or
translation of the book. Yet the two principals who did
carry out those tasks-Burgos and Arturo Taracena
Arriola, a Guatemalan historian and EGP representative
in Paris-confirm that Menchú took control of the
interview, speaking in a strong, certain voice. Though
Taracena and Burgos suggested topics to be covered,
they, Taracena reports, had to "rethink the outline"
because Menchú's "narrative capacity" went "beyond what
we had originally conceived.... There was a profound
literary quality to Rigoberta Menchú's voice." The
editors corrected Menchú's poor Spanish grammar and
syntax, and arranged her account chronologically, but,
Taracena remarks, the "book is a narration only by
Rigoberta, with her own rhythm, with her own
inventions, if there are any, with her own emotions."

Burgos withdrew during the interview process, applying
her doctoral training in ethnopsychiatry to treat
Menchú as a psychoanalyst would an analysand. That is,
she gave Menchú time to talk. And considering her
clandestine life in Guatemala and exile in Mexico,
swinging between bouts of depression and episodes of
intense political activity, Menchú needed it.
"Everything was piling up together," she remembers of
hiding in Guatemala City, "it was all on top of me." In
bed for days at a time and refusing to eat, Menchú had
few people to talk to. "With all the horrors that I had
inside me," she says, "it would have been comforting
for me to be able to talk to all the compañeros, or
people who understood me, people who were sympathetic."
But put to work as a servant in a house of nuns, her
loneliness grew "worse, because as I washed the
clothes, my mind was focused on the whole panorama of
my past. There was no-one to tell, no-one in whom I
could find some comfort." After fleeing to Mexico, she
did have a chance to speak to delegations and
reporters, but such encounters are often extremely
formulaic, driven by pressure to raise awareness to
what was taking place in Guatemala.

Her nearly weeklong interview in Paris therefore was
the first sustained opportunity Menchú had to process
memories and survivor guilt. And what pours forth like
a flood is a rich portrait of a complex, unique
individual. Menchú sanctifies her father as a paragon
of revolutionary virtue, yet she also reveals an
emotionally conflictive relationship to a man she
alternately renders as loving, determined and nurturing
but also quick to anger, prone to drink and despair and
ineffectual. Though Menchú exalts Mayan life for
political reasons, as well as out of genuine affection,
a perceptive reader will find a surface not so still, a
struggle not only on behalf of family and community but
against them. As Menchú's story unfolds and her world
expands, from Chimel to Guatemala as a whole and then
to Mexico and beyond, it becomes clear that her
progress-in terms of what she discusses (her political
education) and what she omits (her formal education,
such as it was)-is largely made possible by the turmoil
and dislocation she is denouncing. The dissonance that
results is irrepressible. "Papá used to be... well, I
don't mean foolish exactly because it's the thieves who
steal our land who are foolish... Well, they asked my
father to sign a paper but he didn't know what it said
because he'd never learned to read or write," she
recalls, in a passage where Burgos left the ellipses in
to capture a hesitant criticism and an implied
superiority. It is a hint that Menchú wrestled not just
with routine ambivalences of those who enjoy advantages
not available to parents but the singular fact that
those advantages were part and parcel of the terror
that took your parents' lives and shattered your
hometown.

In the midst of social decay, Menchú as a person comes
into sharper focus. "I've been in love many times," she
says, and considering the inassimilable loss of her
family she can be forgiven if her initial explanation
for why she rejected marriage and children seems like
pamphleteering. But it is soon revealed that her
position is less a choice than an effort to get some
control over a situation that leaves her little choice.
"It puts me in a panic," she admits. "I don't want to
be a widow, or a tortured mother." By the end of her
story, it is her mother-her body having been left to
the vultures until "not a bit...was left, not even her
bones"-who emerges as the defining parent. Menchú
credits her with pointing to a strategy of emancipation
not through collective action or cultural identity but
an insurgency of the self, a rebellion against filial
expectations. "I don't want to make you stop feeling a
woman," Menchú recalls her saying, "but your
participation in the struggle must be equal to that of
your brothers. But you mustn't join just as another
number.... A child is only given food when he demands
it. A child who makes no noise gets nothing to eat."

The revolution was defeated. But many of the human
rights, indigenous and peasant organizations that
continue today to fight to democratize Guatemalan
society were founded as popular-front organizations
covertly linked to one or another rebel group. One of
the lasting contributions of the insurgent
organizations, particularly the Ejército Guerrillero de
los Pobres and the Organización Revolucionario del
Pueblo en Armas, was to provide a school for critical
thinking for poor Guatemalans, many of whom continue to
be politically active. As theories of how to understand
and act in the world, Marxism and liberation theology
gave inhabitants of one of the most subjugated regions
in the Americas a way to link their local aspirations
to larger national and international movements and to
make sense of the kind of everyday, routine forms of
violence, as well as stunning displays of terror, that
are documented in Menchú's book. It also gave them a
means to insist on their consequence as human beings.
What makes Menchú's testimony so extraordinary is how
far her engagement with ideas clearly outstripped
whatever orientation she might have received from
organizers. What she learned from her travails, she
learned by her own impressive will and intelligence.
Her interpretation of events broadly reflects the
concerns of liberation theology, and at times it can
sound mechanical. But it is clearly rooted in her
personal grappling with the dilemmas of history and her
particular experience of power and powerlessness. "The
world I live in is so evil, so bloodthirsty, that it
can take my life away from one moment to the next,"
Menchú says, "so the only road open to me is our
struggle, the just war. The bible taught me that."

If I, Rigoberta Menchú served only as the testament of
a failed revolution, a moment in history when the
highest collective ideals of liberation theology
crashed headlong into the most vicious distillate of
cold war anticommunism, it would be a good book, still
worth reading. But what made liberation theology, along
with Latin America's New Left more broadly, so potent a
threat in a place as inhumane as Guatemala in the 1970s
was not just its concern with social justice but its
insistence on individual human dignity. This
combination of solidarity and insurgent individuality
is the heart of Menchú's memoir, and that's what makes
it a great, perhaps even immortal, book.

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University and
is a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. His most recent book, Fordlandia, was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

_____________________________________________

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