Such criticisms are necessary & sometimes very helpful, but we should also keep in mind that haggling over facts & figures can have an effect of obscuring big pictures. The main purpose & effect of David Stoll's criticism of Menchu have been to deny the truth of the US-backed Guatemalan military repression of the leftist guerrilla insurgency:
>[PEN-L:13003] I, David Stoll, Liar.
>
>by Sam Pawlett
>
>28 October 1999 22:18 UTC
>
>
>David Stoll. Occupation: Debunker.
>
>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.
Yoshie