Between Rigoberta Menchú and La Violencia

Abstract

In Rigoberta Mench4' and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1998), David Stoll discounts lived experiences of state terror in general and Rigoberta's experiences in particular by presenting conjecture and hearsay as fact to attack details of Rigoberta's testimony. The reason he gives for scrutinizing the Nobel laureate, however, although somewhat buried in the work, is not to quibble about details but to contest her entire representation of the guerrilla movement and La Violencia of the late 1970s and 1980s. Although he does obliquely acknowledge the army's violence against Maya civilians in the final chapters of his book, his take on La Violencia is that the guerrillas bear the responsibility for the army's atrocities. If Rigoberta's representation of these events is accurate, he tells us, then his own previous work was wrong about Ixil country. If, however, his construction is correct, he expresses hope that it will help the Latin American left and its foreign supporters escape from the captivity of Guevarismo (1998: 12, 282). With these purposes in mind, let us look at Stoll's evidence. One of the most egregious errors in Rigoberta Menchu and the Story ofAll Poor Guatemalans is Stoll's representation of the massacre at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala in 1980 as a self-immolation coordinated by student and indigenous leaders of the peasant protesters occupying the embassy (1998: 7188)-a fallacy recently repeated in the Times Literary Supplement by Ilan Stavans in his review of Stoll's book (April 23, 1999). Both Spanish military