rigoberta menchú and the politics of lying

Truth, Fact, and Fiction in the Human Rights Community: Essays In Response To David Stoll's Rigoberta MenchlJ and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

Rigoberta Mench6 and the Politics of Lying Daphne Patai

David Stoll's exposure of misrepresentations of some key episodes and facts in Rigoberta Mencht~'s life story, as told to Elizabeth Burgos, has led to a good deal of hostility and defensiveness. What is the significance of Stoll's discovery? The new information in Stoll's book (even before Rigoberta Mench6 con- ceded that he is correct) has created problems both for leftist academics and for human rights advocates. In a timely coincidence, Stoll's book appeared shortly before the release (on February 25, 1999) of the long-awaited report by the Historical Clarification Commission. In this document, the Guatemalan military and paramilitary are shown to bear overwhelming responsibility for the violence that, according to the truth commission, killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans in the three-some decades of civil war in Guatemala. 1

Stoll never argued otherwise. What he did contend--in a suggestion appar- ently intolerable to many of Rigoberta's academic supporters--was that the war might have ended sooner had not Rigoberta's story been so successful in winning international support for the guerrilla cause whose spokesperson she had become, a cause that was already lost and that significantly lacked local support by Guatemala's majority Mayan population. A further issue raised by Stoll was bound to evoke antagonism among those for whom Rigoberta's tale-- and indeed her very persona--had assumed mythic status. He asked whether other indigenous voices, not sharing Rigoberta's politics, had not been effec- tively silenced by the almost universal authority and acclaim granted to her account. Stoll, in other words, used the rhetoric of silence and voice--which is the favored rhetoric of the academic left--against one of the left's own icons.:

But what is there to discuss in Stoll's disclosures about Rigoberta, given the general agreement that the Guatemalan government committed gross violations of human rights? When first queried on this subject by a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I said, "Of course there is a problem." When a figure such as Rigoberta is found not to have told the truth, there is a problem just as there would be if it were discovered that Anne Frank's diary had been written by her father. Such a revelation would have a major impact on the public perception of the Holocaust, inasmuch as that perception, for many people around the world, has come through a diary taken to be the authentic

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Truth, Fact, and Fiction in the Human Rights Community 79

work of a sensitive adolescent girl. On the other hand, as should be obvious, if Anne Frank's diary were shown to be inauthentic in whole or in part, this would in no way alter historians' understanding of the Holocaust itself.

There are two separate issues here. One of them has to do with historical evidence about particular events. The other concerns our need to create he- roes and heroines as focal points for our feelings of sympathy and horror. Guatemala's civil war, only recently concluded, has made it difficult for people to consider the second issue dispassionately, as is apparent in the defenses of Rigoberta that appeared even before careful attention could reasonably have been given to Stoll's meticulous criticisms.

In the face of Stoll's evidence showing that Rigoberta's brother did not die in the way she said he did, and that, furthermore and contrary to her horrify- ing account, she had not been a witness to his death, the Guatemalan Dante Liano in a recent essay asks: "Is shooting any better than burning?" And to Rigoberta's false claim that she learned Spanish only a few years before her meeting with Burgos in 1982, Dante Liano merely rejoins: "Is partial illiteracy better than total ignorance?" Rigoberta, he charges, in an outraged tone char- acteristic of Stoll's detractors, is being subjected to a "smear campaign," the real purpose of which is to exonerate Guatemala's ruling oligarchy. Casting doubt on particulars in Rigoberta's account is tantamount to denying that atroci- ties occurred: "To say that Rigoberta Menchti has lied is taken to mean that no social injustice has taken place in Guatemala. "3

Such rejoinders, of course, merely foreclose any discussion of the serious issues raised by Stoll's work. They instantly divide the world into friends and foes, Rigoberta's "supporters" taking the high ground, while their opponents are made to look like apologists for the military. Even Stoll himself has repeat- edly had to defend Rigoberta's "narrative strategy" as one appropriate to the "emergency situation" in which she found herself. 4 But this has not protected him from intensely personal attacks, such as that published in the Guatema- lan newspaper El Peri6dico by Ramdn Gonzfilez Ponciano, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas in Austin, who accuses Stoll of being ob- sessed with gaining notoriety, s Others were quick to label any critics of Rigoberta as racists seeking to silence the voice of indigenous people. 6

My own view of this conflict has until now focused primarily on what it reveals about politics and academic postures. I have written elsewhere about the double standards by means of which many prominent scholars have defined testirnonio in such a way that it includes only memoirs by"subalterns," and more specifically only by those attacking right-wing regimes. 7 Such defi- nitions typically exclude writings directed against left-wing governments (the memoirs of ArmandoValladares, Ana Rodriguez, and Reinaldo Arenas, for example, about their experiences in Castro's Cuba).

In his 1995 essay "The Real Thing," John Beverley, one of the most frequently cited scholars of the genre, calls testimonio "the voice of the body in pain, of the

80 Human Rights Review, October-December 1999

disappeared," adding, "of the losers in the rush to marketize. "~ This represents a clarification of what was only implicit in Beverley's earlier definition of testimonio as "a new form of narrative literature in which we can at the same time witness and be a part of the emerging culture of an international proletarian/ popular-democratic subject in its period of ascendancy." Testimonio, Beverley then wrote, is a form of writing that engages readers in the struggles of particular communities, involving them in significant human rights efforts and solidarity movements. It arises from an "urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival. ''~ This is the view of testimonio that many North American academics have accepted and celebrated over the past few decades.

In a recent essay, Elizabeth Burgos referred to the"delirium" unleashed in the United States on this subject--the testimonio. 1~ It is this exhilaration--as manifested by dozens of books and hundreds of articles on testimonio--that has been threatened by Stoll's revelations (and by Burgos's own descriptions of her problematic relationship with Rigoberta Mench6). Not surprisingly, Burgos has been attacked for the very process that brought Rigoberta Mench6's book into existence. She interviewed Rigoberta"in the imperial language [Span- ish]" and thereby reduced her to the status of a "subaltern. "11 Such are the arguments of North American academics who act out their politics in their classes and their scholarly work.

For the purposes of this article, however, I want to focus not on academic battles, but rather on what I take to be the most serious consequence of Rigoberta's lies: the damage they have done to the cause of human rights and to the public's willing grant of sympathy and support for those they see as oppressed. To Stoll himself, the main importance of his work is the questions it raises about peasant support for guerrilla warfare and the tactics used to com- bat a repressive military regime. These are not issues that leftist academics typically want to expose to critical light, nor are they issues that are easily taught to students. In the rush to defend Rigoberta from Stoll's revelations, North American academics generally adopted two postures. They have either taken the line exemplified by Dante Liano, mentioned above, or they have fallen back on highly "theorized" explorations of the anomalous state of testimonios, resting somewhere between fact and fantasy; between an objec- tive recital of specific actions and events witnessed by the narrator, and an evocation of the fictive self that, contemporary critics assure us, is invariably created in the production of autobiography (nowhere more so than when that self speaks for an entire people). While much of this theorizing is interesting and provocative, it does not in any way prepare the ground for an adequate response to the dilemma posed by Rigoberta's lies.

Do symbolic and evocative stories that tell some "larger" truth provide a sound or even a possible basis for advancing human rights claims? It seems obvious the answer has to be no: "larger'or symbolic truths may indeed be in


some sense relevant to the matter of human rights abuse. But anyone can make claims. Anyone can tell horror stories--indeed, when opposing political commitments must be served, everyone typically does tell them. Human rights activism, however, cannot depend on postmodernist views of multiple narratives, on the notion of the fictive self, or on the epistemological uncertainty of all truth claims.

If one is asserting that human rights abuses occurred, charges must be specific and verifiable. Exaggeration of existing evils is not an acceptable way to call attention to those evils, since in the absence of first-hand empirical knowledge, the public--and especially human rights activists--have no way of dis- tinguishing fraudulent claims from those having substantial merit. Even to use terms like "fraudulent" or"substantial merit" is to refer to something existing independently outside the world of narrative. It seems foolish to have to declare this, but in the context of a polemic in which to criticize a lie is to be accused of ignoring a troth, one has to go back to basics.

As I have argued at length elsewhere, when supporters of Rigoberta exam- ine truth claims by figures on the other side (whatever other side that is), they stay well clear of postmodernist sophistries about truth and accuracy. The very same academics who think Rigoberta's lies are nothing more than an inge- nious textual strategy adhere passionately to the Truth Commission's empirical findings about the Guatemalan military. No multiple narratives there, but solid facts and figures.

The question of what, and whom, to believe is perhaps most serious for teachers utilizing Rigoberta's book to introduce students to human rights issues, and for students whose knowledge of a political confict in a far-off country often comes from the immediacy of a personal voice, claiming to speak for her people and recounting a story of pain, privation, and atrocity. For the past seven years, since Rigoberta's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize made her a familiar name, L Rigoberta Mench~ has been an enormously popular text on college campuses. An entire volume has now been devoted to the problems of teaching the book. The twenty-eight chapters of Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Mench~ and the North American Classroom, edited by Mien Carey- Webb and Stephen Benz, make abundantly clear how readily professors have accepted Rigoberta's account as truth. Whatever their theoretical predisposi- tions toward truth and narrative, there clearly is a bottom-line conviction about I, Rigoberta Mench11, which is that it is a reliable account, the specific details of which are to be believed. Furthermore, professor after professor endorses, in his or her contribution to the Carey-Webb and Benz book, Rigoberta's claim to be speaking for her people, though they would surely challenge such a claim were it made by a member of a "hegemonic" group.

A key point that Stoll found to be inaccurate in Rigoberta's description is precisely the one often focused on by professors who assume its truth. This is the harrowing episode of her brother's torture and death by being burned


alive, which Rigoberta says she herself witnessed. Stoll was able to establish that Rigoberta's brother was in fact murdered by the military in quite different circumstances (he was shot, and Rigoberta was not present at his death). But the more embellished account has been highly important to teachers' efforts to sensitize students to human rights violations. To take just one example of this process: Rigoberta's book was used as a required text in a first-year general education core course at Mount Vernon College, a small liberal arts college for women in Washington, D.C.The teachers of this course write as follows:

[O]nly after they read Rigoberta's moving accounts of the torture and death of her sixteen-year-old brother burned alive in front of his family and of the kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of her mother--in which Rigoberta painstakingly names every atrocity that was inflicted oil her beloved family members--did many stu. dents grasp fully the meaning of the term human rights violations that had figured centrally in the historv outlined for them. '2

Of course, it is not illegitimate to ask: Does it really matter that the students in this course acquired their understanding by means of an apocryphal or par- tially apocryphal story? After all, to quote Dante Llano again: "At any rate, is a death by bullets better than one by burning? "13 Some North American academics do indeed consider lies irrelevant as long as the larger political purpose they espouse is being served. Marjorie Agosfn, a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College, declares,"Whether [Rigoberta's] book is true or not, I don't care. We should teach our students about the brutality of the Guatemalan military and the U.S. financing of it."Besides, Agosfn said to a journalist from the Chronicle of Higher Education,"Even if she didn't watch her little brother being murdered, the military did murder people in Guatemala. ''~

For my part, I believe that these scholars have allowed ideological commitments to lead them to a dangerous line ot argument. They are missing the crucial point. A serious consideration of the problems facing human rights advocates who continually find themselves the bearers of horror stories should rapidly reveal that there can be no human rights activism without confidence in the truth and accuracy of information. It is not enough to shift at will from Rigoberta the historical individual to Rigoberta the mythic figure, and from her story as a source of reliable data to her tale as a symbolic evocation of "larger truths." Each revelation about Rigoberta, and each of her subsequent reactions to Stoll's criticisms, has created difficulties for those human rights advocates who depend upon the integrity of first-person accounts as an important stage in appraising and publicizing possible human rights violations around the world.

Opposition to human rights violations cannot rest on misrepresentation-- whether that misrepresentation is about land conflicts, about family histor); about one's own education, or about who did what to whom and who was there to see it. Truth and integrity matter, and we should not rush to give


willing credence to stories just because they fit our preconceived ideas, all the while insisting on sound evidence for all accounts coming from the other side. In Rigoberta's case, we have the additional disturbing implication that she herself seems to have judged her own and her family's actual experiences as insufficient to win support for her cause. Hence the need for embellishment and outright lies, as in the pretense that her father's conflict over land in Chimel was with ladinos, when in fact it was with his in-laws, or her invention of a younger brother who, she says, died of malnutrition. There is also, in Rigoberta's account, a cunning awareness of what it takes to make one appear in the eyes of the western world as a proper indigenous victim. Such an awareness, it would seem, underlies her claim to have been deprived of education when in fact she had been a well-regarded pupil at a Catholic boarding school. 15 As for the charge that Burgos had distorted Rigoberta's story and was responsible for the misrepresentations in the book, this argument is contradicted by a telling detail in Stoll's book. In his researches, he managed to locate a narrative dat- ing from 1981, in which Rigoberta presents the same persona, with some of the same key misrepresentations and distortions, as she did a year later when taping her story for Elizabeth Burgos) 6

As Sissela Bok has written in her important book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, lies tend to spread. Not only are they likely to be re- peated from person to person (as indeed they are in the immense literature by now available about Rigoberta, which includes even children's books), v but they also lead to subsequent fabrications, told to protect the initial falsehoods. Bok's point about these ever-widening circles of lies was confirmed when Rigoberta, in the face of Stoll's evidence, first disavowed responsibility for the book and had her staff blame Elizabeth Burgos for whatever was written in it, TM and then took an opposite tack and claimed the book represented "my truth" and that she had "a right to my own memories. "a9 Some weeks later, tacitly acknowledging Stoll's claims, Rigoberta stated that she had mixed the testimony of other victims with her own stories. 2~ She also offered feeble but hard to resist defenses along the same lines we have encountered above: Were not members of her family indeed killed? And, throughout, she denounced criticism of her book--according to the New York Times report of her visit to New York in February 1999--as "a campaign that has political ends, that is lying and that is taking things out of Guatemala's historical reality. "2a This last comment is of particular interest since it reflects a perfectly conventional understanding of the politics of falsehood, which rather undermines the notion that "truth" is a western hegemonic preoccupation not appropriately applied to communities of indigenous people with strong traditions of oral narration.

But Bok has a more practical point to make concerning the costs of lying, and this goes some way toward explaining Rigoberta's resistance to admitting what now seems incontrovertible. Lies are often told to enhance the teller's power (in Rigoberta's case, to increase support for the guerrilla struggle on


whose behalf she was tour ing Furope w h e n she met Burgos). W h e n these lies are exposed, however, they backfire, and the teller's power (and that of her cause) is d iminished as confidence is replaced by mistrust. 22 It is against this predictable sequence of events that Stoll's critics, and Rigoberta herself, have mobilized. In an essay in April 1999, StoU c o mme n t s on this resistance. The denials and cover-ups, he writes, h a v e - - a s in the case of the Clinton scan- d a l - - s p a r k e d far greater consequences than the react ions provoked by the original transgression. 23

In the long run, the destruct ion of trust is the real damage done by lies. As Bok says (and this is the last line of her book on the subject):"Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundat ion of respect for veracity. ''2~ W h e n a wor ld - famous figure such as Rigoberta Mench6, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is found to have invented, distorted, and misrepresented key e lements in the story that is responsible for her very fame and reputation, the cause of h u m a n rights every- where is set back. 2s

Notes

1. Stoll, in fact, put off publishing his work for several years, until the end of the war, in December 1996, when the Guatemalan government and leftist rebels signed a peace treaty.

2. David Stoll, Rzgoberta Menchfi and the Story of All Poor Guaternalans (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Carmen Ochando Aymerich, in" De la representatividad literaria a la politica," Lateral 6:52 (Apnl 1999): 31, discusses the limited ideological horizon that defined testi- monials which, like Rigoberta's, received literary awards from Cuba's Casa de las Amdricas. She warns readers about the dangers that lie behind the assumption of"representativity" accorded such works, which can lead to what she calls a totalizing discourse, one that fails to recognize that people can be victimized by a variety of political commitments.

3. Dante Liano,"/, Rlgoberta Menchfi?The Controversy Surrounding the Mayan Activist,"trans. Will H. Corral. Forthcoming in llopscotch 1:3 (1999).

4. See Julia Preston, "Guatemala Laureate Defends 'My Truth,'" New York Times, January 21, 1999, A8. Stoll offered similar defenses in the Latin American press when news of his work broke in December 1998.

5. Ram6n Gonz~ilez Ponciano,"Yo, David Stoll,"El Periddlco, December 18, 1998: 10. b Miguel Angel Albizures even sees these attacks as motivated by Rigoberta's defense of

human rights. See Miguel Angel Albizures, "Se llama RJgoberta Menchti y le creci6 la conciencia," El Perirdico, December 23, 1998: 10.

7. See Daphne Patai,"Whose Truth? Iconicity and Accuracy in the World of Testimonial Lit- erature," in The Properties of Words, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), which further develops some ideas in the present essay.

8. John Beverley,"The Real Thing," in The Real Thing: Testirnomal Discourse and Latin America, ed. Georg M. Gugelberger (Durhan, DC, Duke University Press, 1995), 281.

,4. John Beverley,"The Margin at the Center: On Tesnmomo (Testimonial Narrative)," in De/ Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women~ Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 106, 94.

10. Elizabeth Burgos,"La creacirn de un mito," Lateral 6:52 (April 1999): 29. 11. Elizabeth Burgos,"Poner voz a una conciencia," Lateral 6:52 (April 1999): 20. 12. Jonnie G. Guerra and Sharon Ahern Fechter,"Rigoberta Menchr's %stimony as Required

First-Year Reading," in Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchfi and the North American


Classroom, ed. Mien Carey-Webb and Stephen Benz (Albany: State UniversiW of NewYork Press, 1996), 265. Emphasis in original.

13. Liano,"L Rzgoberta Mench~?" 14. Quoted in Robin Wilson,"Anthropologist Challenges Veracity of Multicultural Icon,"

Chronicle of lligher Edt~cation, January. 15, 1999: A14. 15. Preston,"Guatemala Laureate," confirming what Stoll had written in his book 16. Stoll, Rigoberta Mench~, 183. 17. See for example the children's book by Marlene Targ Brill, Journey for Peace: The Sto~. of

Rigoberta Mench~, illustrated by Ruben D6 Anda (NewYork: Dutton, Lodestar Books, 1996). 18. Lms Aceituno,"Arturo Taracena rompe el silencio," El Acordefn, January. 10, 1999: 213.

'faracena, who introduced P, dgoberta to Elizabeth Burgos and participated in the editing of her interview, states that though the Guatemalan press had insisted that it was Burgos who wrote the book, this is entirely false. She merely edited it, he says, with his help. The book, according to Taracena,"is completely Rigoberta's narranon, with her own rhythm, her own inventions, ff there are any, her own emotions, her own truths. What the rest of us did was editorial work."

19. Preston,"Guatemala Laureate.'A month earlier, Rigoberta was making similar comments. See for example Lucy Barrios,"Es mi testimonio v 1o defender6,"Prensa I.lbre, December 17, 1998: 4.

20. "Peace Prize Winner Admits Discrepancies," New York limes, February 12, 1999: A12. 21. "Peace Prize Winner," New York 11rues. This approach was part of Rigoberta's defense from

the beginning, as indicated by articles in Guatemalan newspapers containing Rigoberta's comments in December 1998.

22. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private life (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1978), 27.

23. David Stoll,"Los testimonios silenciados," Lateral 6:52 (April 1999): 32 24. Bok, Lying, 263. 25. My thanks to Wilfrido It. Corral for his interesting comments on the issues raised in this

essay and for supplying me with copies of Spanish-language articles relating to the Rigoberta Menchfi/David Stoll controvers,,'.

David Stoll's "Litany of Complaints" About Rigoberta Mench6

loan Bamberger

Anthropologis t David Stoll re turned to Gua temala in 1993 to research his new book, Rigoberta Menchli and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. 1 During earlier fieldwork, Stoll had discovered, quite by accident, that there were cer- tain inaccuracies in Rigoberta's account of her life dur ing the years of conflict which had ravaged the Kich'6 and Ixil Mayan villages in the western high- lands of Gua temala . " I recall being surprised w h e n a routine atrocity c h e c k . . . failed to corroborate the immola t ion of her brother and other captives in the Chajul plaza," Stoll explains. 2 His impulse to ques t ion Rigoberta 's narrative grew out of this initial discovery of conflicting evidence, a l though he denies that the point of his work is in fact to" indic t . . .a Nobel laureate for inaccu- racy. "3 His more modes t claim for the book is that its subject focuses o n " t h e discrepancies be tween Rigoberta's version of events and local ones. "4

rigoberta menchú and the politics of lying

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