December 16, 1998
The Guardian Features Page; Pg. 3
Nothing but innuendo and weak allegations; Rigoberta Menchu, champion of Guatemala's poor and oppressed, was a darling of the left who beat Nelson Mandela to the Nobel Prize. But a US scholar claims she made up much of the book which built her reputation. Robin Blackburn defends his author
by ROBIN BLACKBURN
There can be little doubt that the publishers of David Stoll's book, Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans, will be highly gratified at the willingness of the New York Times to adopt so enthusiastically their thinly veiled innuendos and allegations. The book, they wrote, was about a 'a young Guatemalan orphaned by death squads who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was 'the story of all poor Guatemalans' . . . Menchu's words brought the Guatemalan army's atrocities to world attention and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize'.
But, they imply, Stoll had dug up another story entirely. It was 'not the eyewitness account it purported to be' but rather a story edited by Elizabeth Burgos which the Nobel laureate has 'seemed to repudiate' and which 'served the ideological needs of the urban left'. Indeed, it is responsible for 'caricaturing the complex feelings of Guatemalan Indians towards the guerrillas' and having 'shaped the assumptions of human rights activists and the new multicultural orthodoxy in North American universities'.
Anyone who actually reads Stoll's account soon finds that these tantalising allegations are not borne out. For starters, Stoll discovered that I, Rigoberta Menchu is exactly the book it claimed to be. Burgos, who edited the book from 27 hours of interviews with Menchu in 1982, had produced a text very faithful to the interview tapes. The insinuation that the book was somehow scripted by the 'urban left' is quite at odds with Stoll's account. Both Burgos and Menchu made it clear from the outset that they had a political purpose, and that was to expose the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army. This was not the fruit of some judicial investigation striving to be fair.
Have the New York Times's intrepid reporters really discovered the book to be 'all lies', as they quote someone saying? Is it the case that half Menchu's family was not killed? No. Instead, what Stoll and the reporters do is query details of Menchu's account or claims that she personally was present at all the killings. They also mount an attack on her transparently metaphorical claim to tell the story of 'all poor Guatemalans'.
Both the NYT and Stoll write on the implicit assumption that if Menchu's account does not square at all points with those of someone else, then she must be lying. For example, she describes how her brother Petrocinio was captured by the army and burnt in front of other family members, whereas the reporter finds another brother who says it was not like that at all - Petrocinio was kidnapped, kept in a hole and shot. Two other younger brothers of the laureate had died of disease and malnutrition, but a family member says Menchu could not have witnessed this as it happened before she was born.
It seems likely Menchu edited her account, appropriating stories she had been told, highlighting her hardships and presenting an unsympathetic portrait of her enemies. But the affected naivety belongs not to those who have lauded Menchu's book but to those who now seek to discredit it. Did they suppose that as she was a peasant she was incapable of rhetoric and metaphor? No evidence is offered that Menchu invented the blood-soaked plight of her people.
David Stoll ventures a substantial political criticism, but is unable to make it stick. He claims that Menchu was romanticising a guerrilla force whose activities brought appalling violence to the region where she grew up. The curious aspect of this criticism is that, once again, an attentive reader of I, Rigoberta Menchu would have grasped the huge human cost of the guerrilla war. By telling her story as effectively as possible Menchu was doing something the guerrilla commanders had failed to do - she was putting the army's brutal regime on the defensive. The eventual decision of the government to negotiate with the guerrillas was in part a fruit of this successful moral campaign.
At the end of his book Stoll almost admits as much: 'Even if it is not the eyewitness account it claims to be, that does not detract from its significance. Her story has helped shift perceptions of indigenous people from hapless victims to men and women fighting for their rights.' If he had taken these conclusions a little more seriously Stoll might have written a work less inviting of sensationalist exploitation.
Robin Blackburn is an editor for Verso, which published I, Rigoberta Menchu in 1984
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