Telling tales from the killing fields

The suffering of the Maya people during Guatemala's years of terror is a story ensnared in the politics of truth, explains Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Within the small universe of academia, a fierce battle is raging over who owns the truth of what happened in Guatemala during the early 1980s. This much is undisputed: that during that time, the Guatemalan army conducted a large-scale scorched-earth campaign through the largely indigenous highlands to rout out the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), Guatemala's small but persistent guerrilla front. The campaign was as brutal as it was effective, killing tens of thousands of unpoliticised Maya civilians and pushing more than one million Guatemalans into exile.

Amid this bloody drama, Rigoberta Menchú, a young Ki'ché Maya woman, escaped the killing fields. She went into exile in Mexico, and then in France. In 1982, aged 23, over the course of a week she told her stark and shocking life story in a conversation that was tape-recorded by a sympathetic listener, who distilled and edited Rigoberta's story into a slim volume that eventually bore the English title, I ... Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman of Guatemala . The book told of Rigoberta's childhood in a traditional Maya village, the brutal murder of both her parents and her brother by the Guatemalan security forces, and of the development of her own political consciousness. I ... Rigoberta became an instant classic in Europe and the United States. Its "authentic voice" resonated loudly among those who supported the guerrillas' fight against their government. But on a different level, the book also spoke to readers who saw in Rigoberta the personal embodiment of the ancient struggle of indigenous peoples against their oppressors. I ... Rigoberta made Rigoberta Menchú an important international spokesperson for human rights in her country and symbol of indigenous rights in general. In 1992, the year of the Columbus quincentenary, she became the first indigenous American to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.

In late autumn 1998, the American anthropologist David Stoll published an exhaustively researched book that charged that many of the claims made in I ... Rigoberta are not true, that the book contains intentional and substantial lies and exaggerations that were skilfully crafted to serve narrow political purposes. In Stoll's view, that project was a subtle propaganda piece; it served to advance the political ends of the Guatemalan guerrillas by engendering a consensus among well-meaning leftists living abroad that the URNG fully represented the interests of Guatemala's indigenous population and enjoyed their wide support. Stoll concluded that Rigoberta's story projects a dangerous and disingenuous image that reflects a nonexistent "pan-Maya political consensus" and misrepresents those many indigenous people who, he believes, found themselves caught unwittingly in the crossfire of two, albeit very unequal, "armies".

In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans , Stoll attacks Rigoberta's veracity on three points in particular. The first regards the life and politics of her father, Vicente Menchú, an important figure on the Guatemalan left. Rigoberta portrays her father as a founder and activist in the Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC), a grassroots indigenous organisation seeking justice against vertical ( ladino , or non-Indian) oppression and exploitation. Stoll finds that Menchú senior spent most of his life involved in a decades-long land dispute with his indigenous in-laws, not with ladino overlords. Stoll also casts aspersions on Rigoberta's canonical account of Vicente's death in the infamous 1980 Spanish embassy fire, in which more than 30 (the number ranges from 34-39) protesters and hostages were burned alive in the building by the Guatemalan security forces. The second major challenge Stoll makes is to the verisimilitude of Rigoberta's claims to speak as an "authentic voice" for the Maya. Here, Stoll makes two charges: first, that even by the age of 23, Rigoberta was willing to package herself as an "exotic" in a way that romantic, paternalistic and potentially sympathetic supporters most wanted to see her. He charges that she pretended to be uneducated and a neophyte Spanish speaker when in fact she had been a promising student at a Catholic girls' school in Guatemala for a number of years and spoke Spanish like the educated person she in fact was.

What is interesting about this point is that even without the embellishment of illiteracy and monolingualism, the young Rigoberta already was the "genuine article". She spoke Maya Ki'ché as her first language, and was the product of a relatively typical upbringing of an indigenous girl in the remote campo of the Guatemalan highlands. However, by Stoll's measure, Menchú realised early on that this in itself was not quite enough, so she outfitted herself in a more "suitable" personal history. In so doing, Stoll argues that Menchú set herself up as the voice of a voiceless people; we assume that because she managed to escape and had the courage to speak out, she serves as a voice for the many tens of thousands of Maya who suffered under the jackboot of army repression between 1980 and 1983. Because they could not speak for themselves, Rigoberta spoke for them - and because she supported the popular movement, we believe, ipso facto , that those for whom she spoke also supported it.

On the basis of research he did for this book and for an earlier work, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala , Stoll argues fiercely against this last assumption. In his assessment, Maya enthusiasm for the Guatemalan popular movement was, even at its apogee, significantly tempered by fear and mistrust of the guerrillas - whose leaders were neither indigenous nor particularly cognisant of the exigencies of rural Maya life - and by an even greater fear and mistrust of the Guatemalan army, which exacted the most horrible and excessive kinds of retribution against any person or locality thought to be in any way sympathetic to the guerrillas. (The result of this brutality was the almost complete defeat of the guerrillas by 1984 through the demolition of any potential base of civilian support - a result still known in Latin American military circles as "the Guatemalan solution".) That the "draining of the sea in which the fish swim" - to invoke the well-worn Maoist image - took place in the 1980s in those regions of the country that were primarily Maya gave the army's war a racist subtext that I ... Rigoberta highlights with unblinking clarity. Stoll points out that in the late 1960s, the Guatemalan army conducted an equally successful and ferocious scorched-earth assault against a guerrilla movement in the non-Indian eastern part of the country. However, the sheer scale, sweep and human geography of the 1980s campaign infused it with the pungent odour of genocide.

The 1980s military campaign in the highlands, the publication of I ... Rigoberta in English and in nearly two dozen other foreign languages (although it was originally written in Spanish, the book was not available in Guatemala for nearly a decade after its initial publication), and the subsequent emergence of Rigoberta Menchú as an international personage, all converged within North America in a kind of academic synergy. Rigoberta and her book simultaneously became the iconic embodiment of what would eventually be known (before the term acquired ironic and hostile use) as political correctness. For left-leaning US academics, I ... Rigoberta was like a ray of bright light against the dark shadows of the Reagan years, when US support for the Contra war against the Sandinistas and aid to the right-wing government of El Salvador defined most North Americans' views of Central America. In Rigoberta - the woman and the book - academics found the "authentic voice" demanded by post-colonial theory, the eyewitness to repression and atrocity that nonetheless spoke in the simple and passionate cadences of the indigenous campesina. But if her soulful, Maya, female voice seemed right for the time, so did her words - simple, direct and radical: "My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people."

The stated purpose of Stoll's book is to underscore this very point. While Rigoberta's life story, like nearly any autobiography, has embroidered facts, self-serving omissions, and fictional elements, it was nonetheless embraced as inerrant gospel by US academics and solidarity workers. Stoll argues that sympathetic readers seized on the book as a way to justify the championing of a popular movement that had already lost much of its momentum, credibility and support within Guatemala itself.

With this charge, Stoll places the practical culpability for the perpetuation of the army's fierce recrimination against the Maya population at the feet of the scholarly community, particularly his fellow anthropologists and colleagues in the Latin American Studies Association (Lasa), a large and liberal-minded interdisciplinary congress of Latin Americanist scholars. Within these circles, Rigoberta Menchú, book and icon, became an avatar for contested intellectual venues, such as multiculturalism, identity politics, post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. As such, Rigoberta ascended to an unassailable moral high ground that was only underscored by the award of the Nobel peace prize.

Stoll argues that this context provided his colleagues in the academy with a secure and unimpugnable intellectual armchair from which they could advocate solidarity with the Guatemalan armed left, even after that movement was largely discredited and defeated. By using Guatemala's civil struggle as a backdrop for their own intellectual battles, Stoll charges that foreign scholars inadvertently but recklessly helped to prolong the blood-chilling hostilities that claimed the lives of so many nameless Mayas.

Menchú's most recent book, Crossing Borders , addresses few of the specific charges in Stoll's book. The new Menchú book essentially picks up the thread of her life around the time she was awarded the Nobel prize, with two short chapters devoted to the work she did for human rights in the United Nations and in Geneva that resulted in the accolade. Unfortunately, Crossing Borders has little of the urgency or the vitality of I ... Rigoberta. Whatever its flaws, the original book is an affecting and powerful story, told in the simple but compelling language of a young woman who obviously carried a great weight on her heart.

Regardless of its original purpose and subsequent uses, and even if Menchú did play as fast and loose with the facts as Stoll claims, I ... Rigoberta is nonetheless a book that can, and has, moved souls to action. In Crossing Borders , however, the ingenuousness and wide-eyed perspicuity of that first book is lost entirely. Now at the edge of middle age, Doña Rigoberta's (Doña is a Spanish term of respect) iconic status is evident on every page, and the author is obviously mindful of the fact that to many of her loyal readers she speaks not only for "all poor Guatemalans", but for all indigenous peoples. While one might question whether or not the young Rigoberta was fully aware of the political ramifications of her testimony, Crossing Borders leaves no doubt that the mature Rigoberta enjoys complete ownership of her own political power and significance. What is most intriguing about this book is the way in which Menchú tries to rise to a variety of heavily valenced meanings that other people have attributed to her over half a lifetime of fame. It is also revealing to explore just what those meanings tell us about our own ideas of political correctness. While the title of the book apparently refers to geographic borders - as in the peripatetic life of an activist and Nobel laureate - it might be more aptly applied to the metaphorical borders a person crosses when she moves from being an unknown refugee to an international icon, from campesina to celebrity.

In I ... Rigoberta, for example, the word "Maya" does not, I believe, even show up, since the 1982 work predates the pan-Mayan consciousness that grew out of the war. Instead, she uses the words "indigenous", "compa$eros", or simply refers to people by their language group. But in Crossing Borders , Doña Rigoberta defines herself clearly as "Maya", or even "native American", a term used commonly in North America but rarely in Latin America. She is self-conscious in noting her status as a woman, and a woman of colour at that. Moreover, she engages at some level in the politics of gender, although she is, as she puts it, "confused" by some aspects of feminism and frankly put off by homosexuality. On other issues, Doña Rigoberta assumes a voice of authority in several areas that are almost entirely outside of her earlier milieu; this is most evident when she discusses how she served as a delegate to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is difficult to assess whether Menchú's recent concerns about the environment are a natural evolution in her career as an activist, as they very well may be, or if she simply felt compelled by her notoriety to conform to the idealised image, so common in the North, of indigenous people as "organic environmentalists". For this reader, the central question that emerged from Crossing Borders was how much of this is really Rigoberta, and how much of it is Doña Rigoberta, Nobel laureate, trying to jump the high bar of our expectations.

One of the basic premises of subaltern studies is that "authentic voices" should speak for themselves and that our western agendas for them should be relegated to the dustbin of colonialism. What are we to do when the most famous indigenous woman on earth still seems to believe she must tell us what she thinks we want to hear?

A possible answer to this question lies in another recent book about the violence in Guatemala in the early 1980s, Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History , by Victor Montejo. Montejo's spare and lyrical work explores the violence done to Maya individuals and communities, and the lives of survivors in exile. This book resulted from a series of extensive interviews the author conducted with refugees living in camps located mainly in Chiapas, along the Mexican-Guatemalan border, in the middle and late 1980s. Like Menchú, Montejo is a Maya, a Jakaltek, from a small town located high in the exceedingly remote and beautiful Kuchumatanes mountains; like Menchú, he was forced into exile by the execution of family members and by violence wrought on his community by the Guatemalan army. But like Stoll, Montejo is also a degreed anthropologist, and he is a knowledgeable player in the multicultural debates. Thus his study becomes an intriguing discursive hall of mirrors, as he interviews his subjects, first through the prism of his own experience of loss and exile, and second through the refracting lens of formal anthropological discourse. ("I only interviewed people who speak Popb'al Ti', Q'anjob'al [two Maya languages] or Spanish," he notes in a modest disclaimer, "since those are the only languages I speak besides English.") While both Menchú and Stoll pay close attention to political allegiances and affiliations, it is abundantly clear from Montejo's work that the people in his study were by and large suspicious of national political movements of any stripe, and joined either side only when outrage, duress, hopeful promises or financial considerations compelled them to do so. Nevertheless, Montejo is careful not to limn a simplistic portrait of pacific Maya farmers and Rousseauan naifs. He lays a careful historical groundwork for the escalation of ethnic tension in Guatemala over a period of some decades prior to the escalation of hostilities in the late 1970s, and he contextualises the era into the political compartments described in the other two books reviewed here - the burning of protesters in the Spanish embassy fire in 1980, the increase of death-squad activity in the late 1970s, the guerrilla offensive of the early 1980s, and the scorched-earth campaign that "drained the sea" of the western highlands in 1982-83.

But Montejo, who writes with the economy of the poet he is, eloquently illustrates how divorced these national events were from everyday life in remote highland villages, until they "hit home" in the most brutal ways imaginable. Montejo's informants describe the beginning of what they call simply " la violencia " not in political terms, but as a time when people began to "dream of wolves and owls, animals that carry a strong omen"; they recall that "dogs began to bark sadly and howl for their masters", because dogs can see into the future and they knew that their masters were going to die.

Montejo adopts a dispassionate tone throughout his text, in part to underscore the power of the testimonies that he quotes verbatim, but also to let the full impact of his findings wash over the reader without comment or hyperbole. At one point, he describes the army's execution of a young school teacher in the town plaza during a fiesta, which "changed the life of the town and confirmed the local belief that the army was the most criminal institution that the Mayas had ever seen". Only by reading the footnotes tucked in the back of the book will the reader realise that the "young school teacher" was Montejo's own brother, Pedro Antonio.

Montejo describes the early relationship between Maya villagers, the guerrillas and the army with remarkable equanimity. Of the guerrillas, he writes: "Among the Jakaltek people there was no great rush to join the guerrillas because they were considered by most to be dangerous, to be troublemakers. Some people saw them in a magical light, as extraordinary people with special abilities who were well trained to avoid dangers."

Even so, contact with the guerrillas - whether solicited or not - brought down the literal hellfire of the army. In a gruelling series of chapters punctuated by interviews and testimony, Montejo chronicles the Guatemalan army's reign of terror that eliminated and displaced so many tens of thousands of civilians. Montejo is less interested in cataloguing names, places and dates than he is in expressing the fullness of the raw emotions that were left bare by the scorched-earth campaign and the sadism of individual gun-bearing men. The searing testimonies he records leave the impression that it was fear - of the army's vengeful methods, its motives, and its strutting caprice - more than any other single factor that spelled the end of whatever support the indigenous population willingly gave to the popular movements that purported to represent the Mayas' best interests.

In the end, even those who managed to escape to Mexico, Canada or the USA with their lives could only pray that they had also managed to survive with their culture and "way of being" intact as well. Montejo is optimistic - perhaps overly so - about the future of the Maya way of life, which he measures in the continued vitality of language, song, ritual and storytelling. Like the later Menchú, Montejo also employs the encompassing word "Maya", a term routinely applied to Guatemala's natives by outsiders but rarely used by indigenous people themselves until quite recently. In his intentional use of this contested word, Montejo offers us a hopeful vision of his own people, bound by a common, if not homogeneous culture and world view, a shared experience of repression, and what he anticipates will be a unified dream for the future.

Virginia Garrard-Burnett is senior lecturer in Latin American studies, University of Texas, Austin, United States, and a long-time member of the Latin American Studies Association.