I, Rigoberta Menchъ

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I, Rigoberta Menchú

• The Cultural Wars

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Guatemalan Historical Background

• See Anthropologists and the War in Guatemala
• 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 protagonist 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

• Rigobertas 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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Stolls ArgumentsWas Rigoberta illiterate?

• Prestigious Belgian nuns 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 Rigobertas 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 Rigobertas brother Patrocinio burned alive?

• They burned a body, but he was already dead

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How did Rigobertas mother die?

• Visualizing her mothers 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
  Stolls 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
  (Rigobertas 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 fragmentarysomeone burned the
  judicial archivebefore I went looking for
  itmany of the officials tending to
  reticencebystanders were confused about who was
  doing what to whom

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Did Rigobertas 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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Violence

• Martínez family
• EGP?
• Family revenge?
• Fate of Patrocinio

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What was Ríos Montts 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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1982
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How Reliable is Stolls Account?

• My interviews with survivorsas for the
  factuality of my conclusionssome issues lead
  only to more and less likely scenarios
• If what results is more reliable than Rigobertas
  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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Stolls 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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Rigobertas RoleMarxist 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 oppressionexonerating 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 sons 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 1980s.

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