Long before this book appeared I found it odd that I couldn't find a single Guatemalan who believed the popularized story of Menchu. I had doubts myself since the historic highway of leftism is paved with the remains of frauds and tyrants.
This book lays my doubts to rest. Menchu is a fraud. She has been used by the Left to bash the U.S., and she used them and a gullible international media to become a star. Menchu is to the misty eyed utopian dreamers what Fabio is to lonely, yearning readers of romance novels, or what Miss February is to adolescent men. Rigoberta is the socialist pin-up girl.
But the fantasy of the left always turns violent and ugly. In the Guatemalan case the author also demonstrates that the indians were used as pawns to further the objectives of the Left and their guerilla surrogates. The Left pushed the mostly uninterested indians into the face of the repressive right-wing government while shouting, "they say you are fascists murderers." Wedged between the bloodthirsty Left and Right, the indians got slaughtered.
Menchu, like Lenin, Castro, Foucault, and so many before her, is a symbol of the moral corruption of the Left. People drawn to utopian reformism are also ideal candidates for the cult of personality. Menchu became (and still is) a useful invention of those who build castles in sand saturated with the blood of innocents.
One thing is certain, this book will cause no general reassessment by the Left. Few leftists will ask themselves, "How did I get taken in by the myth of Menchu?" The Left merely steps over the bodies and havoc it precipitates, moving on to the next big religious crusade. After all, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, can you? The thousands of innocent Guatemalan eggs cracked in the leftist guerilla war merely join the millions of others around the world. Yet very few leftists have found that mass murders associated with their beliefs are reason to rethink. Even one prior reviewer of this book reduces his rating because one of the rare leftists who rethought his views has given support to the conclusions of David Stoll.
Several thousand people were sadly murdered during the Pinochet regime in Chile, and the Left pursues this relentlessly. Millions were killed in the name of socialism in the USSR and China, and the countries they subjugated, yet the Left demands no trials, no accountability. Why?
Have you ever heard one leftist suggest that Castro should be tried for torturing, murdering, and filling his prisons with dissidents, homosexuals, etc.? Castro is merely making socialist omelets, thus he remains a hero.
The reaction to this book by the Left has mostly been to repudiate it as rightist disinformation (despite the fact that the author is on the Left), or to ignore it. Menchu remains a useful myth for those who detest the U.S. and still harbor utopian dreams that require more broken eggs.
If your teacher makes you read "I, Rigoberta," read this book as well and ask some hard questions. You will be branded a racist, anti-third world, anti-multicultural, reactionary, but you will at least know the truth and it will set you free . . . especially when you flunk the course!
The consequences of that myth? romanticism? are among the analyses of Stoll's work. And I must commend him on the depth of his analysis. But...
The Guatemalans have gone through a devestating civil war in which hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them poor, have "been disappeared"--for which that new use of those verbs was created. It means, simply, that they don't exist any more (and that they're buried in one of those body dumps in which most were thrown and are now the subject of exhumations by forensic anthropologists). Stoll agrees that the Guatemalan army, civil patrols, and vigilantes have an inexcusable history. He doesn't seem to evade that. But...
Contemporary American and European leftists have made that war a battle between the victimized Mayan indigenas, and the nasty, unscrupulous, and, of course, wealthier ladinos (known elsewhere in Central America as Mestizos). Stoll points out that Rigoberta's father's major conflict was not with ladinos--with many of whom he got along just fine, thank you--but with his in- laws who were, like him, Mayan. But...
A number of guerilla groups infiltrated the countryside. Stoll examines that the bulk of Mayan and other poor were not supporters of the guerillas. Rather, they saw the guerillas as just another faction with arms. But...
I had some struggles with the book. I, like the author, am critical of white middle and upper middle class analyses of armed struggles--as if those doing the analyzing could tell the difference between a trigger and a plate of Brie cheese. At the same time, as one who is fairly well-versed in the history of the war there and is familiar with many who've suffered as a result of it--and who has been there and stopped by the army for no reason--I find it difficult to so easily exonerate the army. Sure the guerillas were not saints, despite what some of their supporters would have us believe. But desperation leads to armed conflict when there is no hope but to fight. That strikes me as common sense, and has provided the basis for any "revolution" including the American, French, Russian, etc. It's not necessarily "right" let alone "good," but simply fact.
In short, Stoll acknowledges that the Guatemalan army has, in a relative way, rivaled the Nazis (my comparison rather than his). But he clearly--and repeatedly--implies that the army's brutality was instigated by the actions of the guerillas. For instance, a couple of ladinos were killed by guerillas therefore the army became vioent and wiped out villages. Doubtless there was some guerilla activity that stimulated a violent response. But the extent of the army's violence--the formal, objective report issued less than two years ago says that of the violence, the army was responsible for 97 percent leaving little to blame on the guerillas--so overshadowed that of the rebels that the latter's is negligible, barely exists in a statistical sense.
Further, I was turned off by Stoll's overuse of the word "Marxist." Whether Stoll is a right wing activist, I don't know. (As he claims to be a scholar, I hope not.) But the words "the right" came up seldom while nearly everyone, from Allende in Chile to most of the guerilla groups came up as "Marxist." And that's all too often a devil term used to classify as "enemy" rather than to examine one's political or economic policies.
Still, I recommend the book's analyses. I agree with Stoll that even the human rights movement is compelled to draw a good vs. evil distinction rather than examining the complexities of an issue; the academy these days has too much influence of the post-modernists who love to designate others as victims (thereby often freeing those who've done the designating from amending their own comfortable lifestyles to do anything about it).
Indeed, to his credit, Stoll, in at least four places in the text, tries to examine why Rigoberta would have manufactured her story. He asks others too why they think she would do so. He niether frees her from the fallacy nor indicts her for perjury but examines. That attempt to understand her is particularly well-taken.
I must confess too that, despite my appreciation for his analyses, I can give him at best three stars due to guilt by association. That right wing demagog David Horowitz in one of his tracts uses Rigoberta's fabrication as an excuse to refute human rights causes in general. Perhaps--again, ideally--Stoll did not intend that with his examination. But I can't help thinking of Horowitz's reference which I read before reading this work. And that doesn't help Stoll's credibility.
If nothing else, if you read this volume, learn from the technique that the author uses to investigate a story, who he talks with and how he reaches a conclusion. If you come to different conclusions, as I have, more power to you.
This book is about a living legend, an orphaned Guatemalan schoolgirl thrust into the role of spokeswoman for a defeated guerrilla movement. Her story about her life, family, and village, published under the title I, Rigoberta Mench, aroused so much sympathy that she won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Like the Ch Guevara legend, the imagery surrounding Rigoberta Mench served the ideological needs of the urban left. Her story also helped shape the assumptions of an era of human rights activism in Guatemala. But what old neighbors say about the violence that destroyed Rigoberta's family and village is different from what appeared in her 1982 autobiography. By comparing her account with those of other violence survivors, this is a book that goes to the heart of contemporary debates over political violence, revolutionary movements, postmodernism, and the ethics of scholarship.