Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?

Readers hoping for something new about Rigoberta Menchú may be disappointed by this book. After the first forty pages, Greg Grandin drops Rigoberta, gives us two of his previously published essays on the Guatemalan truth commission, then some excerpts from the truth commission report. As for the 1992 Nobel peace laureate, Greg is belaboring my Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, as he has on previous occasions. Why the obsession? Greg was a latecomer to the Guatemalan civil war, showing up after most of the fighting had ended. But he arrived full of faith in the historical significance of the guerrilla movement, and on this faith--a more sellable proposition in American academia than in Guatemala--he has built his career. My portrayal of peasant war-weariness, based on fieldwork in a former guerrilla stronghold, Greg found deeply offensive. Worse, I compared Rigoberta's 1982 story at the height of the guerrilla movement with what her neighbors had to say a decade later. Luckily for Greg, defending Rigoberta from sacrilege gave him a receptive audience in American academia. It became his most rewarding stock in trade.The latest round began when Elisabeth Burgos, the anthropologist who interviewed Rigoberta in 1982 and turned her life story into an award-winning book, contributed a preface to a new edition of my book. Not long after, Greg and Verso Books cooked up the idea of Greg writing a preface for a new edition of I, Rigoberta Menchú. However, Greg has published so many intemperate, unfactual remarks on the subject that he and Verso decided not to inform Elisabeth, let alone seek her approval. The new edition of I, Rigoberta Menchú was at the printer when Elisabeth found out and blew the whistle. Since then Greg has claimed that Verso was unaware of Elisabeth's contractual rights (her name has been on Verso's copyright page since 1984). Greg also claims to have just discovered that Elisabeth stopped sending Rigoberta royalties (a fact I reported twelve years ago--she stopped sending the royalties after Rigoberta accused her of stealing them).I, Rigoberta Menchú is still a widely assigned text. If Greg had succeeded in inserting himself into a new edition, he could have inoculated students against questions about the book's reliability. Instead we have Who is Rigoberta Menchú? which begins (and pretty much ends) with the ill-fated preface. Since Greg has a habit of cherry-picking facts, I should mention a few that he leaves on the tree: *"there is not one piece of evidence, not one witness" that the Spanish embassy fire could have been a tactical suicide by the student guerrillas who occupied the embassy (the sole survivor, the Spanish ambassador, reported an occupier trying to light a molotov cocktail inside the room in which 35 occupiers and hostages died); *"there is no tradition of tactical suicide among Guatemala leftists" (cyanide pills were carried by cadre in danger of being captured); *"Menchú did not study with the rest of the students, and only took classes part time a few days a week in the afternoon" (she was a scholarship student at an upper-class boarding school, then became a regular student at a second boarding school). *the truth commission found evidence of the military harrassing Rigoberta's village before the guerrillas arrived (not in anything the truth commission has published; exactly when and where?)In Greg's opinion, Rigoberta has suffered unprecedented abuse for a Nobel peace laureate and this epitomizes racism. But he's exaggerating the level of controversy. At the time Rigoberta won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, there was very little debate. Even after my book was published in 1999, the attacks came from rightwing zealots who had no credibility in the mainstream media and in diplomatic circles, where Rigoberta's stock has remained high. If the Nobel peace prize is the most prestigious award in the world, and if it has been won by the likes of Henry Kissinger, I think scrutiny is a good idea. As for whether fact-checking Rigoberta's memoir is unfair, Greg should take a look at another proud Verso title--Christopher Hitchens' attack on Mother Teresa, the 1979 Nobel peace laureate. In comparison with Hitchens' exposé, my analysis of I, Rigoberta Menchú is a model of civility.Yes, this is a kerfluffle, but not the underlying issue. Should readers of Rigoberta's 1982 story know that her people tell a significantly different story and that some of her most dramatic claims are contradicted by the documentary record? There's no question that Rigoberta's family was targetted by the army and that the army killed thousands of helpless noncombatants. But sacralizing Rigoberta's version of events serves no good end, just Greg's.What Greg doesn't want you to know is this: when Rigoberta narrated her story as a newly-minted guerrilla cadre, she claimed that her family and village were being forced off their land by evil non-indigenous landlords. If this was true, they had no alternative but to embrace armed struggle. In actual fact, Rigoberta's village was obtaining a substantial land grant from the Guatemalan government when the guerrillas showed up to liberate them. Far worse, the guerrilla strategy of turning peasant villages into fighting units was an utter disaster--not just for the villagers who were helpless to defend themselves, but also for the credibility of the Guatemalan left, which has yet to recover. This is the sad truth behind Rigoberta's story.

Grandin's book is an excellent text for those considering an understanding of the causes of the Guatemalan genocide, an introduction to Rigoberta Menchú that responds thoughtfully to the racist hatchet jobs. Those hatchet jobs sought to undermine Menchú's human rights activism, but also the activism of other human rights workers, including the investigative work of the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala--a precursor to the United Nations own research and conclusion that indigenous people had organized against systematic racism and brutal exploitation and that a genocide had been committed against them by the Guatemalan government. Grandin does an excellent job taking the reader through the methodology and the findings of the United Nations Mission on Guatemala.Grandin does also brilliant work showing how the academic right's industry of character destruction got it wrong empirically regarding most of Menchú's testimony. Most significantly, it shows how the superficial empiricism of the racist industry in right-wing intellectual circles fails to understand the historical dynamics of exploitation and oppression in Guatemala. Of course, the latter part of Grandin's analysis proves to be the part of the work most objectionable to the academic right's industry of racist falsification of the rights of the oppressed to organize (although the ad hominems against Menchú are still used to obfuscate reasoning and cover up the reality of the oppressed); for this industry, the oppressed can be a worthy victim only when they do not fight back, which is very convenient for a system of oppression that wants to perpetuate itself.What is fascinating to me is that the odious attribution of blame to the popular movements in Guatemala for the genocide committed against the members of those movements would get no traction if anyone in the United States sought, for example, to blame people fighting against slavery for the violence of the master against the slave in antebellum United States, or to blame the African National Congress for the violence of the regime of apartheid established by white supremacists in South Africa. The racist right-wing falsification industry commits that fallacy and tries to get away with the fallacy by blaming the victim of the violence with even more animus:The racist argument against Rigoberta Menchú, the Peasant Unity Committee, and the guerrillas is the following: If the victims of oppression organize to fight oppression they are to blamed for the oppression by the oppressors; the argument continues by asserting that those who did not organize were the true victims and they were caught "between two fires." Thus, it takes away agency from the indigenous in two ways: They are either simple recipients of violence (a people without agency), and they do not exist if they fight back. If such argument had been the final argument in the U.S. regarding slavery, we would still be at the stage of fictions such as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Well, critics of Grandin want scholarship on Guatemala to stay at that level of superficiality and racist narcissism.Such was the stupidity that acquired traction in the U.S. in part because it helped absolve the empire from much of the responsibility for the genocide. Grandin does a wonderful work unmasking the prostitution of right-wing academics in the U.S. who found it easier to blame the victims of genocide than show the responsibility ruling elites in Guatemala and in the U.S. had for the tragedy in Guatemala.