RIGOBERTA MENCHU AND THE STORY OF ALL POOR GUATEMALANS. by David Stoll Westview Press,1999,336pgs.
"White people have been writing our history for 500 years. No white anthropologist is going to tell me what I experienced in my own flesh." —Rigoberta Menchu, 1995.
Students of Latin America may be familiar with David Stoll's earlier effort *Is Latin America Turning Protestant?* where he argues that the Protestant sects have succeeded where the left has failed. The left and left oriented Catholicism demands too much of people, seeking salvation through collective action and effort on this earth whereas the Protestants have completely given up on this world and instead seek salvation through individual submission to God. As a result, the Protestants have been more successful in attracting converts and enlarging their flock.
In this controversial new book, Stoll again presents himself as the ruthless pursuer of the truth shattering yet another myth, this time the story of the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and Guatemalan Indigenous campesina leader Rigoberta Menchu. The target of Stoll's attack is not so much Rigoberta Menchu– Stoll's investigations largely confirm her story presented in *I,Rigoberta Menchu* -- but the Guatemalan left and their supporters throughout the world. Stoll believes that *I,Rigoberta Menchu* justifies guerrilla warfare and class struggle (p216,231,278) and to undermine class struggle and guerilla warfare one must undermine *I,Rigoberta Menchu*.(282) As Stoll says
"Facing the limitations of *I,Rigoberta Menchu* will, I hope, help the Latin America left and its foreign supporters escape from the captivity of Guevarismo. At bottom rural guerrilla strategies are an urban romance, a myth propounded by middle class radicals who dream of finding true solidarity in the countryside."(p282).
Elsewhere (p137ff), Stoll faults the URNG for practicing "foquismo" which led the guerrillas to defeat. But what the URNG practiced and preached as well as what is described in *I,Rigoberta Menchu* is the farthest thing from foquismo.(see George Black p79ff.)
Stoll seeks to establish a number of theses in his book:
1) The Guatemalan guerrillas ,specifically the EGP (Guatemalan Army of the Poor), were not and are not representative of indigenous peasants. The guerrilla struggle did not correspond to the needs and aspirations of the peasant highland communities.
2) The URNG's (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity– comprised of four groups; EGP, FAR [Rebel Armed Forces], OPRA [Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms] and PGT [Guatemalan Workers Party]) version of history is false. The revolution and its ideology was not grassroots and did not arise out of popular struggles from the bottom up. The guerrillas Marxist-Leninist ideology was not native to the inhabitants of El Quiche and Huehuetenango but rather imposed from the outside by middle class intellectuals and students. This ideology thus does not correspond to the reality of the highland peasant.
3) The pre-revolutionary situation in the highlands was essentially peaceful, class struggle was absent and the main conflicts occurred between poor peasants (e.g. family/village feuds) and not between classes.
4) The main locus of oppression was ethnicity (ladinos&whites vs. indigenous) and not class.
5) Menchu's story was told to conform to what the western left expects of indigenous peoples i.e. class struggle leading to socialist revolution. She thus abrogated her claim to speak on behalf of all poor Guatemalans.
6) Peasants joined the guerrillas because they has no choice believing the guerrillas would defend them from the army and the ruling class not because of ideology.
7) The guerrillas did not give an adequate account of ethnicity and the indigenous peasantry thus making serious flaws in their organizing, actions and expectations. The guerrillas did not put indigenous peoples in leadership positions.
8) Guerrillism is risky and is doomed to failure as a mode of social transformation.
9) The URNG failed to protect their constituents from the army's brutality and underestimated the brutality of the military and paramilitary forces in quelling the insurgency.
10) The revolution was not brought about by economic pressure on the peasantry.
11) Many of the civil patrols formed in the highland were formed by peasants trying to protect themselves from the military.
None of these claims are new, they are all staples of counter-insurgency literature and the right wing armchair reactionaries that grace the op-ed pages of North American newspapers as well as the pseudo intellectual groveling that takes place in pulp fiction magazines like New Republic and National Review.
However, Stoll in his investigations comes up with some new evidence that ,as he admits, corroborates Rigoberta's story or otherwise gives good excuses for the actual inaccuracies that occur in it(p9). When *I, Rigoberta Menchu* was published in 1983, the Guatemalan military and death squads were still murdering anyone who expressed even the mildest resistance to the status quo. Rigoberta sought to protect the identity of the figures who appear in her story(p191.) This is where Stoll's book is most valuable, for he presents a story that damns the Guatemalan military and establishment as strong as Rigoberta's does. He even manages to debunk some common right wing claims e.g. that the Rios Montt regime stopped the death squads and halted extra-judicial political murder.
Stoll relies on anecdotal evidence –a handful of interviews with campesinos conducted in 1995– to establish the tensions and inaccuracies in Rigoberta's story and the version of Guatemalan history presented by the URNG. To his credit, Stoll does not rely exclusively on government – both U.S. and Guatemalan– for his information, he to some extent, lets the peasants speak for themselves. He can be faulted on many accounts. It is easy to criticize a failed revolution after the fact. Most of the revolutionaries and their sympathizers are either dead, in jail, in exile or frightened to speak to anyone about politics. His interviews are not representative of the population but feature people he claims are missing from the left and right wing accounts of Guatemalan history. These are the people who supported neither the military nor the guerrillas. Stoll supposes this faction is quite large though it is impossible to know. Further as Rigoberta says "If they are now collaborating with the army why believe them?"
Stoll tries to establish that it was the guerrillas who provoked the military in its genocidal campaign in the Guatemalan highlands, thus closing off any possibility of peaceful social change. Yet clearly, state repression and massacres pre-date the appearance of the EGP and the other armed groups. Guatemala was after all under a military dictatorship from 1954. Many people consider it legitimate to use violence against an unconstitutional military regime regardless of the merits of doing so.
Stoll likes to pick apart the publications of people struggling for social change, so lets pick him apart. Despite his own self-professed sensitivity to racial dynamics, Stoll is not beyond engaging in racial stereotyping of his own. For example we are told "International adulation for Rigoberta has brought out the Guatemalan penchant for backbiting."(p275.) Well, perhaps Stoll's "Ixil sources"(p8). are just engaging in traditional Guatemalan backbiting when they denounce the revolutionary movement as the aggressors in the civil war?
Stoll claims that "although a large majority of their(the URNG-SP) fighters came to be indigenas, their leadership continued to be completely ladino above the level of the columns."(p204) This is false. A man named Efrain Bamuca , a full blooded indigena came to be a Commandante in the OPRA and later married U.S. activist Jennifer Harbury and was subsequently tortured to death by the military. But then as Stoll says "For an audience uncomfortable with its middle class privileges and the U.S. record in Guatemala, Rigoberta's story of oppression is analogous to a preacher reminding listeners that they are sinners. Then her story of joining the left and learning that not all outsiders are evil makes it possible for the audience to be on her side, providing a sense of absolution."p243. So , Bamaquez was really just providing Harbury with a relief for her middle class guilt, so that doesn't count.
One of Stoll's techniques common to all counter-insurgency literature is to set up a false dichotomy between peasants and guerrillas reducing mass struggle to armed struggle. However, the two forms are interrelated, villagers and peasants joined or supported the guerrilla struggle as the ruling class repressed violently all social and nationalist movements for social change. The guerrilla movement was a defensive responses to the elite violence and an attempt to address the basic social demands of the majority. The peasants were not conceptually or practically distinct from the guerrillas, only under the most severe conditions of inhuman repression and intimidation by the capitalist State did the guerrillas and the communities become separated when the army massacred whole villages forcing the peasant and Indian guerrillas into the mountains and jungles.
Stoll maintains that the guerrillas precipitated the violence, that guerrilla violence was present in El Quiche before the military started kidnaping, murdering civilians and burning down whole villages.. Yet his statements to this effect are wildly inconsistent. For instance:
"The EGP's role in setting off political violence was the central problem...it would become apparent that the bloodshed had been precipitated by the EGP's decision to turn her area(Rigoberta's S.P.) into a battleground."p193
"By the time the guerrillas arrived in Uspantan (Rigoberta's hometown), the army was an experienced killing machine, all too ready to retaliate against possible civilian collaborators because it knew that was the way to defeat the guerrillas themselves." p155
"Army kidnappings began not in reaction to peaceful efforts by Ixils to improve their lot but to guerrilla organizing and ambushes. If anyone ignited violence in Ixil country it was the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Only then had the security forces militarized the area turned it into a killing ground."p9
"By 1981 southern Quiche was in a state of rebellion. ANGERED BY GOVERNMENT KILLINGS, most of the population seemed to support the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. According to one source, over a thousand people from the municipio of Santa Cruz alone joined the guerrilla forces. Organized by CUC (Committee for Campesino Unity– peasant union that joined the URNG in 1979-SP.)
"And incorporated into the EGP, they mined roads, burned government vehicles, blew up electrical infrastructure, fired on helicopters ambushed government patrols and attacked bases. They also practiced self-defense by setting up warning systems and digging booby traps. But the insurgents did not have enough firepower to protect themselves from the army, which was soon burning villages...."p101
"But in Uspantan,.during the entire war it (the EGP S.P.) attacked the security forces just once on April 25,1980 when two plainclothes policmen were shot near the plaza. The local support the guerrillas won seems to have been mainly in BESIEGED villages that were soon destroyed. Survivors became refugees on the run, most of whom were killed captured, or forced into submission, leaving only a handful to flee north to the Communities of Population in Resistance."p137
Stoll dates the first appearance of the EGP in El Quiche to April 1979. Yet, officially Quiche had been under a state of siege and occupied by the military since 1976 (Black p79). The military's strategic hamlet program began in 1976 as well. Huehuetenago weas occupied by the military in 1976 when the militant local labour unions went on strike at the Tum mine. In May 1978, more than 100 Kekchi Indians were massacred by the army at Panzos while protesting over land rights.
Stoll then says
"By June 1978 the Catholic diocese counted more than 75 government kidnappings in Ixil country, plus dozens more in the Ixcan."
And
"A fertile district of Alta Verapaz where finca owners called in the army to fend off Quiche Maya peasants challenging their property lines. On May 29,1978 landowners and soldiers machine gunned a crowd of demonstrators in the town square. The army had declared open season on campesinos demanding their rights...As the rebel youth of Nicaragua demonstrated the potential of street warfare, Guatemalans listened on their radios and dreamed of liberating their own country."p51.
Stoll shifts between claiming that the army reacted to guerrilla violence or reacted to guerilla organizing.
"Accounts like this illustrate how hard it is to define when guerrilla organizing began. No one except survivors among the first cadre in an area may know because it was the EGP's policy to infiltrate pre-existing structures and only gradually disclose its agenda even to the people it was organizing."p118
Throughout the book, Stoll keeps asking if the guerrillas had little support ,as he believes, then why the amount of killing and all the brutality.
"The avalanche of violence presented in the previous two chapters has probably been difficult for readers to comprehend. If Uspanatan was relatively peaceful how could the execution of two ladinos unleash so much brutality?"p153
"For the quantity of killing committed by the Guatemalan army, many observers have assumed that the insurgency was a popular uprising– why else so much bloodshed?"p137
"What reduced it to the fanatical anticommunism that allowed it to slaughter so many men, women and children? "P279.
Stoll cannot answer this question because of the dichotomy he sets up between the guerrillas the communities. The only the way the army could stop a revolution among the Indians and peasantry was by massacring them and instituting a permanent culture of fear. There is no way of separating the guerrillas from the communities, the Church, unions and other civil organizations.
Stoll maintains the revolution had nothing to do with political economy and economic pressure on the peasantry(p154). He would do well to consult his mentor Timothy Wickham Crowley:
"Indian settlers and sometimes older Indian villagers in the "Zone of the Generals" were uprooted from their lands in what soon resembled a large assault on the peasants very access to land...land grabs occurred in areas that provided a guerrilla haven.
"Percentages of land poor and landless among the peasantry are almost surely responsible for the falling levels per capita food consumption among the peasantry... Using the U.N. minimum of 2,236 calories daily, 45% of the Guatemalan people fell below the subsistence level in 1965, a proportion that increased sharply in the period under consideration: to 70% below minimum in 1975 and 805 by 1980. Brockett has also linked such conditions "backward' to decreased peasant access to land and "forward" to increased levels of malnutrition among the Guatemalan peasantry... The authors also link the increased level of exploitation to increased support of the Indian populace for the highlands insurgency." Wickham-Crowley p239-40.
These are but a few of the inconsistencies and contradictions in Stoll's account. No doubt readers will find more. His book is a slapdash affair full of unsubstantiated assertions and opinions. His evidence consists of rumors and a handful of conversations with locals made around 1995. His evidence in no way supports any of his conclusions. Stoll gets a D for effort and an F for content.
Sam Pawlett
Sources:
David Stoll. *Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans* Westview,1999 . George Black with Norma Chinchella and Milton Jamail. *Garrison Guatemala*,MR Press,1984
William Blum. *Killing Hope*. Common Courage,1995
Timothy Wickham-Crowley. *Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America*, Princeton U Press,1992.
Elizebeth Burgos ed. *I,Rigoberta Menchu*, Verso 1984.
James Petras Critical Persepectives on the Central American Peace Accords: A Class Analysis. Critique 30-1 p71-89
Guatemala Report. Various Issues.