Truth-Telling and Memory in Postwar Guatemala: An Interview with Rigoberta Menchú
Burt, Jo-Marie & Rosen, Fred
Rigoberta Menchu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace rize in 1992 and has been a tireless activist for indigenous and human rights, has become the subject of controversy. Last fall, anthropologist...
...The army was just carrying out its mission...
...We believe there is a malicious element in all of this, and, moreover, Vol XXXII, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1999 7 that it is politically motivated...
...It was the cry of a survivor, one of the first survivors who managed to cross the border alive...
...It is the same with my book...
...Isn't it true that there are social forces in Guatemala who do not want this process of truth-telling to continue...
...He also tried to interview various friends...
...We now know the names and stories of many of the victims--as well as of the victimizers...
...We have worked tirelessly to assist local efforts to address the problems of reconciliation and reconstruction...
...It had no objective other than to expose the carnage being deployed against the Guatemalan people...
...But the REMHI was designed to be a participatory investigation, in which community leaders-many of whom were Mayan--interviewed over 6,000 victims and eyewitnesses...
...So there is a tendency to want to clean up the image of the dirty war...
...Has this controversy had any effect on the process you have been describing...
...He would say, "Look, I know your history, and I know who your parents were and I have information about them...
...In this interview, which took place on February 10 in the NACLA offices, Rigoberta discusses the controversy and its impact on the current political situation in Guatemala...
...For some time he has tried to talk with me and I haven't wanted to do so...
...I was there for a long time, but as a servant...
...But it is no longer a question of individual guilt...
...The other main achievement of the REMHI project is that no one can now deny what happened in Guatemala...
...The Association of Military Veterans reportedly has its own files, which it has not made available...
...Many sectors fear this because they don't see me as an ally, but as an adversary...
...The fact is that there was a dispute among my grandparents because they had bought a farm together and they never could decide who owned which part, but that was not the problem...
...How do you respond to these charges...
...I think that underlying this is the fact that the "official history" is always written by others...
...It is now part of the historical record...
...Most importantly, I am not alone...
...It is unfathomable for certain sectors in Guatemala that we have written our own history, that we have insisted on our rights to our own memory and our own history...
...Mine is just one page among thousands that have confirmed what really happened in Guatemala...
...And so many more people who were witnesses also would have been put at risk...
...But this testimony no longer belongs only to me...
...So, Mr...
...For finding and uncovering the truth gives us an opportunity to start all over again...
...The REMHI made it possible that their great and painful story be heard...
...Stoll is obsessed with his own conclusion...
...The UN Commission on Historical Clarification is scheduled to release its final report in late February...
...For my own dignity, I didn't want to engage in this discussion...
...For example, REMHI and the UN Commission were denied access to the secret files of the G-2, one of the most feared secret police forces in the past...
...It had no objective other than to expose the carnage being deployed against the Guatemalan people...
...We are unsure where this political campaign is coming from...
...But I hope we can establish a new peace ethic in which justice is considered an essential part of peace...
...I think that the intention is to divert the question of collective memory by bringing the discussion to a personal level...
...I mopped floors and cleaned toilets, work that I am very proud to have done...
...If some people didn't hear my cry back in 1982 or heard it and remained complicit in what happened in Guatemala, that too is part of our collective history...
...I will never complain about the time I spent there, because the Sisters protected me and taught me many things...
...The onslaught against the indigenous population was just beginning when I fled Guatemala, so they might have helped prevent the 422 massacres that took place...
...More than 80% of all the testimonies collected by REMHI were of indigenous people...
...Stoll says, that I spent a lot of time with the Belgian nuns of the Order of the Holy Family and the school they run, which provides education mainly to middle and upper-middle class Guatemalans...
...The REMHI and the UN Commission are tremendously important because they have exhaustively documented the nature of the crimes committed by the Guatemalan armed forces during the 36-year conflict...
...Perhaps these omissions do not make any sense today because we are in a different period...
...And there can be no justice without democracy, without development, without respect, without equity...
...If I had said my sister Anita was with my mother when they burned my brother Patrocinio, I would have been exposing her to death...
...The names of the witnesses who saw the torture and who told the story are left out...
...Monsignor Gerardi, who led the REMHI, paid with his life so that this project could materialize...
...I don't want to say that I forgive what happened in the past...
...Stoll's charges is that the land conflict I describe was a simple dispute between my grandparents...
...It was also a small compensation to the victims for all they had suffered-for the first time they could tell their stories without fear and be certain that it was not in vain...
...st year, the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) project, which documented the testimonies of the victims of Guatemala's civil war, made public its final report...
...But the truth uncovered by the REMHI can no longer be hidden...
...NACLA correspondent Steve Dudley interviewed David Stoll by telephone on January 26...
...it is a national tragedy...
...In many ways, during the 1980s, I was a solitary indigenous voice, the only survivor, upon whom fell the task of traveling the world, going to the UN and to human rights groups around the world to tell them of what was happening in Guatemala...
...The REMHI set the standard for truth-seeking...
...How would you describe these two processes and their relevance to building peace in Guatemala today...
...I am concerned, however, that at this particular moment, this controversy might negatively affect the process of establishing the collective truth of the victims of this war...
...The conquistadors, the victors, the victimizers have always written history...
...These were conscious omissions because in the context of the 1980s this was necessary to protect the lives of those who remained in Guatemala...
...this was important because that meant that the UN Commission had to rise to the level of the REMHI report...
...Among the most evident omission is in relation to my brother Patrocinio...
...those atrocities continue...
...But we have no doubt that there are sectors who do not want the people to tell their stories...
...It cannot be undone...
...We have especially worked hard to promote political participation on both a municipal and regional level...
...now we are over 30,000 strong, and every story being told, every testimony gathered by REMHI and the UN Commission, is part of the broader tapestry of thousands of stories that are being woven together to write our history...
...And I think I have fulfilled that mission...
...Of course there are omissions in my book...
...I also traveled all over the world to tell about what happened to my parents...
...Rios Montt didn't want to kill...
...And they were also participants in drawing up the recommendations for the future to ensure that these atrocities never happen again...
...My book was a cry in the silence...
...It marks the first time in our history that indigenous people were active participants in the writing of their own history...
...They would liked to see us remain victims forever...
...Stoll says he consulted an official file of 600 pages...
...But many people did hear, and therefore we were able to obtain the support of human rights organizations and the UN...
...But this is not the 1980s, when people were silent and there were many reasons to worry...
...Stoll says...
...The implication of the charges against me is that if Rigoberta MenchO-the bestknown Indian from Guatemala, a Nobel laureate-is lying, then these Indians, who are unknown, must also be lying about what happened to them during the dirty war...
...How do you respond to the charges by numerous critics, stemming from the book published by David Stoll questioning aspects of your first book, I, Rigoberta Menchfi, that your story is at least partly fabricated...
...REMHI has been described as a process of recovering memory "from below...
...I think that forgiveness will evolve as part of a much larger process...
...But yes, a demonstration of a willingness to begin again was important...
...But to say that it was a dispute among Indians-among brothers-is malicious and only a partial version of the truth...
...Tell us about the work you see ahead of you...
...What I do want to do is be a part of the international campaign to promote a culture of peace in the year 2000...
...The REMHI was particularly important because it established a new methodology for recovering the testimonies of the thousands of people who suffered these crimes...
...I want to see justice...
...Now my grandparents have been dead for some time...
...In those years, I was very conscious that my only mission in the world was to not permit that "My book was a cry in the silence...
...The implication of the charges is that if Rigoberta Menchf--the best-known Indian from Guatemala, a Nobel laureate-is lying, then these Indians who are unknown must also be lying...
...If during the 1980s someone said that I was telling lies, and those charges had been investigated, they would have discovered the extreme violence going on in my country...
...In some way, there is a complicity here...
...It is not true-and I want to say this very clearly-that I am working to be the next president of Guatemala...
...How would you characterize this process and its relationship to the work of the UN Commission...
...This made it possible to collect information about more than 50,000 cases of human rights violations, and out of these individual memories to begin to construct a collective memory...
...what do the 400 pages that he does not mention say...
...But the file is a thousand pages long...
...Nor did they have access to the important files of the army or the national police...
...It belongs to Guatemala and to the world...
...It was something very deeply felt...
...In Guatemala there are very few elite schools-the elite sends its children to Harvard...
...In reality, the intention is to destroy the myth of Rigoberta Menchi...
...The problem was a large old-growth forest which the big landowners coveted and which my father, with a group of people, was also soliciting from the government because these were public lands...
...A struggle against indifference...
...On December 15, The New York Times ran a front-page story reporting on the controversy, and sent one of its sleuthing reporters to Guatemala to corroborate some of Stoll's findings...
...It was not just theater...
...Of course, there are other intentions here as well...
...We have also been involved in the debate over constitutional and educational reforms...
...We hope that the land census can resolve these ongoing land disputes...
...But the question is this: For many years it has been said that we Indians are useless and ignorant, that we can't make our own decisions, that we are manipulated by the Communists and the theologians, that the theologians turned me into a myth...
...In the midst of the controversy, Guatemala is still struggling to consolidate its fragile peace and to find ways of addressing the legacies of 36 years of war...
...I am happy that it fell on me to take part in the Peace Accords, the dialogues, the negotiations, and that I even had the human ability and the sensitivity as a woman to shake hands with the military officers on the day following the signing of the Peace Accords...
...Clearly...
...This myth is not carved out of stone, but is a living, breathing person...
...We planted a tree in the Ixcan together-the Minister of Defense, a guerrilla commander and myself...
...Another of Mr...
...Our hope is that this will contribute to a process of reconciliation, of coming together, of rebuilding confidence in the future...
...It was not an "elite" school as Mr...
...If it had erupted prior to the REMHI report, the official version of Guatemalan history might have triumphed...
...Many people have been victims of the violence, and not everyone has told their story...
...There are also those who say, "Well yes, the indigenous people were killed, but it was necessary...
...REHMI represents a struggle against forgetting...
...And in the case of education, we believe that unless it is intercultural, interethnic and multilingual, then intolerance will continue, racism will continue, and so will impunity...
...In 1984 we succeeded for the first time in having a special UN rapporteur named to Guatemala...
...His only intention was to corroborate his own version of events, and he never had the respect to listen to the people, and that's why I never wanted to talk to him...
...Most investigations are run by a few experts who show up and ask questions and tell people how to present their testimonies...
...There was a systematic campaign of genocide and ethnocide against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala...
...Last fall, anthropologist David Stoll, a professor at Middlebury College, published a book entitled Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press, 1998), in which he questions many aspects of Rigoberta's life story presented in I, Rigoberta Menchi: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Verso, 1984...
...The Communists and theologians manipulated the situation and exposed the people by creating a myth...
...We have to rebuild local leadership, and it is our hope that young people will become more and more involved in this task...
...It is true, as Mr...
...He doesn't say that there were more actors involved-in fact there were seven actors-and the dispute still hasn't been resolved...
...In many ways, the two reports are complimentary, and together they have succeeded in breaking the fear and terror that have dominated Guatemalan society for so long...
...Remember that most of those assassinated during the war were community activists...
...I want to see that we can live together peacefully so that forgiveness can take place...
...Now there is an effort to say that this solitary voice is not valid...
...We have had many meetings with human rights groups and various indigenous organizations in Guatemala, and we are all concerned because the discussion has been brought to a personal level, to attempt to dispute the story of Rigoberta Mench6...
...it belongs to the memory of indigenous people everywhere, and especially to all those who are survivors...
...There is a team of people who work with me at the Rigoberta Menchfi Tum Foundation...
...Rather than remaining on the sidelines saying, "we like this" or "we don't like that," we have made concrete proposals...
...The same thing happened to Martin Luther King and many other world leaders who were seen by those in power as adversaries...
...The Monsignor's death was a tremenINTERVIEW/ GUATEMALA dous blow to us, but we continue to work in defense of human rights in honor of his memory...
...But he doesn't realize that this myth called Rigoberta Menchfi has blood in her veins, believes in the world, believes in humanity, believes in her people...
...I want to see respect...
...It is obvious that Mr...
...Your book has also been questioned as a political tool...
...Without justice there is no peace...
...He just wanted to bring things under control...
...So a more constructive way of responding is to say that the collective testimony of REMHI and the UN Commission is adding to the pages of the history of the Guatemalan people...
...Stoll tells only a part of the truth...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 5
