The Fate of Rigoberta Menchu

by Alexander Cockburn

Such now appears to be the fate of Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan Mayan woman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The slurs are cast not on her conduct but on her powers of recollection, and so the charge is leveled upon her presumptive capacity for distortion.

When Menchu's autobiographical memoir, "I Rigoberta Menchu," was first published in English back in 1982, its vivid account of the ferocious campaigns of repression carried out by the Guatemalan army had an impact that has lasted until this day.

It was scarcely a secret that the Guatemalan army had been butchering peasants, particularly Mayan Indian peasants, on an almost genocidal scale, but Menchu gave an immediacy and a specificity to the killings that placed successive Guatemalan governments on the defensive in the court of world opinion. The ultimate decision of the government to negotiate with the guerrillas can be attributed in no small part to Menchu.

Long before she was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1992, Menchu had as secure a position in the pantheon of the world's moral witnesses as, say, Mother Teresa, albeit with an entirely different political cast. Whereas Mother Teresa preached accommodation with earthly social inequities, Menchu has been an avowed supporter of, participant in, Guatemalan's guerrilla movement. To radical students in this country as elsewhere, she has been perhaps the pre-eminent Third World witness, a Mayan, a peasant, an activist, a woman.

Such pre-eminence has long irritated the right, whose rage boiled over when Menchu's memoir became required reading for students at colleges such as Stanford at the start of the 1990s. Conservatives watchdogs such as William Bennett and Dinesh D'Souza deplored this intrusion of a Mayan woman into the sacred Western pantheon, and their attacks were echoed in the liberal New York Review, where the well-known historian C. Vann Woodward described Menchu patronizingly (and inaccurately) as an "unlettered" Indian woman.

Menchu's foes, ranging from these cultural conservatives to lobbyists for the Guatemalan government, are now exultant because an American anthropologist based at Wesleyan named David Stoll has finally published a long engendered assault on Menchu, titled, "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans," and published by Westview.

Stoll claims firstly that Menchu's recollections are disputed by relatives and by those who knew the circumstances of her upbringing. Though Stoll acknowledges members of her family were murdered, he disputes the manner and whereabouts.

Going beyond disputes over such data, Stoll argues that the political context for Menchu's memoir was far more complex than she let on, when she dictated her memoir over 17 hours to a French anthropologist and political sympathizer, Elizabeth Burgos, in 1982. Whereas Menchu presented the Guatemalan army as the villain, Stoll claims the struggles over land described by Menchu had perhaps more to do with familial disputes and clashes between Indians and Latinos. Stoll's bottom line: more culpable than the Guatemalan army are the guerrillas, whose insurgency provoked the terrible blood-letting that followed.

To take the last charge first, the oppressed are always being blamed for their reckless presumption in rebelling against their condition, and it is scarcely damaging to claim that Menchu portrayed the guerrillas in a favorable light. Hers is an account by an open partisan, not one with claims to impartiality. Stoll doesn't have to deny the murderous brutality of the army. On specific biographical details, there seems to be little doubt that Menchu did not always maintain a clear distinction between what had happened to her or to acquaintances. But is it devastating to Menchu to say she did get educated at a convent, working at the same time as a maid? Was her brother burned to death or did the army throw him in a hole where he died?

Stoll may have been confused by the fact, which he does not mention, or did not know, that Menchu had two brothers by the same name. But even so, is it irreparable damage to Menchu's reputation to acknowledge her brothers died violently or from malnutrition, but to question some of the circumstances?

One comes to the end of Stoll's book with the thought that he should have learned from Rigoberta, to be more open about his own political agenda, which appears to stem from America's culture wars and a desire to demolish an icon of the left.

Menchu survives his scrutiny and even Stoll is forced in his conclusion to acknowledge her achievement: "Her story has helped shift perceptions of indigenous people from hapless victims to men and women fighting for their rights."