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I reread I, Rigoberta Menchú last year, after Verso asked me to write an introduction for a new edition, having not taught or turned to the book for quite awhile. The controversy that had engulfed the memoir in the late 1990s, which included charges that Menchú misrepresented some aspects of her life, had increased the class time needed to teach it and there were other good, quick illustrations of Cold War terror in Central America one could assign, such as Marc Danner’s Massacre at El Mozote, for instance. The intensity of the accusations and questions asked about Menchú’s story––What was true? What wasn’t? Who wrote it? Who, really, was Rigoberta Menchú and what did she want?––seems specific to the fixations of a time that was, in the US at least, more innocent: the last skirmish in the pre-9/11 culture wars. Today, students and scholars who have time to work through the always vexed relationship between history and memory continue to find the book useful. But the tribunes of culture and opinion can breezily dismiss it as a hoax, or as an example of “social or political witness stories that turns out to be works of fiction,” as the New Yorker recently did, along with James Frey’s discredited A Million Little Pieces. This is regrettable, for subsequent research––by individual scholars (see the suggestions for further reading) as well as sprawling, multi-year investigations by two truth commissions, one run by the Catholic Church and the other by the United Nations––has largely vindicated Menchú’s version of events.

When I returned to the book, I half expected to find in Menchú a left-wing John Galt, a character with no inner life, a pure propagandist. That’s not the case. Throughout the narrative, but especially toward its end as Menchú moves toward exile and retrospection, her testimony reveals dissonant impulses, pleasure in the middle of terror and currents of despair running under surface triumphalism. Menchú, a semi-literate twenty-three-year-old with a few years of basic education, one of the few survivors of a slaughtered peasant family, conjures a battleground where her political battles seem almost slight compared to her own psychic ones. Listen to the recordings of the interviews that led to the book, done in Paris in 1982––they are available at the Hoover Institution Archives, in Stanford, California––and you will hear a disembodied tumble of words made substantial by anger and defiance, muted, perhaps numbed, by repetition, from having already told her story so many times to sympathizers, strangers, and reporters in an effort to raise awareness about what was happening in Guatemala. In one interview she did in the Montparnasse apartment of Arturo Taracena, a member of the insurgent Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) then working on his doctorate in history, Menchú recounts what she called la vida mala of peasants: “we are machines of production . . . always producing, never receiving.” “This isn’t just my pain,” she says, with the bells of the Église Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge tolling faintly in the background, “but the pain of a whole people.”

The introduction I wrote was not published in the new edition. Neither I nor Verso were aware that Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, the anthropologist and journalist who conducted most of the interview with Menchú, had the power, based on the original 1982 contract she signed with the French publisher, Éditions Gallimard, to approve or reject future editions and additional material that might be added to the English version of the book published by Verso. It is public knowledge that Burgos and Menchú, since the early 1990s, have been on bad terms and that in September 1993 Burgos asked Gallimard to stop sending Menchú her share of the royalties. Burgos told David Stoll, the US anthropologist who spent nearly a decade researching the veracity of Menchú’s memoir, that the reason she did so was because the two women began to diverge politically over her criticism of Cuba, an account Burgos repeats in her preface to a second edition of Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, the book that led to Menchú’s discrediting. Stoll, though, notes a second reason: around this time Menchú began to question the fact that she was not considered the book’s legal author. “What is effectively a gap in the book is the question of the right of the author, right?” Menchú remarked in a 1991 interview. “Because the authorship of the book really should be more precise, shared, right?” Then in February 1993, Menchú asked Burgos to sign over the author’s rights, “so that she could make her own contracts.” This request was denied, and Stoll, whose book Burgos strongly endorses in her preface, suggests that Burgos “stopped the remittances” because of Menchú’s complaints.¹

All of the above occurred in the early 1990s, a full half decade before Stoll’s exposé kicked off a firestorm of criticism against Menchú. In all of the ink spilt about that controversy, all of the accusations leveled against Menchú, not one reporter, as far as I know, thought it worth mentioning that the book, whatever its intellectual and political provenance, did not legally belong to Menchú. I’m not especially politically correct, and have always thought that defenses of Menchú’s memoir based on her position––that is, as an indigenous woman with claims to ways of knowing or speaking distinct from colonial knowledge––came up short. Yet this particular arrangement, whereby Menchú got the opprobrium but not the royalties her book generated, does seem unjust. And it perhaps accounts for her conflictive relationship to her own memoir. Faced with unrelenting, and often unfounded, criticism––discussed in more detail in the essay that follows––and cut off from its proceeds, Menchú has distanced herself from the book. She has moved on, continuing her work on the international stage as an advocate of indigenous rights and trying to launch a political career in Guatemala.

This is a shame, for the integrity of the memoir, both as a political and historical document, remains intact. Stoll has repeatedly justified his exposé by arguing that the popularity of I, Rigoberta Menchú built support outside of Guatemala that the insurgents had lost inside of the country, prolonging a war that would have ended much earlier, which only brought more misery to the “people,” in whose name the guerrillas fought. This is simplistic and wrong. The political success of the book, its unexpected wild popularity in Europe and the US, actually strengthened the non-militarist wing of the insurgents, which was able to use the attention the book focused on Guatemala to create a political space that allowed for a negotiated end to the country’s prolonged civil war. I, Rigoberta Menchú, with its forceful promotion of indigenous identity and rights, can in many ways be considered a precursor to the formation of guerrilla-allied organizations, such as GAM and CERJ (respectively, in English, the Mutual Support Group of Relatives of the Disappeared and the Council of Ethnic Communities), which advocated on behalf of human rights and the rule of law in order to strengthen democratic institutions and compel the state and the military to the bargaining table.

And breezy repudiations by New York’s literati notwithstanding, Menchú’s work of course is not fiction. Hence this volume, which includes the introduction and also, for the first time in translation, the historical section of the United Nations–administered truth commission, the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), or, in English, the Historical Clarification Commission. Published in June 1999, the CEH’s twelve-volume final report fully confirms Menchú’s interpretation of the conflict that took the lives of her brother, father, and mother. I, along with about 300 others, had worked with the commission, though had departed before its conclusions were drafted. One of the issues that dominated the commission––staffed largely by lawyers and other human rights professionals who work the international crisis circuit, from Haiti to Kosovo, with little specific knowledge of Guatemalan history or commitment to any particular interpretation of the war––was whether or not genocide against Mayan Indians had taken place. The assault on Mayan communities––over a hundred thousand dead, hundreds of villages, including Menchú’s, razed––was undeniable. But the debate was: Did the military and its allies kill Mayans because they were Mayan or because they were the real or imagined support base of the insurgents?

To answer this question, the CEH did what no other truth commission had done before or has done since: it gave a team of Guatemalan historians and social scientists (composed of intellectuals from across the political spectrum, absent the recalcitrant right) access to its research—including an enormous database of over eight thousand testimonies, about a dozen “context reports,” or local histories, composed by the CEH’s regional offices, interviews with key actors, including former presidents, military strategists, death squad members, and guerrilla leaders, thousands of declassified US government documents, and an extensive library of secondary sources—and asked them to write an analysis of the “causes” and “origins” of the human rights abuses. The result was a sweeping interpretation of Guatemalan history that went well beyond the often vacuous “reconciliation talk” of past truth commissions. Also included in this volume are two essays discussing the Guatemalan truth commission’s precedent-setting use of historical analysis and its genocide ruling.

Ultimately, what was at stake in the Menchú controversy was a question of responsibility; those who seized on her disputed testimony argued that Guatemalan political repression was largely a contingent reaction to New Left guerrilla provocation––thus holding revolutionaries such as Menchú and her father answerable for the onslaught. But the CEH, based on extensive and diverse sources, unambiguously concluded that the war was “historically and structurally determined,” tracing how colonial racism, exploitation, and authoritarianism evolved to the point where genocide and counterinsurgency became indistinguishable social projects. The Guatemalan commission did not say, as the South African truth commission did, that armed struggle was morally justified––a claim that Menchú was heavily criticized for. Yet it did unequivocally understand the guerrillas as emerging from a society that allowed no possibility for peaceful reform: “Social injustice led to protest and subsequently to political instability, to which there were always only two responses: repression or military coups. Confronted by movements calling for economic, political, social, or cultural change, the state increasingly resorted to terror in order to maintain social control. Political violence was thus a direct expression of structural violence . . .”

Let me end this already too long preface to what was meant to be an introduction with words from a Nobel Prize winner––not Rigoberta Menchú, who received the honor in 1992, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the prize for literature in 1971. In the great fallout that resulted from the defeat of the global New Left, followed shortly by the collapse of Soviet Communism, these two laureates occupy exact opposite ends of the debate over the meaning of the twentieth century. The dissemination of Solzhenitsyn’s work, first in Europe and then in the United States, exposed the Soviet system as bankrupt and, for many, the “gulag” as the terminus, metaphorically or actually, of the Marxist tradition. In contrast, Menchú, during the early years of her fame, was taken up by those who refused to see in the failure of the USSR an absolute indictment of all militant social movements and who insisted that the historical injustices of colonialism, along with the violence involved in maintaining first world domination of the third, was as urgent an issue as human rights in Russia. Then, in the late 1990s, when accusations called Menchú’s testimony into question, those most likely to demonize Menchú, or dismiss her as a dupe, were also likely to celebrate Solzhenitsyn as a moral beacon. Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work of course is The Gulag Archipelago, a book of irreproachable esteem, described upon its publication as “nonfiction” (Washington Post), depicting “only true facts,” a “factual documentary” (New York Times), and, by Solzhenitsyn himself, as containing “no fictional persons, nor fictional events . . . all took place just as it is here described.” But the respected Russian historian Roy Medvedev, as part of a broader study of Stalinism, writes that Solzhenitsyn “distorted many details” in that book and that he did so for political reasons.²

No one, rightly, would use such distortions either to diminish the horrors of the gulag or to present a sweeping reinterpretation of Stalinism, as Menchú’s critics do for Cold War terror in Latin America. As far as I know, no major publication felt compelled to follow up Medvedev’s findings with a full-on inquisition into every nook of Solzhenitsyn’s life, into every unverifiable statement he ever made, along the lines of the frenzy unleashed on Menchú. This dispensation extends not just to the content of Solzhenitsyn’s book but its style. Human rights intellectuals, such as the French philosopher Bernard- Henri Lévy, insisted that what separated Solzhenitsyn’s “experiment in literary investigation” (as the author described his method) from dry statistical or fact-based accounts of Soviet terror was its ability to invoke “that aspect of myth, of fiction, of the symbolic that makes it possible that Evil, which cannot be thought, can be represented.”³ Menchú of course was pilloried for doing just that. “The criminal oppression of indigenous peoples in Guatemala cannot be disputed,” wrote the New York Times, after one of its reporters scoured the Guatemalan highlands to find evidence contradicting Menchú’s memoir. “Why, then,” the Times editorial asked, “the sinking feeling upon learning that some of the essential facts in ‘I, Rigoberta Menchu’ are not true? In a war between unequals, especially when the more powerful side is rampantly duplicitous, we expect that truth will be on the side of the innocent.”

Perhaps. But who gets to carry the heavy weight of “innocence” is itself a consequence of the “war between unequals.” This study in contrast, this double standard, in how the work of the learned Solzhenitsyn and the unlettered Menchú has been incorporated into the West’s moral education speaks volumes about the meaning and legacy of racism and the Cold War, providing one more reason why Menchú’s testimony, in addition to its intrinsic power, should still be taught and valued. As Solzhenitsyn said in his 1971 Nobel lecture, the worth of literature and language is their ability to pass from generation to generation an “irrefutable condensed experience,” a “living memory” that must remain “safe from deformation and slander.”

Greg Grandin

New York City

October 2010

1. Stoll writes that Burgos “had always sent Rigoberta the full royalties,” and reproduces in his book receipts showing that Menchú received 295,802 francs, about $59,000, between 1983 and 1993 (my emphasis). See David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO, 2008), 321. A Gallimard representative, however, told me that according to company records, until 1993, the company “paid [Menchú], upon request of Elisabeth Burgos, every year part of Burgos’s royalties.”

2. Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, translated by George Shriver (New York, 1989), 273.

3. In Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives ( Chicago, 2002), 171.