I, Rigoberta Menchú

The Cultural Wars

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Guatemalan Historical Background

See “I, Rigoberta Menchú and the “Culture Wars”

Historical Background on Guatemala

Altiplano/

El Quiche

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Number

of Massacres

by Department

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Testimonio Literature A form of collective autobiographical

witnessing that gives voice to oppressed peoples

Told in 1st person, by a supporter or witness It supports human rights & liberation

struggles Rigoberta: “The history of my

community is my own history”

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David Stoll 1999 Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of

All Poor Guatemalans

A fabrication of lies?

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Stoll confuses testimony with testimonio

Instead he is overly concerned with empirical accuracy & discounts testimonio… where advocacy is more important than strict

factual reliability

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The Civil War Does Stoll deny the civil war? “The army demonstrated its willingness

to slaughter 100s of men, women, & children in a single day”

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Conflicting versions of history Rigoberta’s account brought

international attention to the violence & human rights abuses

Stolls’ book attacked those who were fighting against a repressive government & placed into question the truth about Guatemalan history

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Rigoberta: “Peasant” Revolutionary Leader?

“In a peasant society ruled by elders, where girls reaching puberty are kept under close watch…”

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Conflicting accounts Stoll: “Other survivors gave me a rather

different picture” “There are enough conflicting versions,

& enough gaps in my information…” Stoll does reject essentializing

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Stoll’s Arguments:Was Rigoberta illiterate?

“Prestigious Belgian nun’s boarding school”

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Did Rigoberta work on the fincas?

“Peasants had found better kinds of work”

“This left the seasonal workers the most precarious & exploited of the finca workforce”

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Did Rigoberta’s brother Nicolás die of malnutrition? Naming siblings of deceased children

=

Antonio Nicolás Cotojás

Tum

=

Vicente Juana

Menchú Tum

Patrocinio Nicolás Nicolás Rigoberta

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Was Rigoberta’s brother Patrocinio burned alive?

“They burned a body, but he was already dead”

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How did Rigoberta’s mother die?

“Visualizing her mother’s death so graphically might be the only means of closure”

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What really happened at the Spanish embassy?

The occupiers were guerrillas, not peasants

They are the ones who set the embassy on fire

Selection among different accounts that best fits Stoll’s agenda

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The land dispute: Family feud over land?

Land disputes are common in rural peasant communities

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The land dispute: Rich peasants? Public land – 2753 has. Laguna Danta – 800 has. forested land

(Rigoberta’s maternal grandmother -Tums- bought 360 has., including disputed land)

Disputed land – 151 has. claimed by 221 homesteaders (.68 has. each)

“Small Kingdom”

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Abundant, available land? Brol, Martínez, García ladino families “My evidence is fragmentary…someone

burned the judicial archive…before I went looking for it…many of the officials tending to reticence…bystanders were confused about who was doing what to whom”

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Did Rigoberta’s father Vicente collude with the guerrillas?

“That Vicente hoped guerrilla muscle would help him against the Tums is only a hypothesis.”

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What was Ríos Montt’s role in the civil war? “A restraining influence”

1980-85 50,000 Killed 440 Villages destroyed

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Guerrillas appear 1979 1954 Arbenz overthrown 1966-76 20,000 killed by death squads 1970-74 Ríos Montt – Army Chief 1978 Army machine guns crowd

demonstrating for land rights 1978-82 Lucas García 1982-83 Ríos Montt

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19821982

Rios Montt edges closer to escaping accountability for genocide

November 14, 2013, Aljazeera America Despite Ríos Montt being found guilty in May

for genocide and crimes against humanity—a watershed since this was the first time a former head of state was convicted of genocide in a national court—the short-lived celebration was extinguished 10 days later when Guatemala's Constitutional Court annulled the verdict.

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How Reliable is Stoll’s Account? “My interviews with survivors…as for

the factuality of my conclusions…some issues lead only to more and less likely scenarios”

If what results is more reliable than Rigoberta’s account, it encompasses a wider range of versions

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Stoll on Guerrillas Not an attack on Rigoberta, but on the

militant left Instead of portraying the military as evil,

he portrays the guerrillas as evil

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Stoll’s central argument CUC was a guerrilla front that used peasants

like pawns The EGP lured peasants into confronting the

army & that led to more army repression Violence followed the appearance of guerrilla

groups “By the time the guerrillas arrived in

Uspantan, the army was an experienced killing machine”

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Rigoberta’s Role—Marxist Tool?

“Her 1982 story becomes a parable about learning to trust the left”

“For Marxists the Menchú-Burgos collaboration became a classic text”

“It was all too obvious that her first loyalty was to the Marxist International”

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Criticism of “Leftist Academics” “Scholars have been tempted to heap all

blame on the army, arguing that the guerrillas were an inevitable reaction to oppression…exonerating the guerillas”

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REMHI PEACE ACCORDS 1996 The Recovery of Historical

Memory Project Interviewed 6000 VICTIMS Documented systematic campaign of

genocide & ethnocide

1998 Bishop Juan Gerardi assassinated

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Mayan woman giving Truth Commission report “Memory of Silence” to UN Assistant Secretary General

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Exhuming the Past 1996

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Mother witnesses exhumation of son’s remains

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1997 Exhumation near 16th C. Church

                                                     

                                                        

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A woman cries over an open coffin at the reburial of 20 victims of Guatemala's civil war. In 1982, the army and civilian patrols massacred 20 people and dumped their bodies in a church latrine. For 16 years, the victims' relatives were too scared to say anything about it, and too frightened to

remove the bodies

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Reclaimed bodies that had been dumped inside the church

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Forensic expert Dr. Clyde Snow

Body of a young boy exhumed from a mass grave. His hands were tied behind his back with a rope that reached around his neck. He, like a dozen others, were shot in the back of the head

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Evangelical priest gives eulogy behind black trash bags containing the skeletal remains of eight people murdered in the early 1980’s.

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35 Bodies Linked to Guatemala Army Sweep in 1982, New York Times

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