Who Is Rigoberta Menchú?

Greg Grandin

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781781683613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

In 1984, indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Mench published a harrowing account of life under a military dictatorship in Guatemala. That autobiography- I, Rigoberta Mench -transformed the study and understanding of modern Guatemalan history and brought its author international renown. She won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. At that point, she became the target of historians seeking to discredit her testimony and deny US complicity in the genocidal policies of the Guatemalan regime.
Told here is the story of an unlettered woman who became the spokesperson for her people and clashed with the intellectual apologists of the world's most powerful nation. What happened to her autobiography speaks volumes about power, perception and race on the world stage. This critical companion to Mench's work will disabuse many readers of the lies that have been told about this courageous individual.

CHAPTER ONE

Clarifying History: On the Guatemalan Truth Commission

Truth commissions are curious, contradictory bodies.¹ They often raise hope of justice symbolized by the Nuremberg Trials yet operate within the impoverished political possibilities that exist throughout much of the post–Cold War world. They are rarely accompanied by prosecutions and often do not have the authority to subpoena or sanction. Rather than serving as instruments of justice, their value is seen, in the words of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in their ability to construct a “historic bridge” between “a deeply divided past of untold suffering” and a “future founded on the recognition of human rights.”² Over the last two decades, truth commissions have been established in, among other places, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, East Germany, and East Timor, where, it is commonly asserted, they marked the border between what those societies were—intolerant, fevered, arbitrary—and what they hope they have become—peaceful, impartial, protective.

Yet before being adopted as a universal rite to solemnize the distinction between political liberalism and diverse forms of violent, unrepresentative regimes, official inquiries, what came to be generally known as “truth commissions,” into human rights abuses indexed a unique moment in Latin American history, as the decline of socialist movements crossed paths with ascendant efforts to consolidate liberal constitutional rule. Often portrayed as a “transition to democracy,” Latin America’s move away from military dictatorships in the 1980s was less a transition than it was a conversion to a particular definition of democracy. In the decades after World War II, there prevailed throughout the continent a social understanding of the term, described by Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough as entailing a “commitment to popular, more particularly working-class participation in politics, and social and economic improvements for the poorer sections of the population.”³ By the 1960s, the violent suppression of the mass movements that stood behind this definition gave way to, on the one hand, militant, often armed, efforts, such as the Cuban Revolution, to restructure economic and social relations and, on the other, repressive anti-communist dictatorships that came to rule much of the continent. Beginning in the early 1980s and continuing over the next decade and a half, one country after another emerged from this cycle of crisis politics not only through a return to constitutionalism but also by abandoning social-democratic principles of development and welfare, opening up their economies to the world market, and narrowing their conception of democracy to focus more precisely on political and legal rights rather than on social ones.⁴

First instituted in Bolivia in 1982 with the modest Comisión Nacional de Desaparecidos and in Argentina in 1983 with the more extensive Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, state-sanctioned investigations into past episodes of political terror were one part of this transition’s agenda to cultivate a notion of liberal citizenship that viewed the state not as a potential executor of social justice but as an arbiter of legal disputes and protector of individual rights. In their initial formulations in Bolivia and Argentina, truth commissions were to be supplemented with prosecutions of at least the worst atrocities. Yet in most countries, the military and its allies emerged victorious from the counterinsurgent wars of the 1970s and 1980s, disinclined to give up their self-assigned immunity. This intransigence brought about a shift in the logic that justified truth commissions, which moved their work out of the legal arena into the realms of ethics and emotions. Efforts to get at the “truth” of past episodes of political violence would have two functions, as José Zalaquett, a Chilean law professor who would go on to play an important role in Chile’s Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, argued in 1988. They would, first, repair the psychic damage caused by repression and, second, prevent such repression from occurring in the future. These two goals were said to be mutually dependent, in that officially sanctioned inquiries into the past, followed by public acceptance of the conclusions of those inquiries, would not only heal wounds but also help lay the foundation of liberal tolerance and thus prevent future transgressions. “The truth in itself is both reparation and prevention,” Zalaquett believed.⁵

Truth commissions therefore, while technically charged with examining the specifics of individual acts of violence according to accepted norms of national and international jurisprudence, came in fact to be concerned with the larger historical meaning of collective political repression.⁶ Their final reports distill a violent past into a manageable, lucid story, one that portrays terror as an inversion of a democratic society, a nightmarish alternative of what lies ahead if it does not abide by constitutional rules. Yet the jurists who designed Latin America’s first truth commissions approached historical interpretation with ambivalence, overtly denying, covertly embracing its import. As political liberals, they were suspicious of any effort to impose, softly or severely, a universal conception of the common good or to use history to justify militancy. Their liberalism demanded an acceptance of plural interpretations of the past.⁷ But they also argued that a dramatic affirmation of liberal values was needed in order to prevent recurrences of state violence or institutional breakdown and they often turned to the past in order to define these values. Truth commissions therefore had to deal with history, but, being largely run by lawyers, they were concerned that too close an attention to realms of human activity comfortably associated with historical inquiry—an examination, say, of economic interests and collective movements, or the unequal distribution of power in society—might grant moral pardons or inflame political passions.⁸ In most truth commissions, history was not presented as a network of causal social and cultural relations but rather as a dark backdrop on which to contrast the light of tolerance and self-restraint.

In other words, truth commissions, by presenting an interpretation of history as parable rather than as politics, largely denied the conditions that brought them into being. In Latin America, this meant portraying terror not as an extension of a reactive campaign against social-democratic nationalist projects, nor as an essential element in the consolidation of a new neoliberal order, but as a breakdown of social relations, as but one more instance in a repetitive cycle of “interruptions in democratic rule” that had taken place since independence in the early nineteenth century.⁹ As such, truth commissions serve as modern-day instruments in the creation of nationalism and embody what Benedict Anderson describes as nationalism’s enabling paradox: the need to forget acts of violence central to state formation that can never be forgotten. Among such acts, Anderson lists the Saint Bartholomew’s Day and Paris Commune massacres in France, and, in the United States, the Civil War and the annihilation of Native Americans. To this inventory could be added the hundreds of thousands of individuals murdered, “disappeared,” or tortured during Latin America’s “dirty wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, victims of campaigns that put to a provisional end political conflicts and ideological debates over how society should be organized, particularly those concerning the relationship of the citizen to the state.¹⁰ While such violence is an essential component of state consolidation, in order to serve the purpose of nationalism, it needs to be ritualized, as Anderson puts it, “remembered/forgotten as ‘our own.’”¹¹ The jurists who designed Latin America’s transition to democracy drew ethical instruction from violence in toto, but they refused, despite the protests of victims and their families, to sanction the collective political projects that were defeated by the violence.

This essay examines the role truth commissions play in “remembering/forgetting” exemplary terror, focusing on three examples, Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala. The evolution in the way that each approached the past emerged from, and thus revealed, the limits of the assumptions that underwrote Latin America’s turn toward constitutional rule and free-market policies, particularly assumptions regarding the relationship of violence to nationalism, state formation, and democratic rule. In the first instance, the intellectuals who designed Argentina’s post-dictatorship human rights policy, while understanding political violence to be rooted in psychological and cultural patterns deeply entrenched in national history, refrained from making any historical judgment in either the trials or in the final report of the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP). Criminal proceedings, it was believed, would serve as an alternative to dealing directly with the past, as their transparency and impartiality would contrast with the darkness and arbitrariness of the dictatorship years. In Chile, the second case, where the power of the military foreclosed the possibility of prosecutions, the Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación had to confront history more explicitly. Yet the burden of reconciliation, which was now understood as the commission’s primary mandate as reflected in its title, demands a conception of history that takes national cohesion as its starting premise and posits violence as resulting from the dissolution of that unity. The commission’s final report, therefore, narrated the conflict leading to the 1973 coup that ended Chilean democracy and initiated Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year reign as resulting from an unraveling of the institutional and normative protections that bind society together. While the institutional repression that followed the coup was subject to scrutiny, the coup itself was redeemed as a tragic but necessary intervention that prevented complete national collapse. Finally, in Guatemala, the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), which released its final report in 1999, operated in an even more constricted political terrain than its predecessors. Deep social divisions destroyed the conceit that either the past could be healed or future abuses prevented by appeals to national reconciliation. The commission likewise found the procedures used by previous truth commissions insufficient to account for the intensity of the violence that took place during a more than three-decade-long civil war, which included an acute two-year phase of violence against Mayans that the commission ruled to be genocidal. The commission turned more fully to causal history to break out of this impasse. While it did posit authoritarianism, expressed in a virulent strain of racism, as propelling the violence, it situated this variable within a larger political economic framework and examined its radicalization in light of the imperatives of civil war. In so doing, it produced an analysis that understood terror not as a result of state decomposition, a failure of the institutions and morals that guarantee rights and afford protection, but rather as a component of state formation, as the foundation of the military’s plan of national stabilization through a return to constitutional rule.¹²

*

Following its defeat by England in the Malvinas War of 1982, the disgraced Argentine military gave up power after six years of rule based on political terror.¹³ Even before his 1983 election, Raúl Alfonsín, of the center-left Unión Cívica Radical, convened a human rights kitchen cabinet of intellectuals, drawn mostly from the law school and philosophy department of the University of Buenos Aires, to plan the policy he would follow to address the violence of the past regime.¹⁴ After taking office, Alfonsín and his advisors, the most influential of whom were law professors Carlos Nino and Jaime Malamud-Goti, designed a legal strategy that attempted to reconcile a number of concerns: the need to respond to the demands, backed by large, vociferous street demonstrations, for justice; the desire not to provoke the still-powerful military high command; and their own understanding of the function of criminal jurisprudence in a liberal society.¹⁵ In the first formulations of human rights policy by these politician-scholars, the establishment of a truth commission was part of a larger strategy that was to include prosecutions. They did not believe, as many later came to accept, that the quest for punishment had to be weighed against the search for truth. Although the new government insisted on the need to limit the scope of prosecutions, trials were nonetheless essential to their primary goal of preventing a return to military and repressive rule.¹⁶ In setting their human rights agenda, Alfonsín and his advisors drew heavily from ethical social theory influenced by Emile Durkheim. Legal procedures, in their view, were more than agreed-upon rules to settle unavoidable conflicts. Rather, they formalized a common social cohesion, a cohesion that would strengthen and be strengthened ...