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

[naaman fletcher]

1. The whole book is a fraud.

She made it up.

google it.

[Judi Lynn]

11. For the DU'ers who read this thread, here's what her Wiki says, concerning the original man

who went to look into her story:

~snip~
However, Stoll does not claim that her 1983 story is a hoax. The reason is that she in fact lost both her parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law and three nieces and nephews to the Guatemalan security forces.

In response to Stoll's findings, Menchú initially accused him of defending the Guatemalan military and seeking to discredit all victims of the violence, but later she acknowledged making certain changes in her story. The Nobel Committee has dismissed calls to revoke her Nobel prize because of the reported falsifications; however, Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the Committee, said her prize "was not based exclusively or primarily on the autobiography".<1> According to the Nobel Committee, "Stoll approves of her Nobel prize and has no question about the picture of army atrocities which she presents. He says that her purpose in telling her story the way she did 'enabled her to focus international condemnation on an institution that deserved it, the Guatemalan army.'"<1>

Five weeks after publication of the New York Times article raising doubts about the accuracy of several key allegations found in Menchú’s biography, the Times published a news story which reported Menchú's response to several questions raised in the earlier article.<9> Several days later, the Spanish-language newspaper El País (Madrid) published an extended interview with Menchú in which the Nobel laureate offered a defense of her 1983 biography.<10>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoberta_Mench%C3%BA

What is written in her book HAS HAPPENED. There's no mistake everything she has said about the atrocities has happened. Just take any look at reports of the grotesque actions by the Guatemalan forces. Unbelieveably vicious, sadistic, insanely brutal, like monsters from the depths of hell in someone's worst nightmare.

I'll be keeping my eyes open for more information as time goes by. I simply don't have the time to stop everything and spend a lot of time on this woman some fools refer to as a "peasant" in their wish to cut her down to size for being a leftist. Anyone in the Americas who has lived through what many people like her have lived through would NEVER i a trillion years affiliate themselves with the filth who massacre poor people.

As all the books say, the military and the paramilitaries have been responsible for almost ALL the atrocities. This is standard, as we ALL know.

[naaman fletcher]

14. "What is written in her book HAS HAPPENED."

She didn't watch her brother starve.

The primary focus of the story, a land dispute, was with another Mayan, not a European.

she did not watch her other brother be burned alive, nor did her parents watch it.

The marixsts with rifles showed up in town before the government did.

she did not travel to the coast every year to pick beans. her family was too wealthy.

they were not desperatley poor, her father had over 2,000 hectares

she had an elaborate story about how her father didn't want her to go to school and learn upper class values so she had no schooling and was self taught. In fact she want to two boarding schools.


I have no idea what else that she says is true or not true. It has no credibility.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Important history information people really need to know. It's familiar to most DU Latin America

posters, clearly, but it's so important. 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."

~~~~~
This story is going to be heard again, and again, and again, no matter HOW MANY RIGHT-WING ASSHOLES try to dismiss it, divert attention away from, try to rebury it, or claim it's all made up.

FUCK THEM. The truth is GOING to be heard, in the end, no matter WHAT.

[naaman fletcher]

3. which story?

The truth of the massacres, or the stuff Menchu made up? Salon is not a right-wing magazine, and the anthropologist who exposed her fraud is not a right-winger either. She blatantly made stuff up.

It's important to expose what happened in Guatemala which is why it shouldn't be discredited by someone who made up massive portions of her book.

[naaman fletcher]

4. FYI, she ran for president and got 3% of the vote.

Apparently her fellow peasants don't think all that highly of her.

[Judi Lynn]

5. What is it you're trying to say? Man up, say it directly, don't play games. n/t

[naaman fletcher]

6. huh?

I am saying that her book is a fraud, and that she isn't even all that popular in Guatemala as she only got 3% of the vote. What was not clear about that?

[Judi Lynn]

7. You said her fellow peasants don't approve of her. There's no concealing

your hostility toward this woman, toward leftists.

There's very little reason to indulge you. It's clear to me you intend to try to get in the road, to interfere with the flow of information among DU'ers who are interested in information exchange, communication.

You are NOT going to to come here and tell us we are idiots, forget it. You tried, you are not qualified to pass judgement.

You are NOT going to sidetrack everyone's attention from what HAS happened throughout the Americas by attempting to start little stupid arguments.

What has happened in Guatemala is REAL. We all know it is real, those of us who care have researched and studied it, already, long ago, and will continue to study it. We didn't get our information from reading Rigoberta's book. I have never read it. Don't have the time.

You're not dealing anyone a mortal blow by trying to devalue the lady, and you sure as HELL won't win one decent friend here by pointing out she's a peasant, and her "fellow peasants" don't like her. It's the filthy classist, racist assholes who don't like her.

She's not a politician, she doesn't glad hand people, your attempt to mock her by pointing out she lost doesn't get you anywhere.

THAT's crude, oafish, unrefined, and socially repellant beyond endurance.

We know what has happened, and we're going to find out a hell of a lot more, so you need to get out of the way. You're not going to make one dent in the quality of this forum, count on it.

[VioletLake]

8. Some people decide whether something is right or wrong by how popular it is.

:eyes:

[naaman fletcher]

10. I don't understand...

Is it right that she fabricated her book? Is it right that she took a property dispute between her family and painted it as the whites stealing her land?

Perhaps her fellow citizens don't like a very complex situation that resulted in the terrible right-wing atrocities being portrayed as a standard marxist class struggle when in fact it was a lot more complex than that. Complex enough that Menchu felt the need to lie about so much in her book so that it was in line with marxist dogma.

There is a reason she only got 3% of the vote. If the history of Guatemala is as she describes then certainly everyone but the whites would have voted for her.

[Bacchus39]

12. yep, more info from Judi's Wiki article.

everyone knows the atrocities committed by the army particularly under Rios Montt. campesino means peasant. note it is used in the article. there is nothing particularly derrogatory about being a campesino.

Controversies about her testimony
More than a decade after the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, anthropologist David Stoll carried out an investigation of Menchú's story, researching government documents, reports, and land claims (many filed by Menchú's own family), and interviewing former neighbors, locals, friends, enemies, and others for his 1999 book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. He did not interview Menchú herself, however. Stoll confirmed that Menchú grew up in a Mayan peasant village which was visited by Marxist guerrillas and then attacked by the Guatemalan army. However, Stoll claimed that Menchú changed some elements of her life, family and village to meet the publicity needs of the guerrilla movement, which she joined as a political cadre after her parents were assassinated.

In the book, Menchú maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had founded the peasant movement known as the Committee for Campesino Unity. Instead, Stoll and New York Times journalist Larry Rohter found that Vicente Menchú, while poor, was relatively prosperous by local Mayan standards. As leader of his community, he won a 27.53 km² land grant from the Guatemalan government. Unfortunately, his success led to a long-running dispute with his wife's relatives, in the Tum family, who claimed some of the same land. During the late 1970s, when Vicente Menchú's daughter claimed that he was an underground radical political organizer, he was at home in his village of Chimel working with U.S. Peace Corps volunteers.

In her 1982 life story, Menchú claimed that she and her family had been forced to work as peons on a distant coastal plantation for eight months of the year, as millions of other impoverished Mayan farmworkers continue to do every year. According to neighbors, however, the family was sufficiently well-off to avoid this fate. Menchú also claimed that her father refused to allow her to attend school, on the grounds that it would turn her into a non-indigenous "ladino" who would forget her Mayan roots, but in reality, Catholic nuns supported her in a succession of private boarding schools until she reached the 8th grade.

Stoll claims that Menchú's account of watching her younger brother Nicolas die of malnutrition was false, as Stoll located a living brother of hers named Nicolas. Menchú has responded that she was referring to another brother also named Nicolas (giving several children the same name is a common practice among rural Mayans in Guatemala). When interviewed by Rohter, the surviving Nicolas affirmed that two brothers had died of malnutrition but remembered the name of only one of them, Felipe.<7>

In one episode in her 1982 story, Menchú claimed that her younger brother Petrocinio had been burned alive by Guatemala's military while she and her family were forced to watch in a town plaza. After interviewing local townspeople and reviewing contemporary human rights reports, Stoll concluded that Petrocinio was shot and killed by Army-supported paramilitary groups, rather than burned to death, and his body dumped in a mass grave, and that Menchú and her family had not witnessed his death. In follow-up interviews with the New York Times, Menchú conceded that she had not personally witnessed the murder of her brother as it was related to her by her mother. "Show me where the mass grave is where he is buried. If someone will give me his body, I will change my view. My truth is that my brother Patrocinio was burned alive."<8>

However, Stoll does not claim that her 1983 story is a hoax. The reason is that she in fact lost both her parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law and three nieces and nephews to the Guatemalan security forces.

In response to Stoll's findings, Menchú initially accused him of defending the Guatemalan military and seeking to discredit all victims of the violence, but later she acknowledged making certain changes in her story. The Nobel Committee has dismissed calls to revoke her Nobel prize because of the reported falsifications; however, Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the Committee, said her prize "was not based exclusively or primarily on the autobiography".<1> According to the Nobel Committee, "Stoll approves of her Nobel prize and has no question about the picture of army atrocities which she presents. He says that her purpose in telling her story the way she did 'enabled her to focus international condemnation on an institution that deserved it, the Guatemalan army.'"<1>

Five weeks after publication of the New York Times article raising doubts about the accuracy of several key allegations found in Menchú’s biography, the Times published a news story which reported Menchú's response to several questions raised in the earlier article.<9> Several days later, the Spanish-language newspaper El País (Madrid) published an extended interview with Menchú in which the Nobel laureate offered a defense of her 1983 biography.<10>

[naaman fletcher]

13. I wonder why,

someone who claims to be so in favor of telling the truth about Guatemala would use a phony as the vehicle for that, and then get so angry when I question it.

Perhaps because the marxist story and the truth are different in this instance, and explain why her fellow citizens have no liking for Menchu as evidenced by her 3% result in the election.

Guatemala is and was complex, and its people are proud. They don't want to be sterotyped in a false marxist paradigm.

[Judi Lynn]

16. It has to pass muster with the xenophobic chauvinists, bloodthirsty, greedy maggots

of the Teabagger society or they do their best to destroy it.

Doesn't matter. The more they express themselves, the more they out themselves. Can't hide "values" like theirs. The smell gives them away every time.

[naaman fletcher]

18. Value like lying about basic stuff, or values like using such a liar to promote a cause here?

I've never seen you so worked up Judi. You have repeatedly said that this forum is good for sharing information and for discussion, how come you don't want to discuss Menchu's lies and possible explanations for why someone everyone in the west thinks is such a hero only go 3% of the vote?

[naaman fletcher]

9. I didn't say what happend in Guatemala was not real.

why are you accusing me of suggesting that what happened in Guatemala was not real? I never said that.


I said she was a liar. She is. That is a fact.

She is a politician, she ran for president.

You are not for the free exchange of information and discussion. You are for one-sided discussion of items that already fit your worldview.

[Judi Lynn]

15. DU'er readers who didn't know Rigoberta Manchu ran for election might want to read more:

Rigoberta Menchú Running for the Long Term
By Inés Benítez

GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 28 , 2007 (IPS) - The first indigenous woman candidate for president of Guatemala, Rigoberta Menchú, is behind in the polls, but the very fact that she is standing is an important precedent and a sign that the political system is more open, analysts say.

"Indigenous people now not only have the opportunity to vote, but also to exercise power," Menchú told foreign correspondents Tuesday.

The indigenous activist, 48, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and created the Winaq movement which aims to become a political party, will run in the Sept. 9 elections with businessman Luís Fernando Montenegro as her running mate.

They are supported by a coalition made up of Winaq and the centre-left Encounter for Guatemala Party, headed by Nineth Montenegro, a lawmaker and founder of the non-governmental Mutual Support Group (GAM) human rights organisation.

An opinion poll published last week by the newspaper Prensa Libre placed Menchú, the only woman among 14 candidates, in fifth place, with 2.42 percent ratings.

According to official figures, 5.9 million Guatemalans will be eligible to cast their votes for president, vice president, 158 parliamentary deputies and 332 mayors.

The poll placed Álvaro Colom of the centre-left National Union of Hope (UNE) in first place with 22 percent of voter intentions, followed by retired general Otto Pérez Molina of the rightwing Patriotic Party (PP) with 17.5 percent, and in third place Alejandro Giammattei of the governing centre-right Great National Alliance (GANA) with 7.67 percent.

If no candidate takes a majority of the vote, a runoff will be held.

But Menchú’s candidacy transcends the results of the forthcoming elections, political analysts told IPS.

"Although she may achieve modest results in terms of votes, her candidacy is important as a sign that the political system, which has traditionally been dominated by ‘criollos’ (people of European descent), is opening up," Manfredo Marroquín, the head of the Central American Institute for Political Studies (INCEP), told IPS.

"We are the voice of the thousands of silenced people, who have no room (in the system) and who only take orders," said Menchú, who emphasised the fact that she is a woman candidate, and an indigenous one, in a country that is "‘machista,’ racist and excludes people."

Officially, 40 percent of the population is indigenous, although non-governmental organisations put the proportion closer to 65 percent.

Menchú said that she has been the victim of a smear campaign by her opponents, and that "the rest of the parties are battering us on every side," for instance by tearing down her campaign posters in some communities.

Menchú "knows the needs of the Mayan people. She works for the good of indigenous peoples," Margarita Lares, a 54-year-old indigenous woman who travelled from Tecpan, in the west of the country, to attend the final campaign rally on Sunday, told IPS.

In Constitution Square, in front of the National Palace, the Nobel laureate compared the elections to a "market," criticised politicians who spend millions on winning converts, and said she was proud of having run her campaign "without sponsors," financed only by her supporters.

"Our campaign was one hundred percent self-financed, and that gives us the moral right to assert that we represent a dignified option," Menchú said at the press conference.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39056

~~~~~
The 2007 election.

The Usual Suspects Retain Power: Guatemalan Elections 2007
NISGUA
9/14/2007

by Alexandra Durbin and Sue Kuyper of the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA)

Guatemala's first-round election results are in, and human rights advocates have little cause for celebration. Presidency and Congress will once again be dominated by representatives of the elite, infamous military officials, and masterminds of organized crime.


Violence and Intimidation

In a country devastated by violence - evidenced by an annual murder rate higher than that of the civil war and a single-digit conviction rate for offenders - it would be unrealistic to expect election day to be an oasis of peace and tranquility. The climate of insecurity affects the exercise of democracy in Guatemala on many levels: from the paralysis of intimidated activists, to the popularity of a hard-line approach to crime, to fear of supporting leaders who threaten the powers-that-be.

On voting day, conflict erupted in 105 municipalities. Incidents included the temporary kidnapping of the mayor in Sacatepequez, ballot burning in Santa Rosa, burning of municipal offices, take-overs of voting stations, lynching threats, robbery of computer equipment, road blocks, fist-fights, and other types of confrontation between party sympathizers.

Behind the scenes of Guatemalan politics lurk shadowy networks of war criminals and organized mafias who repeatedly resort to intimidation and crime to hold onto their power. In addition to targeting grassroots human rights leaders, these clandestine groups terrorize and attack party leaders whose platforms or competing interests pose a threat to their own power.

Since the election season officially opened in May, some 50 party leaders, candidates, and activists have been murdered. Authorities have made no arrests in these cases and have even denied that these killings were politically motivated.

Local strongmen, some with criminal pasts, exploited their economic standing or questionable alliances to use intimidation, payments, or a combination of the two to persuade citizens to vote for a particular mayor or party. The legacy of war and terror continues to shape voter choice. Some people picked the candidate less likely to take violent retribution against detractors. In other cases, participants specifically cast their votes for those they suspected might react with displeasure, even violence, towards those who voted against them. Behind this rationale is citizens' lack of trust in the secrecy of the ballot and their ongoing fear that political henchmen are recording their votes.

More:
http://www.nisgua.org/news_analysis/index.asp?id=3006

Will be back later.

[naaman fletcher]

17. A nice way to spin that basically nobody voted for her. nt.