It Was Heaven That They Burned

[Judi Lynn]

It Was Heaven That They Burned
Greg Grandin
September 8, 2010 | This article appeared in the September 27, 2010 edition of The Nation.

Dante's Inferno "is out"; I, Rigoberta Menchú "is in," the Wall Street Journal wrote, in late 1988, of Stanford University's decision to include third-world authors in its required curriculum. "Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus give way to Frantz Fanon," the paper said, concerned that Stanford's new reading list viewed "the West" not through the "evolution of such ideas as faith and justice, but through the prism of sexism, racism and the faults of its ruling classes." Herewith began the metamorphosis of a young and relatively obscure Guatemalan Mayan woman into something considerably more than a witness to genocide.

Since its publication in Ann Wright's English translation in 1984, Rigoberta Menchú Tum's memoir had been assigned with increasing frequency in university courses in the United States and Europe. Historians taught it as a primary source documenting revolution and repression in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America, anthropologists as first-person ethnography and literary theorists as an example of testimonio, a genre distinct from traditional forms of autobiography. But Menchú's mention in the Journal thrust her further into the escalating culture wars, with conservatives holding her up as an example of the foibles of the multicultural left. "Undergraduates do not read about Rigoberta," wrote the American Enterprise Institute's Dinesh D'Souza in 1991, "because she has written a great and immortal book, or performed a great deed, or invented something useful. She simply happened to be in the right place and the right time."

The place was Guatemala's Western Highlands, inhabited by some 4 million people, the majority poor indigenous peasants living in remote, hardscrabble villages like Chimel, Menchú's hometown. The time was the late 1970s, when the Guatemalan military was bringing to a climax a pacification campaign, the horror of which was matched only by historical memories of the Spanish conquest. By the time it was over, government forces had taken the lives of Menchú's parents, her two brothers and 200,000 other Guatemalans. And though this campaign may have been "unfortunate for her personal happiness," D'Souza said, it was "indispensable for her academic reputation," transforming Menchú into a fetish object onto which "minority students" could affirm their "victim status" and professors could project their "Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture."

Then in 1992, on the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas, Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and whatever ability she had up until that point to maintain the integrity of her particular story gave way to the burdens of representing the victims of imperialism everywhere. She was given the prize, the Nobel selection committee noted, not just for her work exposing the murder and mayhem committed by US allies in Guatemala but for serving as a "vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation" in a world still scarred by European colonialism.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/154582/it-was-heaven-they-burned

[Judi Lynn]

1. You may want to read a quick overview of the violence against the people from this article:

Taken from page #2:

~snip~
Rigoberta Menchú Tum was 23 years old when she arrived in Paris in January 1982, when she gave the interview that would produce her memoir. The worst of Guatemala's civil war was yet to come. The roots of the crisis reached back to five years before Menchú was born, to the CIA's 1954 overthrow of democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz. The agency objected to the fact that Arbenz had legalized a small communist party and implemented an extensive agrarian reform. Following the coup, Washington promised that it would turn Guatemala into a "showcase for democracy." Instead, it created a laboratory of repression. After the costly Korean War, US policy-makers decided that the best way to confront communism was not on the battlefield but by strengthening the "internal defense" of allied countries. Guatemala, now ruled by a pliant and venal regime, proved a perfect test case, as Washington supplied a steadily increasing infusion of military aid and training. US diplomats often signaled a desire to work with a "democratic left"—that is, a noncommunist left. But the most passionate defenders of democracy were likely to be found in the ranks of Washington's opponents and singled out for execution by US-created and -funded security forces.

By the late 1970s, more than two decades after the overthrow of Arbenz, the Guatemalan government stood on the point of collapse. Repression against reformist politicians, a radicalized Catholic Church, indigenous activists and a revived labor and peasant movement swelled the ranks of a left-wing insurgency that, by the end of the decade, was operating in eighteen of Guatemala's twenty-two departments. Between 1976 and 1980, security forces killed or disappeared close to a thousand Social and Christian Democrats, trade unionists, university professors and students. By 1980 death squads were running rampant in Guatemala City and the countryside, and mutilated bodies piled up on the streets and in ravines.

In the indigenous highlands, violence against activists had been commonplace since the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz, and steadily increased through the '60s and '70s. Menchú's brother, Petrocinio, was murdered in late 1979. Repression of Catholic priests and catechists reached such a pitch that the church shuttered its diocese in the department of El Quiché in 1980; the first of many assaults on Menchú's village took place that year on Christmas Eve. The massacres started in 1981 and at first were not linked to a plan of stabilization or rule. Then in March 1982, shortly after Menchú's Paris interview, a military coup in Guatemala brought an even more vicious, yet more competent, regime to power. In an effort to eliminate the insurgent threat without generating wider circles of radicalization, military analysts marked Mayan communities according to colors: "white" spared those thought to have no rebel influence; "pink" identified areas in which the insurgency had a limited presence—suspected guerrillas and their supporters were to be killed but the communities left standing; "red" gave no quarter—all were to be executed and villages destroyed. "One of the first things we did," said an architect of this plan, "was draw up a document for the campaign with annexes and appendices. It was a complete job with planning down to the last detail."

A subsequent investigation by the United Nations Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH)—a truth commission, for which I worked as a consultant—called this genocide. The CEH documented a total of 626 army massacres, most of which took place between early 1982 and 1983—that is, the period between Menchú's interview and her book's publication in French and Spanish. In a majority of cases, the commission found

evidence of multiple ferocious acts preceding, accompanying, and following the killing of the victims. The assassination of children, often by beating them against the wall or by throwing them alive into graves to be later crushed by the bodies of dead adults; amputation of limbs; impaling victims; pouring gasoline on people and burning them alive; extraction of organs; removal of fetuses from pregnant women.... The military destroyed ceremonial sites, sacred places, and cultural symbols. Indigenous language and dress were repressed.... Legitimate authority of the communities was destroyed.

Massacres broke the agricultural cycle, leading to hunger and widespread deprivation as refugees hiding in the mountains and lowland jungle scavenged roots and wild plants to survive. A million and a half people, up to 80 percent of the population in some areas, were driven from their homes, with entire villages left abandoned.

This scorched-earth campaign was designed to cut off indigenous communities from the insurgency and break down the communal structures that military analysts identified as the seedbed of guerrilla support. This explains the exceptionally savage nature of the counterinsurgency, which, while constituting the most centralized and rationalized phase of the war, was executed on the ground with a racist frenzy. The point was not just to eliminate the guerrillas and their real and potential supporters but to colonize the indigenous spaces, symbols and social relations military strategists believed to be outside state control. Terror was made spectacle. Soldiers and their paramilitary allies raped women in front of husbands and children. Security forces singled out religious activists for murder and turned churches into torture chambers. "They say that the soldiers scorched earth," one survivor told me, "but it was heaven that they burned."

~~~~~I had never, ever heard they used their churches against the people this way. Unbearable.

Why on earth WOULDN'T they be put on trial? God.

[tomg]

2. Thanks so much for

posting this link. I just finished the article.