In defense of Rigoberta Menchu
By Teresa Gutierrez
Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Mayan woman from Guatemala,
recently came under attack for her world-renowned book "I,
Rigoberta Menchu."
Menchu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is a long-time
human-rights activist and an outspoken critic of repressive
policies in Guatemala. Her book, a stirring account of life for
Indian people in Guatemala, was published in 1983 and became an
international best seller.
But recently David Stoll, a professor at Middlebury College
in Vermont, published a 10-year study refuting much of the
information in Menchu's book. The study, "Rigoberta Menchu and
the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" opened up a defamation
campaign, prompting the office of the Nobel Premium to defend
Menchu's peace prize.
The New York Times devoted considerable space to the study,
including a lengthy front-page article. A Times reporter was
sent to Guatemala to conduct the newspaper's own
interviews.
Stoll claims--and the Times supports him--that Menchu
exaggerated and distorted some of the events in her book. Stoll
asserts that many incidents are not true. For example, he says
that a brother whom Menchu wrote died of starvation did not
exist.
Probably the most important question to ask about all this
is why Stoll conducted a 10-year study attempting to debunk
Menchu. Who funded this decade-long investigation? And why is
the bourgeois press interested in boosting his defamation
campaign?
There can be no doubt that Stoll's campaign is tainted with
a racist and right-wing political agenda. You need only put
Rigoberta Menchu's book in the context of the period in which
it was published to recognize the historic contribution her
book has made to Indigenous rights.
Before Menchu's book, news of the brutal and harrowing
struggle raging in Guatemala had been suppressed. The media
were silent about the many atrocities being carried out,
primarily against the Mayan people.
For 36 years, from 1960 to 1996, Guatemala was in the grips
of a bloody civil war--a war the United States was instrumental
in provoking.
War rooted in CIA coup
In 1954, the United States led a violent CIA-sponsored coup
to overthrow the Jacobo Arbenz government. Arbenz had won a
popular election, one of the first democratic elections held in
years.
Arbenz represented a progressive administration. He had
overseen liberal agrarian reform from 1952 to 1954. Under this
reform, tens of thousands of peasants received desperately
needed land.
Some of that land had been held by the United Fruit Co., a
U.S. corporation now known as United Brands.
The progressive turn in Guatemala was a threat to the
imperialist interests of the United States. After it overthrew
the Arbenz government, the land reform was reversed.
The coup ushered in a long brutal and repressive period.
Some of the worst atrocities were carried out during the
1980s. Kidnappings, disappearances and mass murders--most
against peasant and worker activists--were common.
In 1982, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt came to power. His rule
became infamous. In that year alone the army conducted at least
400 massacres and destroyed hundreds of peasant communities in
the name of a counter-insurgency campaign.
When Israel invaded Beirut that same year, right wingers in
Guatemala openly called for the "Palestinianization" of the
nation's Mayan Indians. Indeed, by the end of Rios Montt's
"scorched earth" campaign, more than 100,000 people had been
killed. A million more were forced from their homes.
Even though the Guatemalan military was U.S.-trained, the
media here were silent about these abuses.
It was within this context that Rigoberta Menchu escaped
Guatemala and published her book. Its publication ripped an
enormous hole in the wall of silence shielding events in this
Central American nation.
G. Grandin and F. Goldman write in the Feb. 8 issue of the
Nation: "Menchu's story was a call to conscience, a piece of
wartime propaganda designed not to mislead but rather to
capture our attention."
This is the truth of "I, Rigoberta Menchu."
Menchu is a representative of a people oppressed for over
500 years. She may not be a socialist or a revolutionary, but
Menchu embodies a people whose right to self-determination has
been violated over and over. Stoll continues this
violation.
What side of the struggle is Stoll on? His writings blame
the atrocities committed in Guatemala just as much on the rise
of the guerrilla movement, which took up arms to defend the
oppressed, as on the death squads.
Last spring, the right wing brutally murdered popular
Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi. He was assassinated because he
participated in releasing a report documenting the atrocities
committed during the war. The report said that the overwhelming
majority of human-rights violations had been committed by the
military--not by the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity,
the revolutionary armed forces.
This murder and ongoing repression in Guatemala are still
the reality today. The Mayan people face a life-and-death
struggle for self-determination. Workers and peasants continue
to face grueling poverty and unemployment.
This is the truth that Stoll and the mouthpieces of the
ruling class are attempting to derail.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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