A Tainted Attack on a Cultural Icon

Few disclosures offer keener pleasure than the news that those one had previously believed to be of impregnable reputation have, after all, feet of clay.

Such now appears to be the fate of Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan Mayan woman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The slurs are cast not on her conduct but on her powers of recollection and, so the charge is leveled, upon her presumptive capacity for distortion.

When Menchu’s autobiographical memoir, “I Rigoberta Menchu” was published in English back in l982, its vivid account of the ferocious campaigns of repression carried out by the Guatemalan army had an impact that has lasted until this day. It was scarcely a secret that the army had been butchering peasants, particularly Mayan Indians, on an almost genocidal scale, but Menchu gave an immediacy and a specificity to the killings that placed successive Guatemalan governments on the defensive in the court of world opinion.

The ultimate decision of the government to negotiate with the guerrillas can be attributed in no small part to Menchu.

Long before she was awarded the Nobel Prize, Menchu had as secure a position in the pantheon of the world’s moral witnesses as, say, Mother Teresa, albeit with an entirely different political cast. Whereas Mother Teresa preached accommodation with earthly social inequities, Menchu has been an avowed supporter of and participant in Guatemala’s guerrilla movement. To radical students in this country as elsewhere, she has been perhaps the preeminent Third World witness, a Mayan, a peasant, an activist, a woman.

Such preeminence has long irritated the right, whose rage boiled over when Menchu’s memoir became required reading for students at colleges such as Stanford at the start of the 1990s. Conservative watchdogs such as William Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza deplored this intrusion of a Mayan woman into the sacred Western pantheon.

Menchu’s foes, ranging from these cultural conservatives to lobbyists for the Guatemalan government, are now exultant because an American anthropologist based at Wesleyan named David Stoll has finally published an assault on Menchu 10 years in the making, entitled “Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans” (Westview).

Stoll claims firstly that Menchu’s recollections are disputed by relatives and by those who knew the circumstances of her upbringing. Though Stoll acknowledges that members of her family were murdered, he disputes the manner and whereabouts. Going beyond disputes over such data, Stoll argues that the political context for Menchu’s memoir was far more complex than she let on, when she dictated her memoir in 1982. Whereas Menchu presented the Guatemalan army as the villain, Stoll claims the struggles over land described by Menchu had perhaps more to do with familial disputes and clashes between Indians and Ladinos. Stoll’s bottom line: more culpable than the Guatemalan army are the guerrillas whose insurgency provoked the terrible blood-letting that followed.

To take the last charge first, the oppressed are always being blamed for their reckless presumption in rebelling against their condition, and it is scarcely damaging to claim that Menchu portrayed the guerrillas in a favorable light. Hers is an account by an open partisan, not one with claims to impartiality. Stoll doesn’t dare to deny the murderous brutality of the army. On specific biographical details, there seems to be little doubt that Menchu did not always maintain a clear distinction between what had happened to her or to acquaintances. But is it devastating to Menchu to say she did get educated at a convent, working at the same time as a maid or to question whether her brother was burned to death or thrown by the army into a hole where he died?

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, which appears to stem from America’s culture wars and a desire to demolish an icon of the left. Menchu survives his scrutiny, and even Stoll is forced in his conclusion to acknowledge her achievement: “Her story has helped shift perceptions of indigenous people from hapless victims to men and women fighting for their rights.”