rigoberta menchu, the academy, and the u.s. mainstream press: the controversy surrounding...

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Rigoberta Menchú, the Academy, and the U.S. Mainstream Press: The ControversySurrounding Guatemala's 1992 Nobel Peace LaureateAuthor(s): Linda J. CraftSource: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33/34, Vol. 33, no. 3 -Vol. 34, no. 1 (Autumn, 2000 - Winter, 2001), pp. 40-59Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315341 .

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Rigoberta Menchti, the Academy, and the U.S. Mainstream Press: The

Controversy Surrounding Guatemala's 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate

Linda J. Craft When the Nobel Committee awarded the 1992 Peace Prize to

Guatemalan indigenous resistance leader, Rigoberta Menchi--a figure whose 1982 testimonio was already familiar to students in multicultural courses on U.S. campuses-it sparked further debate between cultural conservatives on one hand and those they accused of "political correctness" on the other. Interested in how this award would be interpreted to the more general national audience, I undertook an investigation of this event in the "mainstream" U.S. press to discover how the heretofore unknown Guatemalan woman was being explained to the North Ameri- can public.1 At the same time, I considered a variety of other factors which were associated with the timing and significance of her selection. I reported these findings to the 1993 meeting of the Mid-American Confer- ence on Hispanic Literatures in St. Louis, but decided against publishing them at that time, thinking I needed more time for this question of reception to develop.

Now, seven years later, Menchti's merits are once again being ques- tioned in U.S. dailies, most notably the New York Times, which began the current flap December 15, 1998, in a front-page special report entitled "Tarnished Laureate: Nobel Winner Accused of Stretching the Truth in Her Autobiography," by Larry Rohter. Rohter's article provides an in- depth review of Middlebury anthropologist David Stoll's latest book, Rigoberta Menchz and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999). In it, Stoll questions the validity of a number of the stories in her testimony, I, Rigoberta Mencha, after interviewing over 120 people from her home area in the department of Quiche and consulting Guatemalan archives. He concludes that on many counts her story carries more authority than it deserves (x). But Stoll reserves his main criticism for leftist academics in the United States: "The underlying problem is not how Rigoberta told her story, but how well-intentioned foreigners have chosen to interpret it. Especially now that many academics are eager to deconstruct any claim to settled truth, Rigoberta's story should be compared with others" (xiv). He writes that sympathetic professors and solidarity workers have been duped and/or have duped others into believing that the ideology of armed

40 Guatemala's 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate



guerrilla resistance in Menchi's book was espoused by all Guatemalan indigenous peoples. Ironically, according to Stoll, this approach advocated by the disciple of peace actually prolonged the war and made it far more brutal.

Needless to say, Stoll's study and the New York Times focus created a small tempest in the media and evoked heated responses from U.S. and Guatemalan academics. Throughout the winter and spring of 1999 flowed a steady stream of listserve e-mail, mostly decrying Stoll's conclusions, but sometimes defending him and calling for the Nobel Committee to revoke MenchO's prize. Newspapers and weeklies followed suit and published Stoll's accusations, often with editorials or commentaries extolling Menchi's larger virtues, excusing her mix of collective and individual memory, or excoriating her for her lies. In my own attempts to understand what was happening and what was at stake, I thought it a good time to revisit the question of Menchi's reception. I begin this study with results of my research from 1992 at the time the Nobel was conferred upon Menchfi, followed by comments on Stoll's book by me and by other critics from both the press and the academy, and finally with an attempt to situate the book and controversy in a larger cultural context.

Part I: The U.S. Press Reception of Rigoberta Menchti in 1992 In an effort to understand the way in which MenchOi's Nobel Prize was

received, reported, and interpreted throughout the United States, I began by studying the editorials, commentaries, and news stories in twenty major U.S. newspapers with a circulation of 100,000 copies or more, both immediately after the announcement of the Peace Prize on October 16, 1992, and/or at the time of the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 1992. I also researched press coverage of the events surrounding the "Ser- rano coup"2 in Guatemala in the spring of 1993 as they related to Menchui. To avoid a bias in favor of the "dominant" urban dailies, I sought copies of pertinent editorials from fifteen "mid-size" papers (circulation of 20,000-100,000) and twenty-two small papers (circulation less than 10,000) from every geographical area of the country. The six mid- size papers which actually responded to my inquiries published only AP wire reports or news stories obtained from other major dailies. I received no responses from the small newspapers. The following summary pres- ents only a few highlights of extensive press reaction.

Menchii's personal qualities and published testimony attracted com- ment in virtually every newspaper I consulted. Epithets such as "coura- geous and charismatic," "effective," "idealistic, eloquent, and profoundly insightful," "worthy," "passionate," "lonely and brave," "hopeful like a child," and "determined," appear frequently to describe this "ceaseless campaigner," this leader of "stubborn resistance," this "self-taught woman

Linda J. Craft 41



who never went to school as a child but managed, as an adult, to address the world" (St. Petersburg Times-EOF). A lone voice of dissent, William Ratliff of the Hoover Insitute, writing for the Wall Street Journal, finds Menchfi dishonest, unrepentant, narrowly political, and a traitor to the cause of indigenous rights.3 He reports that she supported the Sandinista repression against the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua and that "her support for Guatemala's Marxist guerrillas. .. was contrary to the wishes of many of her own country's Indians" (9). Her praise, he writes, is "undeserved." The other nineteen editorials and commentaries from the major and mid- size newspapers express cautious to enthusiastic praise for the Nobel Committee's decision.

A word about reference to genre is appropriate here because it will resurface again in the discussion about Stoll's book. Most newswriters refer to Menchii's transcribed word as an "autobiography" or "personal story," albeit a powerful and graphic statement, a "view from the bottom" (Eugene Register-Herald-EOF). Only two-the Philadephia Inquirer and the Miami Herald-use the actual term "testimony," the literary mode which has received much attention in academic circles in the past fifteen years. New York City Newsday mentions the fact that the autobiography was "ghosted," and Ratliff notes that Menchdi's "editor," Elisabeth Burgos Debray, is the "wife of Castro/Guevara hagiographer Regis Debray" (9). No one delves into the not-so-subtle distinctions between autobiography and testimonio, ghost writers and mediators, and so on, all of which certainly interest literary scholars and determine how a text works. The failure to make these distinctions will cause misunderstanding later.

The overwhelming hope expressed in almost all the editorials is that the award of the Peace Prize to Menchui will break the silence surrounding events in Guatemala, rescue it from obscurity, and jumpstart the stalled peace negotiations between various factions. Newsday and the Philadelphia Inquirer editorials recognize overtones of political correctness in the award but justify it since it brings to light an oppression "more ferocious than most of us can begin to imagine" (Newsday-EOF) and since most Americans are "utterly unaware. .. about lives south of the border" (Inquirer-EOF). Donna Lee Van Cott of the Christian Science Monitor expresses doubts whether the increased world attention will effect any significant change in Guatemala (19). An editorial in the Boston Globe goes further than most in linking Menchi's prize to a re-examina- tion of the U.S. role in Guatemala: the Globe recalls U.S. complicity with the 1954 coup which "blocked the path of peaceful reform in Guatemala.

. [and] emboldened the killers on the right, not only there but in Nicaragua and El Salvador," and it calls for the Clinton Administration to rededicate U.S. foreign policy to human rights (Dec. 13, 1992).4

To summarize my early research, I found that her prize was consid-




ered by most editorial and general news writers to be appropriate for the Columbus quincentenary, coming as it did when the world was focusing renewed interest on indigenous peoples and asking new questions about the significance of the Discovery and Conquest. The award was not interpreted as a specifically feminist victory, as I thought it might be during the "Year of the Woman," but was situated in the context of a more general "Other." Most writers ignored mentioning the quagmire of political correctness. A skeptic might view this reaction cynically by explaining that, in neglecting this dimension of the award, journalists were just affirming what everyone else already knew-that they, the "cultural elite," were awash in PC complicity themselves.

After the 1993 constitutional crisis of President Serrano until Decem- ber of 1996, when the long-stalled peace accords were finally signed between the Guatemalan government and the URNG (revolutionary fac- tion), little about Mench' or Guatemala reached the U.S. press. The prin- cipal exceptions were stories about lawyer activist Jennifer Harbury and her campaign to pressure the U.S. government into releasing reports of CIA involvement with Guatemalan military forces in the torture, disap- pearance, and killing of her husband, URNG guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, as well as in several other high-profile cases involving U.S. citizens. The other story that caught the imagination of the outside world was that of kidnappings of children for body parts by foreign profi- teers.5 The most extensive feature on Menchui, to my knowledge, ran in the Los Angeles Times, on January 23, 1994: Hector Tobar's article, "Rigoberta Menchi's Mayan Vision," examined the complexities of her life in exile and the limits of her leadership within Guatemala's indigenous communities (Magazine 16).

A full year after her award, I concluded that Menchi's early positive reception would not translate into more consistent attention paid to her country and that the "Rigoberta text" seemed to have lost its value of rais- ing political and social consciousness.6 I predicted her name would most likely resurface in the mainstream press only as a footnote when subse- quent Nobel winners were announced, and I wondered whether the "Rigoberta phenomenon" could be one more example of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by players on both the left and the right to under- mine political power structures. It seemed to me that Menchui had served her usefulness as a "political football" in the United States, then becom- ing largely irrelevant in the mass media.

Part II: David Stoll and Re-evaluations of Rigoberta Menchul According to Guatemalan novelist and anthropologist Arturo Arias

(1999), the information presented by David Stoll in Rigoberta Mencha- and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans is simply a reworking and expansion of

Linda J. Craft 43



the thesis of his doctoral dissertation (Stanford) and 1993 book, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. Only this time, by mentioning the name of the famous Nobel laureate in his title, Stoll's critique becomes personal. To many readers, it will play out as an ad hominem (ad feminam?) attack.

Stoll began as a journalist before entering the field of anthropology (Taracena, Arias). In the current book, he describes himself as sympathetic to Menchti and her Nobel award (viii) and as part of a general current of contemporary postmodern anthropologists (12). Aware of the furor his research findings will provoke, he takes great pains to establish his mainstream, progressive credentials, as if to inoculate himself against the anticipated onslaught.7 Post-Marxist, postmodern Latin Americanist Marc Zimmerman has associated Stoll's work with a respected "cluster of progressive anthropologists" (Robert Carmack, Christopher Lutz, George M. Lovell, Kay Warren, and Carol A. Smith), but has characterized Stoll's research as "extreme" in its positioning on issues of models of indigenous resistance (1995, I, 43). Several journalists (Reid, Leo, Geyer), document- ing the impact of the book, mention Stoll's "liberal" background as an important piece of information in understanding the gravity of his findings. U.S. News and World Report's John Leo writes that "Stoll's account is unusually convincing because, he says, 'I'm a lefty myself'." Yale Latin American historian Greg Grandin and journalist/novelist Francisco Gold- man, writing for the Nation, note that Stoll's allegations have been "taken up gleefully by the right" (Feb. 8, 25). Predictably, most critics on the left have not embraced Stoll as one of their own.

Stoll argues that the 1982 testimony of Rigoberta Menchti does not

merit the lavish praise it has received. Her story, he states, at many "critical junctures, is not the eyewitness account that it purports to be" (70). He then supports this thesis with example after example of what he calls inexactitudes and unreliable information. Quite simply, according to Stoll, her versions of events are "misleading" (12). What is basically true in her story, concludes Stoll, is that "a dictatorship massacred thousands of indigenous peasants, that the victims included half of Rigoberta's imme- diate family, that she fled to Mexico to save her life, and that she joined a revolutionary movement to liberate her country. On these points, Rigob- erta's account is beyond challenge and deserves the attention it receives" (viii). Stoll disputes Menchi's version on the following points: 1) Her brother Petrocinio was not tortured and murdered in the way she recounted; 2) A younger brother who she said died of starvation on a coffee plantation never died; 3) The Spanish Embassy massacre in which her father and other revolutionaries perished could very well have been a suicide mission rather than a massacre; 4) There is no evidence to support Menchti's contention that her father, Vicente, was a member of the CUC




(Comite de Unidad Campesina--Committee of Peasant Unity); she has mythologized him to symbolize pan-Mayan solidarity; 5) Vicente Menchui was most likely not as radical or ideological as his daughter maintains; he probably used the revolutionary EGP (Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres- Guerrilla Army of the Poor) to get back at his in-laws in a land dispute; 6) The indigenous peasants did not embrace the EGP or the militant left as their representatives; 7) Land disputes were as numerous (or even more frequent) between indigenous factions as they were across class or ethnic lines, contradicting Rigoberta's analysis of indigenous peasant/ladino8 conflict; 8) Rigoberta had more schooling than she let on; and 9) she was not a labor organizer as she claimed.

A point-by-point refutation of Stoll's book is not the purpose of this paper, but I will highlight several responses proffered by Stoll's critics to give the flavor of the polemic. Rohter (NYTimes)-a Stoll sympathizer, we assume--interviewed several relatives and neighbors of Menchti in Guatemala who dispute her descriptions of the deaths of her brothers and support Stoll's suspicions. According to these sources, Petrocinio was not burned alive; Nicolas, the brother who died of starvation, is alive and well today. Interestingly, Nicolas recalls he had two brothers who did die of hunger, "one named Felipe and another whose name escapes me" (A8).

Critics respond by questioning the nature, level, and source of the "lies" in the testimony. Guatemalan writer, historian, and former militant Arturo Taracena Arriola-who recently broke his silence about his own presence and involvement at some of the sessions of the now famous 1982 interview of Mench(i by Burgos in Paris-writes: "You have to ask yourself if this version of her brother's death was Rigoberta's invention or a family myth. Rigoberta was about 20 years old when she gave her testimony, and this story can only have come from a tradition based on family memories. Stoll says that Rigoberta's brother did not die in the way that she says. Again, whose invention is this-is it Rigoberta's, the CUC members', the family's?" (9). The matter is not as easy as it seems. Nicolds also comments on Petrocinio's murder: "I don't know exactly what happened to Petrocinio... I know that he was kidnapped and handed over to the army. After that, I heard that they kept him in a hole, and that then they shot him" (A8). A number of critics have noted the picayune, painfully literal quality of Stoll's accusations: "pelos en la leche" (Galeano 2), "hair-splitting of the worst kind" (Gugelberger 5), "making a mountain out of a molehill" (Goldman June 14, 67). Literary scholars Georg Gugelberger and John Beverley have both cited the well known study on Holocaust testimonies by Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub regarding "inaccuracies" in survivors' accounts: the minute details and data of testimonial discourse are not so important as the fact or "real- ity" of an unimaginable occurrence (Gugelberger 4). Their point is that

Linda J. Craft 45



one might ask what difference it really makes how Petrocinio died when by all accounts it appears he suffered extreme torture and a horrible death.

Other critical reactions to some of Stoll's charges include the following observations. Regarding the 1980 Spanish Embassy massacre in which Menchui's father, Vicente, died and which appears as a blistering indict- ment of government ruthlessness in her testimony, Stoll speculates that it is quite possible that the fire that engulfed the protesters and their hostages was ignited by one of the protesters (probably an outside student agitator) committing "revolutionary suicide" and taking everyone else with him or her (88), and not by the riot police who stormed the embassy to end the occupation. He bases this idea on conversations with a firefighter who recovered the bodies and a California fire investigator who never visited the scene of the crime. Greg Grandin finds Stoll's logic "grotesque," transforming Vicente Menchui "from victim to victimizer" and flying in the face of the "Catholic Church's exhaustive investigation [which] has found the state responsible for the firebombing" (June 14, 66).

Further charges by Stoll challenge her account of the length and quality of her education and the level of her political activism while in school (Chapter 11). In a response, Menchfi corraborates much of what he says while referring back to her testimony, denies the "elite" status of the school, and reminds him that she was there "as a servant," mopping floors and cleaning toilets (Burt 8). Since the only real point of contention is the status of the school, one wonders why Stoll devoted so much space to so little substance.

As was mentioned earlier, Stoll repeatedly assures his reader that he does not intend to destroy Menchfi and that he holds her in high regard. Since she was new to the movement when she gave her testimony, he observes, "there is no need to question her good intentions" (193). Throughout the book, Stoll couches his critique in backhanded compli- ments: "Not at issue is Rigoberta's choice as a Nobel laureate or the larger truth she told about the violence" (xi); "That Rigoberta turned herself into a composite Maya, with a wider range of experiences than she actually had, is not a very serious problem" (273); "Even if it is not the eyewitness account it claims to be, that does not detract from its significance" (282). Perhaps realizing the power of his negative observations, Stoll offers his own disclaimer: "Arguing for the need to exercise judgment is not to claim that mine are necessarily definitive" (277). Nevertheless, a series of journalists have read him just that way, to the point that Grandin questions Stoll's sincerity: "After repeated cautions from colleagues about the repercussions of publishing his work just before the Truth Commission report, Stoll's sympathy for Menchi appears at best




naive, at worst disingenuous" (June 14, 2). The following titles of newspaper and magazine articles indicate that a number of journalists missed Stoll's appeals for caution and his declared admiration for Menchui: "A Nobel Prize for Lying" (Schwartz); "A Lofty Liar" (Peterson); "Mendacious Menchii" (NYPost editorial); "I, Rigoberta Menchfi, Liar" (Horowitz); and "Nobel Prize for Fiction?" (Leo).

What has obviously captured the attention of these and like-minded journalists, who in turn hope to capture readers with sensational head- lines about "lies,"f is the question of Menchi's veracity, although Stoll exhorts his readers to look beyond to what he sees as the bigger problem of multicultural studies and political correctness, which we will consider shortly. Such catchy phrases have reduced complex historical, cultural, and political persons and events to a simplistic binary opposition of truth and lie, perhaps missing important nuances and a bigger picture.

The idea of "the truth" merits some discussion first. Stoll himself states the case: "Sociocultural anthropologists like myself are classified as social scientists, but much of our research belongs in the humanities. Recently we have been much affected by literary theory and postmodern skepticism about the very possibility of knowledge. Like other scholars influenced by these trends, we increasingly doubt our authority to make definitive statements about subordinate groups. Recoiling from the contri- bution of Western thought to colonialism, worried about our right to 'represent' or depict the victims of the process, we wish to relegitimize our- selves by deferring to the perspective of the people we study and broadcasting their usually unheard voices" (12). We are left to wonder how one determines "truth" in what has happened in Guatemala and in how it has been remembered. Stoll's criticism is that it is fashionable in progressive academic circles to privilege her testimony over those of other indigenous people such as those he interviewed who contradicted her version; thus, to his thinking, self-proclaimed postmodernists are not being very postmodern-that is, inclusive and democratic-but rather hypocritical. I think it is probably inevitable that some texts be preferred, for political, philosophical, pedagogical, esthetic, or whatever reason, and indeed there may be good reason to prefer Menchii's testimony. But much of the critical reaction to the Stoll-Menchci debate has tended toward pronouncing the last word and arrogantly preempting other per- spectives, a very un-postmodern stance, according to Gayatri Spivak. Spi- vak promotes caution and humility as useful tools to the postmodern critic (33). It appears Stoll heeds Spivak's warning to the extent he sprinkles his book with disclaimers, but when one considers his final chapter and the fallout (intended or not) in the press and on the Internet, one wonders whether his "caution" elucidates or in fact obscures "the truth" about the indigenous question in Guatemala.

Linda J. Craft 47



More than a few critics, including Taracena, have signaled Stoll's confusion of the fields of journalism (his first profession) and anthropology, where significance, not veracity, is the focus (8-9). Taracena chides Stoll for doing what he criticizes in others-failing to question the declarations in the testimonies he collected from sources that disagree with Menchii. Zimmerman asks why Mayan peasants, knowing how dangerous it could be to talk, would somehow reveal all to a North American anthropologist newly arrived and asking questions (II, 67). Zimmerman goes on to acknowledge the validity of some of Stoll's research but begs to put it into a proper context: ". . . it must be insisted that whatever doubts have been raised about details of Rigoberta's story by Stoll and others, they have failed to shake its foundations... Rigoberta's account of her brother's death represents countless stories, many of them with questionable details, about countless unquestionable massacres" (II, 68). Menchui herself has indicated as much in the first lines of her testimony: "I'd like to stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people... My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans" (1).

Unfortunately, the debate has taken several ugly turns, most notably the reply by Colgate University professor Eileen M. Mulhare to Latin American writers Eduardo Galeano and Dante Liano, who expressed dis- pleasure at North American anthropologists such as Stoll studying Guatemalans "as if we were insects." Mulhare charges Galeano and other Latin American intellectuals in general for assuming they know how indigenous people think without consulting them: "Perhaps what really bothers Galeano is that North American anthropologists like Stoll consult the Maya, live among them, and are able to report what they find without prejudice. If it weren't for these studies by anthropologists from the United States and other foreign countries, from the 1940s until the present, the world would know very little about life today in Mayan villages in Guatemala." She includes a list of Mayan intellectuals who she says, unlike their ladino counterparts, do enjoy good relations with U.S. anthropologists. Heated replies via the internet have followed from Arias and from University of San Carlos, Guatemala, anthropologist Carlos Rene Garcia Escobar, denying the existence of the racism and ivory tower men- tality denounced by Mulhare. Arias mentions that all the indigenous anthropologists cited by Mulhare have signed a declaration of support for Menchii.

The issues of veracity, of postmodern culture, and of anthropological and journalistic discourses lead us to the question of literature. As we noted above, Stoll acknowledges in his explanation of postmodernism that his discipline is currently heavily influenced by literary theory. Gugelberger, nevertheless, describes his dismay upon discovering that Stoll fails to demonstrate familiarity with the impressive literary bibliog-




raphy included in his own book: Stoll does not seem to understand testimony as literature nor is he familiar with recent changes in theory (2). The literary dimension is important because it is in college literature classes where students are most likely to encounter Menchi's story. Gugelberger writes: "[Testimonio] is a complex genre at the threshold of other genres which continues to defy definition. One would also expect an anthropologist not to confuse this relatively new genre with autobiography [as journalists have done], life story, and documentary (2).10 Stoll keeps returning to the eyewitness aspect of testimony (242), as if expect- ing Menchui to provide courtroom-worthy evidence-the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and as if forgetting that one of the most studied characteristics of testimony is its "effect of the real." But Menchui tells us quite frankly that she is still guarding some secrets for the protection of her people and their culture.11 Like any eyewitness, Menchui must speak from her own lived experience and perspective.

Stoll completely ignores another aspect of testimony that scholars have long acknowledged-its religious-like quality. In this sense, testimony can hardly be "objective" or "documentary," as Stoll seems to demand. Rather, one who gives this kind of testimony is testifying passionately to the power of a life-changing event, something perhaps gut-wrenching or heart-warming or profoundly transforming, but something nevertheless very real and very true to that person. The fact that only one person of several might experience the same event in this way does not negate its validity, but it does make for different versions. In this vein, Emil Volek has noted the "prophetic," "allegorical," and biblically "figurative" discourses of testimony, which give the sense that one age is closing while another is dawning (8).

Another key to understanding testimony as a literary mode or genre, which resonates especially in a discussion of Menchi's story, is its ability to capture oral histories and traditions, resulting in a "final" written product that is often a composite of collective voices. Taracena explains that "what Stoll doesn't understand is the narrative voice of the book, that an indigenous person considers both the individual context and the collective context, and that these two become intertwined" (9).12 Besides misunderstanding, I would add, Stoll shows disdain for literature when he dismisses the identification many indigenous and ladinos who have suffered feel with Menchui: "If poetic truth is good enough for you, this is the part of her story that is all too true" (275). A sentence like this one reveals Stoll's empirical and literal biases.

Because Stoll does not read figuratively to any great degree, it is no wonder he misses the power of Menchii's testimony, and it is not surprising that he accuses of narrowmindedness readers who do find it compelling: "In the solidarity and human rights milieu, as well as in much of

Linda J. Craft 49



the scholarly community, many still felt that Rigoberta's account deserved to be interpreted literally, as a monument to the popular roots of the guerrilla movement in its northern Quich6 heartland" (11). If I, Rigoberta Menchz2 is read literally in the classroom, then that is a deficien- cy on the part of the instructor or the student, not of the text or literary theory. And perhaps some are guilty of it. But it seems it is Stoll who has interpreted the text literally-the only way he finds truly legitimate. And since he has no confidence in the ability of his colleagues to read proper- ly nor confidence that there can be a critical and valid reading apart from his own, he fears their being "duped" by romanticized revolutionaries. Does he imagine a guerrilla lurking behind every library stack and a guerrilla disciple behind every college classroom desk?

The "guerrilla connection" is perhaps Stoll's biggest concern as he reads Menchci's testimony. He doubts Menchii's claim that leftist guerrillas had the support of vast numbers of indigenous peasants like her in the 1980s. Stoll, here, is not alone in his skepticism, as other scholars and writers have advanced the same thesis. Mario Roberto Morales's short novel, Seihores bajo los drboles (1994), comes to mind. (Stoll includes this book in his bibliography but never references it in the text.) Up for grabs is the idea that "guerrilla warfare is an inevitable response by the poor, their way of defending themselves from exploitation" (278). Instead, concludes Stoll, the militant left exploited the indigenous lack of organization and pressed many peasants into a type of forced service in which they mainly provided "cannon fodder" without understanding the cause for which they were fighting: "Bluntly, most of the population had no idea that they needed a revolution" (138). Stoll sees the peasants as sacrificial lambs offered up by guerrilla leaders, heavily influenced by outside forces (i.e. urban Marxists), to advance their national-liberationist aspira- tions with little or no concern for local issues. Moreover, following Stoll, Menchui too is guilty of prolonging the war by appealing through her testimony to international solidarity, long after the guerrillas had lost all hope of winning anything. Her deliberately deceptive claim to represent all Guatemalans won the international war of images in favor of the revolutionaries, continues Stoll, and impressed solidarity and human rights workers, who in turn used clout to press a supposedly already victorious Guatemalan government and military into giving concessions to the rebels (7-9). Grandin and Goldman find this line of thought particularly "offensive" since it casts the victims in the role of victimizers (Feb. 8, 27). Likewise, it condemns Menchui who, instead of lifting a prophetic voice of justice on behalf of indigenous peoples, sold her people (and the world) a communist lie perpetuating their misery.

A further word on Menchi's relationship to the ladino left is in order. Was the left using Menchil, as Stoll seems to suggest? Remembering Spi-




vak's answer of "no" to the question posed in her landmark essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," I turn to Zimmerman's analysis of what happened from a subalternist position: "The subaltern [Menchui] speaking through the discourse categories of the guerrilla left eventually freed herself, but then could not fully admit it without compromising her political mission and her ever-changing strategic role"; since her Nobel Prize, however, she has been engaged in efforts to constitute an "ever more sober and ade- quate view of indigenous life and struggle in Guatemala and elsewhere" (1999). Without ties to the guerrillas, Menchui never would have been heard. Perhaps the ladino left "used" her, but she also benefitted from them. Now she can afford to distance herself, concentrating more on racial, ethnic, and cultural issues and less on class differences. She has revealed herself to be very politically astute.

To return to the consequences of Menchi's and the left's militant activism: While Stoll makes a valid point that some indigenous groups at times found themselves caught "between two armies," his thinking is extreme, in my opinion, that "insurgency would seem to be a remedy that prolonged the illness" (279). The illness was endemic and not about to disappear. We might speculate that without resistance, the "war" would have ended sooner, but that is the "peace without justice" scenario. The repression, human rights abuses, and general violence would most certainly remain at high levels to this day. Nor would the government have had any incentive to negotiate with the left to end the fighting in 1996 or to bring real hope for positive change.

Here the major flaw in Stoll's thinking, I believe, is his failure to ana- lyze consistently the impact of the 1954 coup that ended ten years of democratic government, a period recalled in the popular and literary imagination as "the Guatemalan Spring." Curious is his early statement that "if there is a single reason for the guerrilla movement and its premise that Guatemala required armed liberation, it was the CIA's overthrow of an elected government in 1954" (46-7). I agree. He notes there were no guerrillas then, only disgruntled army officers offended by the affront to national sovereignty. The young guerrillas who did emerge in the 1960s dreamed of restoring the freedom in which they had grown up. Perhaps Cuba offered the only successful contemporary model of revolution against tyranny from within and against unwanted meddling from the United States. Nicaragua followed suit to inspire revolutionaries in the 1980s. Stoll forgets the compelling reason offered by the events of 1954 by the time he reaches his final chapter: "For the better part of four decades, a misguided belief in the moral purity of total rejection, of refus- ing to compromise with the system and seeking to overthrow it by force, has had profound consequences for the entire political scene" (282). In the same breath, he laments the absence of "other political possibilities

Linda J. Craft 51



that might have been more successful" but does not elaborate.13 If alternatives include peasant organizations, labor unions, other special interest groups, non-violent protests, civil disobedience, and general political mobilization (a possibility Stoll himself admits would have "deepened repression" [Dudley 9]), we could respond they have all been tried since 1954 and squelched by heavy-handed business, the Guatemalan government, and/or the overwhelming might of the United States.14 What other alternatives can Stoll have in mind?

Also skeptical of Stoll's thesis that repression is a response to insurgency, Grandin and Goldman remind Stoll of a larger continental context of military repression despite the absence of armed rebels: for example, Pinochet's Chile, Mexico before the Zapatista uprising, and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico. They conclude that "[Stoll's] formulation reveals a deep ignorance of Guatemalan and Latin American history" (27).

Finally, Stoll reserves his most venomous attacks for North American academics sympathetic to Menchui and to a multicultural curriculum that includes her testimony. He detects an "appetite for indigenas as symbols of rebellion" (280), for an authentic noble savage in traje (195), for victims who fit a particular romantic stereotype of the Other (barefoot, poor, and illiterate) on whom well-intentioned (perhaps guilt-ridden?) intellectuals can cast their scholarly gaze as they research their way up the tenure track to full professorships, endowed chairs, and publishing renown. He castigates academics who are "prey" to the "myth of the guerrilla" (281), but "secure in our offices in places like Middlebury" (Dudley 9); "middle class radicals who dream of finding true solidarity in the countryside" (282); and committed educators who want to "validate their authority by claiming to abdicate it" (277). The issue of leftist elitism and hypocrisy haunts Stoll. Responding to Grandin and Goldman, Stoll inveighs against the "latte left in New Haven," still enchanted by guerrilla warfare (2).15 Georgie Anne Geyer's defense of Stoll, "Traditional Idea of Truth vs. Designer Truths," echoes similar thoughts from the political right about a left-leaning "cultural elite." Troubling to me is Stoll's (and his defenders') tendency to lump the left into one monolithic front to which he attributes all types of heinous appetites. This conflation smacks of Cold War men- tality and is surely no longer accurate-if it ever was-as the left is frag- mented and foundering in efforts to redefine what "liberal" and "radical" mean today. This is a lesson learned from Jorge Castafieda's Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (1993), another entry in Stoll's bibliography not mentioned in the text.

Perhaps at the heart of Stoll's preoccupation is the idea of the discourse of power. Believing the academy to be dominated by so-called leftist elites, he issues the following tongue-in-cheek mea culpa: "In the case




of the book you hold in your hands, a white male anthropologist is accus- ing an indigenous woman of making up part of her story. The important issue is not whether she did or not. Instead, it is Western domination, which I am obviously perpetrating. Reasoning like this enables Rigober- ta's story to be removed from the field of testable propositions, to instead become a proof-text that foreigners can use to validate themselves" (277). A "bleeding-heart" liberal response would be one of guilt, in Stoll's mind, but a suspect guilt used to cover up a desire for justification. Stoll's real concern is his own loss of authority as a first world scholar: "What if, on comparing the most hallowed testimonio with others, we find that it is not reliable in certain important ways? Then we would have to acknowledge that there is no substitute for our capacity to judge competing versions of events, to exercise our authority as scholars" (277). Spivak's admonition to intellectuals to practice humility would be anathema to Stoll, who would in turn suspect a false humility.

So, in the end, just what is Stoll saying? That guerrilla warfare is a doomed strategy, a clear failure; that Menchui was aligned with the guerrillas; that, therefore (following his syllogism to its logical conclusion), she failed along with them; and that her testimony is a failed eyewitness account because it is full of untruths. But such is not the case in Stoll's own words. On the last page of his book, he declares that "[h]er story has helped shift perceptions of indigenous people from hapless victims to men and women fighting for their rights. The recognition she has won is helping Mayas become conscious of themselves as historical actors" (283). He vindicates her and perhaps even the armed left with whom she initial- ly identified, because they saw in her an effective spokesperson for the rights of oppressed people.

To paraphrase an old saying, with vindications such as Stoll's, who needs censures? Menchi's allies have found her most appropriate vindi- cation in a recent report from the U.N.-mandated Commission for Histor- ical Clarification. CEH (Comision para el Esclarecimiento Hist6rico) data on responsibility for human rights violations and violence in Guatemala between 1962 and 1996 show that "93% rests with agents of the State, including. .. the Army, security forces, Civil Patrols, military commis- sioners and death squads; 3% rests with the guerrillas; the remaining 4% rests with other unidentified armed groups, civilian elements and other public officials" ("Guatemala..." 1). The victims were not the victimizers.

In drawing conclusions to this debate that still rages at some academic meetings, although it seems to have disappeared entirely from the mainstream print media as of summer 1999, I return to my original point of departure, Menchi's reception by the U.S. press, to determine the impact of the latest controversy. Consulting most of the same large dailies that had figured in my early research,16 I found many said nothing (USA

Linda J. Craft 53



Today, Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Philadel- phia Inquirer); one ran only a review of Stoll's book (Atlanta Journal); some of the Knight-Ridder papers had two or three articles which had come through their news service (Miami Herald, Akron Beacon Journal, Charlotte Observer, San Jose Mercury News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch); and only three carried either an editorial or one or two opinion columns (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald), most of which acknowledge the complexity of the question of "truth" and "lies," support the fight for justice by Guatemalan indigenous groups, and do not wish to strip Menchci of her Nobel Prize. Most negative is the editorial in the Miami Herald, "Haunting Guatemala" (Jan. 4, 1999), which demands Menchui apologize for her "lies" and "exaggerations" that have "tarnished" her reputation. At the same time, it recognizes the "larger good" that her "sins" produced by bringing attention to the suffering of the Maya. The most critical view of Stoll comes from Alexander Cock- burn, writing for the Los Angeles Times: "[Menchii's] is an account by an open partisan, not one with claims to impartiality. . . 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. .. "

All in all, my own sense is that, rather than changing many opinions, this latest brouhaha has hardened already strong partisan views. The argument generated by Stoll's book and picked up in the mainstream press revolves around confusion surrounding the term "testimony"; an obsession with the concept of eyewitness; and binary categories of fact and fiction/truth and lie that do not address the full complexities of "veracity" and the representation of the un-representable. Menchui herself has repeatedly insisted her story is testimony, not autobiography, and the Nobel committee has explained it awarded her its 1992 Peace Prize not for her book, but for her activism and her symbolic value, as the press duly noted. In attempting to sort through the controversy, it is helpful to remember that when Menchfi told her story to her three interlocutors in Paris in 1982, the farthest thing from her mind had to have been a Nobel prize and a future as a celebrity. Who could have imagined it? She needed to get a story out about violence and human suffering in order to shatter the world's complacency toward a remote "banana republic."

Had it not been for the timing--1992--with its renewed interest in Conquest and its aftermath and a postmodern reinterpretation of history, Rigoberta Menchui might still exist in relative oblivion. But in a fertile coincidence, the world observed the quincentennial in the last decade of the century, a ten-year period marked by the so-called "culture wars" in the United States. Joan DeJean, analyzing fin-de-siecle quarrels between "Ancients" and "Moderns," notes a telltale proliferation of "anxieties born from the fear of public culture," pitting the guardians of the old order




against innovators who would wish to democratize the public sphere, giving entry to voices (like Menchi's) previously marginalized by virtue of race, gender, or class (25). DeJean sees literature as a political battle- ground because literature is the means by which culture can be made ever more public (21). Demographic diversity leads to canonical diversity (24); the floodgates open, the ancients fear cultural decadence and a con- comitant national moral decline. I suspect that this cultural preoccupation has driven Stoll and that the figure of Menchui has served his purpose. What happened to Menchui publicly, then, is not surprising when one considers the fate of the reputations (deserved or not) of other well- known figures (past and present) in that decade of anxieties, cynicism, and personal demystification in the interests of political gain. There are few, if any, heroes left. The myth of the hero is just that.

In closing, I offer my own testimony vis-a-vis Menchi's story. I have had my students read it-I believe successfully-in both language and literature classes, and I will include it and related readings in theory in course curricula again. It certainly is a point of departure in a discussion of modernism and postmodernism, postcolonialism, and politics and culture at the end of the twentieth century. Students find it reader-friendly and the Spanish accessible; it is one of the more interesting examples of a genre which can sometimes be pedantic, moralistic, and tendentious. Most important, however, the dramatic narrative opens their world to Guatemala and moves them to think in new ways about matters of life and death.

North Park University, Chicago

Notes

1. The only previous reference I found to Mench6i in a major U.S. daily was in the Christian Science Monitor, April 20, 1988, in a 5-sentence article mentioning her detention by government forces upon her return to Guatemala after seven years in exile. 2. In May 1993 social unrest exploded over continuing military-sponsored violence, corruption, and elections. For several days, President Jorge Serrano Elias invoked martial law, suspended the congress, arrested the supreme court, cen- sored the newspapers, and closed several television stations. Internal opposition and international pressure, especially from the United States, put pressure on elements in the military to abandon Serrano and restore civilian rule. Menchui and popular organizations were key in ultimately precipitating Serrano's removal. Human rights activist Ramiro de Le6n Carpio was elected by Congress to succeed Serrano (Zimmerman II, 299-304). 3. Another unfavorable critic is Stephen Schwartz. Since he writes for a magazine, The American Spectator, rather than a daily, I did not include his commentary, "Phoo Menchui," in my 1992 study. Some of his observations resemble Ratliff's.

Linda J. Craft 55



4. I discuss the 1954 coup in greater detail on pages 51-52. 5. See the novel by Francisco Goldman, The Long Night of White Chickens (1994), for a fictionalized look at this phenomenon. 6. In comparing the number of articles and editorials written on Guatemala during 1993 to another period of turmoil-1981-I found a remarkable decrease. In 1981, for example, the Christian Science Monitor published 49 articles (including three editorials) on Guatemala to 21 (including one editorial) published in 1993. The Chicago Tribune ran 27 articles and editorials in 1981 to 12 (including one editorial) in 1993. We could speculate why-from the severity and duration of the crises, to events elsewhere in the world competing for space, and/or to simply a loss of interest. 7. Indeed, he certainly had a foretaste of the reaction at several academic meetings, most notably the 1991 Latin American Studies Association Congress in Washington, D.C. (239-242). See also Marc Zimmerman's description of the same event (1995, II, 64-65). 8. A ladino is both a racial and cultural term in Guatemala, referring to a non- indigenous person (be he/she white, of mixed-race, or of indigenous blood, but no longer practicing indigenous customs). 9. Stoll, to my knowledge, does not use the word "lie" in his book; however, he refers to Menchi's testimony as, among other things, a "falsehood," "fabrication," and "fiction," much of which is "seriously misleading" and "not true," softer syn- onyms that unsympathetic reporters easily convert to the harshest of signifiers. 10. See also Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing. Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham: Duke UP, 1996; Elzbieta Sklodowska, Testimonio hispanoameri- cano: Historia, teorfa, poetica. NY: Peter Lang, 1992; and Craft, Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America. Gainesville: UP Florida, 1997 (Ch.1 and Con- clusion especially) for further discussion regarding definitions and characteristics. 11. See specifically Doris Sommer's essay, "No Secrets," in Gugelberger's The Real Thing. 12. Taracena provides a detailed description of the original 1982 taping and tran- scription sessions of the testimony in Paris. Besides Burgos and Menchf--the two- some that emerges in the published edition that the world knows-there were actually two more individuals present at least some of the time: he and a Cuban transcriber/editor, Paquita Rivas. They both "disappeared" from the final product for security reasons and so that the book would not be seen as hardline political propaganda, "but rather as an attempt to present a testimony with literary quality" (5). Taracena refers to the collective dimension of this process as well and believes it helps explain some of the misunderstandings Stoll has: "I should say that Stoll has a skewed vision of what a testimony is, beginning with the question of who is the author-the interviewee, the interviewer, the editor, the transcriber? If we use anthropological criteria, the interviewer and the editor are as much authors as the narrator is. In this case, there were four of us involved. What I'm getting at is that it is a collective construction, and the error and horrors that may exist in the text are part of that construction" (8). 13. In a letter to the editor in The Nation (June 14, 1999), responding to Grandin and Goldman, Stoll says something similar: "The reviewers are right that the guerrillas are not responsible for right-wing terror in Latin American history, but that hardly proves that armed struggle is the best or inevitable response" (2). He never clarifies what a better response would be.




14. For example, see Miguel Angel Albizures's testimony-like Tiempo de sudor y lucha (1987) about the 1984 Coca Cola strike in Guatemala City from the workers' perspective. 15. I cannot help but note the irony of the advertisement for Salon Blend coffee from the Salon Emporium next to the blistering attack on Menchui by one of Stoll's biggest cheerleaders, David Horowitz, in the online magazine Salon. Is designer coffee only for the right-wing elite? 16. I searched mainly online archives between December 1998 (when the Stoll story first broke) and August 1999 for the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and many Knight- Ridder newspapers (Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Inquirer, Charlotte Observer, Akron Beacon-Journal, San Jose Mercury News, Min- neapolis Star Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

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