Black Flag 218 index
REVIEW
RIGOBERTO MENCHU AND THE STORY OF ALL POOR GUATEMALANS
DAVID STOLL (WESTVIEW 1999)
Michel Foucault once observed that ÒEach society has its regime of truth, its Ògeneral politicsÓ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statement, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.Ó
(Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77 Pantheon Books 1980). With the flight of the Western left in the face of the revealed bankruptcy of Stalinism and the establishment of a viciously anti-working class social democratic hegemony, Óthe status of those who are charged with saying what counts as trueÓ has moved to the foreground of political contest. Simply - the only truth is the truth of the status quo, and any attempt to hold on to an alternative history, of resistance to power, is no more than an exercise in self-deception. Denouncing as liars any who seek to deviate from such an agenda has become, also, part of the process.
In 1998 the Afro-American feminist poet Patricia Smith was forced to resign from her position as columnist at the Boston Globe, having been found to have fabricated characters and quotations in her columns in late 1995 and early 1996. Smith, who saw herself as a voice for Òthe unheardÓ admitted, ÒI wanted the pieces to jolt... So I tweaked them to make sure they did. It didnÕt happen often, but it did happen.Ó The progressive movement around Boston ran for cover-as if SmithÕs ÒtweakingÓ of her stories turned the reality of social oppression into an entirely fictional affair. Soon thereafter another Globe journalist, a white male, Mike Barnicle, was revealed to have continually fabricated stories and plagiarised other writers. At one point the Globe had paid out $40,000 to a victim of BarnicleÕs ÒmisquotesÓ. Barnicle was shielded by the Globe. The NAACP noted ÒIn our view the unacceptable journalistic practices of Smith, an African American female and Barnicle, a middle aged white man were handled differently because of who they are and not what they had done.Ó However much the Ògeneral politics of truthÓ seeks to erase the recognition of discrimination in the popular media, the reality seeps through.
David StollÕs attack on the reputation and integrity of the Guatemalan activist and 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rigoberto Menchu attempts also to portray as a lie MenchuÕs involvement in revolutionary struggle, her history and the history of the movement of which she was a part. StollÕs book is fairly shoddy, less expose than cheap slander. That so few who would once have embraced the movements of resistance in Latin America have come forward to challenge his account is but further proof of the scale of the retreat of the post-Ô68 left, long since driven from the streets and now unwilling even to contest the ideological arena. The postmodernist icon Friedrich Nietzsche once argued that Òtruths are illusionsÉ coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.Ó In 1990 the Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy recorded that what had taken place in Guatemala was Òa virtual genocide that has taken more than 150,000 victims,áin what Amnesty International calls a government program of political murder.Ó No illusion then, and it should be cause for shame that we of truth in Guatemala allow Stoll to pass off the bloody currency as counterfeit coin.
StollÕs premise is simple enough. ÓWhat if much of RigobertaÕs story is not true?.. áWhile interviewing survivors of political violence in the late 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 of RigobertaÕs immediate family, that she fled to Mexico to save her life, and that she joined a revolutionary movement to liberate her country.0n these points, RigobertaÕs 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.Ó Some of us could be forgiven for thinking that the ÒsignificantÓ instances in RigobertaÕs life story are precisely those events which Stoll concedes are true. As the author concedes ÒI agree that it would be naive to challenge RigobertaÕs account just because it is not a model of exactitudeáááIndicting a Nobel laureate for inaccuracy is not the point of what follows here.Ó precisely what the point is, is made clear by Stoll from the start; ÓWas the guerrilla movement defeated in the early 1980s a popular struggle expressing the deepest aspirations of RigobertaÕs people? Was it an inevitable reaction to grinding oppression by people who felt they had no other choice?Ó StollÕs conclusion, not surprisingly, is negative; ÓWhen 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.Ó In attacking the factuality of Rigoberta MenchuÕs story Stoll seeks deliberately to attack the legitimacy of the Guatemalan guerrilla movement per se.
The charges Stoll lays against Rigoberta amount to...nothing much. Many of the issues have been subsequently dealt with by Rigoberta herself. He contends that the land dispute RigobertaÕs father was involved in was not a battle between Ònoble Indians and evil landlordsÓ, but a dispute between small-holding peasants. RigobertaÕs father contests the land claim of the Tum family. Stoll contends that RigobertaÕs account is mythologised because the Tums are indigena rather than ladina(European landholders). The fault here must surely lie with StollÕs inability to grasp the fact that land in Guatemalan society is an issue of class not one simply of racial polarisation. As he notes, by 1928 the Tums had bought up over 800 hectares of land and had Òthe requisites for an independent life for their children and grandchildren.Ó
Stoll tells us that Rigoberta was not illiterate and monolingual, but attended a Catholic boarding school. She replies (NACLA Report on the Americas March/April 1999)ÓI was there for a long time, but as a servant. I mopped floors and cleaned toilets, work that I am very proud to have done.Ó He charges that her account of the death of her brother Petrocinio is false. In ÒI, Rigoberta MenchuÓ we are told that soldiers soak 23 prisoners, including her brother, in gasoline and set them afire. Stoll interviews 7 townsmen who state that the army had never burned prisoners alive in the town plaza. Rigoberta states (NACLA March/April 1999)that her sister and other living witnesses saw the murders and she refused in 1982 to reveal their identities as ÒI would have been exposing (them) to death. Ò
Vicente Menchu, RigobertaÕs father, died on 31 January 1980-one of a group of Indian peasants who peacefully occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City in an attempt to force an official enquiry into Army atrocities in the highlands. A fire broke out as police began to smash their way into the embassy. The Guatemalan state contend that the occupiers started the fire. Rigoberta states that ÓNeither we nor any of our compa–eros can say what the real truth is, because no-one from the Spanish embassy siege survived.Ó Stoll prefers the account of the Spanish foreign minister who records that the Ambassador, Cajal, saw one of the protesters light and throw a gasoline bomb. Fifteen years later, Cajal tells Stoll that Ònot having eyes in the back of his head, he never saw the fireÕs actual source, therefore cannot say for sure that the protesters started it. ÓThere was, however, one survivor, and potential witness. In his book ÒGarrison GuatemalaÓ NACLA researcher George Black records his fate; Ó... Badly burned, he was dragged out of his hospital bed by the customary Òunknown assailantsÓ and his mutilated corpse later found dumped at the University of San Carlos.Ó Stoll himself accepts that Gregorio Yuja Xona, the survivor, was found with a sign next to him which read ÒThe ambassador of Spain runs the same risk.Ó On the balance of probability, most rational observers would assume the truth lay with the peasants. Not Stoll.
On and on it goes. Having conceded the truth of Òthe most important pointsÓ Stoll is left with muddying the waters of a very shallow pool. As he grants ÒWith problems cropping up in RigobertaÕs testimony, readers may ask, how reliable are your own sources? Perhaps many of the people I interviewed have some reason to discredit Rigoberta and her father. Or perhaps they did not like being questioned and misled me... Who are we to believe? If there are disagreements, Might not the stories I gathered be as unreliable as RigobertaÕs? Perhaps they are even less reliable: While Rigoberta was presumably free to tell her story in Paris, peasants in Guatemala must still reckon with the power of the Guatemalan army. Maybe the truth is unknowable, because the milieu is too ambiguous and fraught with repression to have confidence in any particular version.Ó Which makes you wonder whether it was all worth the effort at all. Except that Òthe truthÓ was never the issue at all. StollÕs book is intended to smear not Rigoberta Menchu but the idea of resistance itself. We are told that ÒInsurgency would seem to be the remedy that prolonged the illnessÓ that the Guatemalan armyÕs Òfanatical anticommunismÓ was a response to Òthe specter of foreign communismÓ. Stoll Ôs book is one more in a long line of poorly written would-be exposes that are no more than a contrived attempt at blaming the victim for the sins of the aggressor. Stoll wants us to believe that Òmiddle class intellectualsÓ, seduced by the Òmoral simplicity of the just warÓ are responsible for the ÒdisasterÓ of armed struggle. In Guatemala, he tells us, ÓFor the better part of four decades, a misguided belief in the moral purity of total rejection, of refusing to compromise with the system and seeking to overthrow it by force, has had profound consequences for the entire political scene. It has strengthened rationales for repression, poisoned other political possibilities . . . guaranteeing a crushing response from the state.Ó What other political possibilities? The legally elected Arbenz government was overthrown in 1954, because its embrace of Òpolicies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the massesÓ(qu. US State Department) was seen by the CIA as Òcommunist. ÓSocial democracy was put to death in Guatemala because it threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company. In 1960 an army rebellion against the corruption of Miguel Ydigores FuentesÕ military regime was bombed into submission by US planes. Ydigoras was in turn overthrown in 1963 by a US backed coup which brought to power Col. Enrique Peralta Azurdia. As William Blum observed (Killing Hope-US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2)ÓThe tone of the Peralta administration was characterised by one of its first acts; the murder of eight political and trade union leaders, accomplished by driving over them with rock-laden trucks.Ó Peralta proved too much of a liberal for the US, who engineered his replacement with Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro. From then began ÒGuatemalaÕs final solution to insurgency; only mass slaughter of the Indians will prevent them joining a mass uprising.Ó (Richard Gott-The Guardian-22/12/83). 0ther political possibilities?
The clandestine peasants' organisation, the Comite de Unidad Campesinos, was only formed after the suppression of legal avenues of resistance in Guatemala (assassination of social democratic politicians, the murder of the entire CNT leadership). To aid agribusiness expansion, the bourgeoisie organised land grabs throughout the 1970s, creating a radicalised migrant ÒsemiproletariatÓ which was drawn to the guerrilla organisations for its own defence. What legal options were available, Stoll doesn't say -perhaps because no organisations representing the interests of the poor had been legalised since 1954!
As Rigoberta Menchu pointedly observed in her NACLA interview, ÓI think that the intention is to divert the question of collective memory by bringing the discussion to a personal level. Of course, there are other intentions here as well. I think that underlying this is the fact that the Òofficial historyÓ is always written by others.. It is unfathomable for certain sectors in Guatemala that we have written our own history, that we have insisted on our rights to our own memory and our own history. They would like to see us remain victims forever.Ó Stoll would have it that social change can only come about through a patient reformism that seeks to persuade the state. GuatemalaÕs history tells us that the price for such illusions is death. Assata Shakur, the exiled Black Panther Party activist has said that ÒIt is the obligation of every person who claims to oppose oppression to resist the oppressor by every means at his or her disposal.Ó Unless the left is able to refute the smears of those like David Stoll who would trap us in a social democratic blind alley, we deny ourselves the chance to make history on our own terms, deny ourselves any role in history save as victims. Nor should we fool ourselves that armed struggle is a matter only for the Latin American left, that it is the end of some long, strange Maoist trip. Since 1969, the nationalist community in the Six Counties in the north of Ireland has been engaged in an armed resistance to the British state. Much of the left here has failed the test of solidarity on its doorstep. When, in 1969, Civil rights marchers were attacked by the RUC at Burntollet Bridge, the NorthÕs Prime Minister Terence O Neill ranted ÒWe have heard sufficient for now about civil rights. Let us hear a little about civic responsibility.Ó The Ògeneral politics of truthÓ tells us that democratic society allows us, if we exercise civic responsibility, a range of political possibilities. The history of those like Rigoberta Menchu, which David Stoll here tries to turn to ÒillusionÓ, tells us that such promise is, quite simply, a lie.
NICK STONE