Steven Dudley: Many critics have said that you are being picky; that if the things Rigoberta describes did not happen to her family, they did happen to other Guatemalans. Why do you go to such painstaking effort to point out in detail the discrepancies of a book that even you contend is, at its core, true?
David Stoll: The core of the problem is not that members of Rigoberta’s family might have died a little bit differently than she says they did, or that she was a Catholic boarding school student, or that she wasn’t monolingual and illiterate. The core of the problem is how she describes the situation of her family and village before the war and how she explains the start of political killing in her area in 1979. According to Rigoberta, her father, Vicente, and her village are forced to defend their land from an evil ladino family and nonindigenous plantation owners who are trying to seize it. It’s because the Menchú family has to defend its land from land barons that Rigoberta’s father joins a famous peasant organization, the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC), and it’s after the army starts persecuting them for belonging to th [see associated with the guerrillas. What the land records and other testimony from the area clearly show is that the land conflict in which Rigoberta’s father was enmeshed was with his own Quiché Maya in-laws—that is, with the family of Rigoberta’s mother. In effect, the land conflict was not the sort of issue to which guerrillas would have any solution because it was conflict between small holders due partly to the severe shortcomings in land titling that exist in Guatemala.
Steven Dudley: But even if the guerrillas did not fit into the construct of the Menchú’s struggle for land, does this mean that they were not justified in waging their war against the Guatemalan government?
David Stoll: This is a very important issue, and one to which there are no easy answers. I do think that on the North American and European left, we have tended to underestimate the implications of adopting guerrilla warfare as a method of struggle. If you look at how the situation developed, I think the inevitable conclusion is while guerrilla warfare was an understandable response by the left throughout Latin America to U.S.-supported dictatorships, in hindsight it has to be said that it was not a fruitful strategy. Guerrilla warfare deepened repression. My point is not to blame Marxist guerrilla movements for terror or dictatorship in Guatemala. That clearly would have resulted simply as a response to other forms of mobilization by peasants and workers. The point I want to make is that guerrilla warfare made the situation worse. Guerrilla warfare does not defend peasants. Well, maybe for short periods of time in some cases it does. But in the longer term, the presence of guerrillas invariably attracts much stronger government forces who usually win, often by burning out peasants who are supposedly being protected.
Steven Dudley: What harm was there in sending an agent like Rigoberta into the outside world to draw attention to the abuses of the Guatemalan military and, in effect, play an important role in bringing peace to Guatemala?
David Stoll: I don’t call Rigoberta an agent because that’s a word that casts aspersion. She did join the political apparatus of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). That is a fact. But she joined the revolutionary movement after members of the security forces had killed three members of her family. And it’s in the revolutionary organization and its view of the world as a political struggle that she finds a new sense of coherence for herself. It’s on the basis of that new sense of coherence—as virtually a convert to a revolutionary organization—that she’s able to make sense of the destruction of her family in a new way and then tell this magnificent story which has appealed to hundreds of thou- sands if not millions of people and attracted all this attention to Guatemala. The point of my book is that 15 years later we have to put this appealing story she told into context because it is a story; it is just one version of events.
Steven Dudley: Your book is also very hard on academia, especially postmodernists who accept without question the validity of the oppressed classes’ testimony. Can you explain how the inclusion of other voices has become the accepted means by which the academy is satisfying its own needs as you argue in your book?
David Stoll: Actually, I decided that the issue is not one of postmodernism. The real problem that I raise with academics’ relation with Guatemala is the enshrinement of one version of events, namely Rigoberta’s, as the authoritative version, with the corollary that someone like myself who brings into play other versions of events is doing something heinous. So I would say I am simply defending the obvious self-evident need to compare different versions of events. I’m referring to the tremendous appeal of the story that Rigoberta told in 1982, with its fist-in-the-air attitude, to North American and European academics. We’re sitting here, secure in our offices in places like Middlebury College, yet there’s this wish to identify with rebels in far-off places to the point that it can come to seem that our job as academics is to enjoy our security here in the United States, and it’s the job of Mayan Indian peasants to do the dying.
Steven Dudley: How does racism play into the way the story of Rigoberta Menchú was told and received by readers?
David Stoll: I think that the reason that Rigoberta denied that she had an education and insisted that she was monolingual in Quiché Maya until a few years before and that she had never learned how to read or write is because her audience expects Indians to be barefoot, preliterate and traditional. In other words, there is a standard of authenticity. We expect Native Americans to be a certain way. If they’re wearing eyeglasses or a business suit, or they’re driving a pickup truck, or they own a business, they are not considered authentic Native Americans. That isn’t intentional racism, but it is a deeply ingrained prejudice that might deserve the label of racism.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
NACLA correspondent Steve Dudley interviewed David Stoll by telephone on January 26, 1999. This interview ran as a sidebar to “Truth-Telling and Memory in Postwar Guatemala: An Interview with Rigoberta Menchú,” in NACLA Report, Vol. XXXII, No. 5, March/April 1999. Rigoberta Menchú was interviewed in NACLA’s offices by the editors, Jo-Marie Burt and Fred Rosen, on February 10, 1999.
