The Story of a Testimonio

Abstract

A zeal for transcendence was the sentiment Rigoberta Menchut transmitted to me at our first meeting in Paris one January afternoon in 1982. She was accompanied by Marie Tremblay, a Canadian doctor and collaborator of the guerrilla group Organizacion del Pueblo en Armas (Organization of the People in Arms-ORPA). To understand our encounter, one has to go back to another, also in January, but in the year 1966, during the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. The aim of the Tricontinental had been to coordinate the armed struggle on the three continents in what was then known as the Third World: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Rigoberta Menchui, of course, was not among the participants; at the time she would only have been seven years old, and one must suppose that she could not have imagined the future that awaited her. Nevertheless, her destiny was set in motion in Havana during that memorable gathering. I myself had just been expelled from Venezuela, my homeland, to which I had tried to return after a year-long stay in Bolivia. Also attending the conference was an important Guatemalan delegation under the young guerrilla leader and ex-army officer Luis Turcios Lima. Together with the Guinean leader Amilcar Cabral, they were the conference's stars. There are encounters that lay out and determine the course of a life, and such was the case of my encounter with a Guatemalan couple who were also at the Tricontinental. Ricardo Ramirez and Aura Marina Arriola were their real names, and right away we became inseparable friends. Both were leaders of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (Guatemalan Labor party-PGT). Intellectually and in human terms they were an exceptional pair. Aura Marina, an anthropologist, was an advocate for the participation of indigenous people in Guatemala's revolution, which she argued was crucial for its success. The most suitable model for Guatemala's armed struggle, she