|
|
|
|
|||
|
| |||
opinionAlso in this section:
Bernal, Martín's "Fifth Bench" throne room Syracuse, High profile political murders in Guatemala Jackson, Mitt Romney leads GOP candidate fundraising Sirias, A painful plunge back into English
A vote For Rigoberta is a vote for justice by W. E. Gutman Where does historicity end and poetic license begin? A point to ponder by 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the indigenous leader who will be running for Guatemala’s presidency in September. Key details of her autobiography, challenged in 1999, are sure to be revisited by her rivals --- among them the United States, which can be expected to thwart her political aspirations. Accused of distorting “I, Rigoberta Menchú,” the electrifying 1983 best-selling chronicle of Guatemala’s brutal civil war, the undisputed champion of indigenous rights was also charged with exaggerating anecdotal details about her own childhood. In her book, Menchú, now 47, paints a vivid landscape of racism, violence and intrigue against her people, the Quiché-Maya. Published at the height of Guatemala’s punitive raids in the Petén highlands, a 36-year crusade of ethnic cleansing that claimed about 200,000 lives and countless “disappeared,” her account drew instant attention by the Nobel Committee and paved the way for the prestigious prize she was subsequently awarded. She has since actively campaigned on behalf of indigenous people and received numerous international accolades. It was anthropologist Dr. David Stoll who asserted that Menchú’s book “cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be [because she describes] events she never really experienced.” These allegations have lost much of their punch and relevance over the years. Truth is that Menchú’s book is part of the living memory and heritage of Guatemala and that attempts to impugn her integrity have since been dismissed as a racist political agenda engineered to discredit her and revise history. Between 1979 and 1983, Rigoberta Menchú’s father, mother and two brothers all died at the hands of Guatemalan “security” forces. No one denies the tremendous suffering she and her family endured, least of all the Nobel Institute, which issued the following apologia: “All autobiographies embellish to a greater or lesser extent. The decision to award the prize to Ms. Menchú was not based exclusively on her autobiography. While details of the family history are not without relevance, they are not particularly important and will not lead us to question or revoke the prize.” * * * Remembering is the energy that fuels the time machine. Forgetting (or magnifying) certain events helps compensate for unendurable memories, a syndrome well known to Holocaust survivors, war veterans and their therapists. For Rigoberta Menchú, the past burst through the floodgates of memory, begging to be stilled by he moving pen. Buried recollections --- those that sloth or scruples might otherwise fossilize --- were exhumed from a vast and untidy ossuary. The others, the ones that reside just beyond the threshold of awareness, were slowly coaxed free, the better to survey and resurrect ancient images and feelings so subtle and so fleetingly perceived that they could be silhouetted but never fully rendered. Surely, many of her memories were in tatters or of questionable realism, the misbegotten offspring of agony or wishful thinking. The rest must be irretrievably lost or still in hiding, cloistered in the company of painful mementos and unutterable confessions. The compulsion to tell all is often tempered by the wisdom to say nothing. In light of Guatemala’s tragic history, it might be fair to conclude that with each guileless exaggeration or aberrant detail insinuated into her memoirs, Menchú may have opted to conceal other unbearable truths. Fact remains that for 42 years, from 1954 --- when a US-inspired coup overthrew the constitutionally elected president, Jacobo Arbenz --- to 1996, Guatemala bled. In an effort to crush a peasant-led uprising against feudalism and serfdom, government forces indiscriminately targeted indigenous groups who make up 60 per cent of Guatemala’s 10 million inhabitants. In an unrelenting war of attrition, “counter-revolutionary” forces wiped out 400 villages and massacred some 200,000 campesinos. Declassified CIA documents reveal that the agency had targeted 58 Maya leaders for assassination, “if necessary.” * * * I first met Menchú in 1996 at a UNICEF Press Awards ceremony at the Foreign Ministry in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Presenting the awards, she spoke with the riveting eloquence of someone who saw half her family slaughtered before her eyes. “The role of the media, “she said, “is to educate, inform, to shed light where there is none, or where the truth is filtered. No society is safe without a passionate, incorruptible press.” When I introduced myself, she said she recognized my name. “Tell the world.” She squeezed my hand knowingly, smiled softly and moved on. On the morrow of a new millennium, and despite President Bush’s nauseating lie that the United States “cares deeply about the human condition” in the region, Indians are still marginalized and persecuted. In Brazil. In Costa Rica. In Guatemala. In Honduras. In Mexico. In Panama. To criticize Menchú’s memoirs is to micromanage history at the expense of a larger truth. Such device gives revisionists and the tormentors of Menchús people a measure of undeserved legitimacy. I hope she prevails. It would be a welcome twist of fate --- and sweet poetic justice --- to see a full-blooded Maya take the reigns of nation that has wronged so many of her peers. It is no wonder that Mayan priests can’t wait to "spiritually cleanse" and rid of “bad spirits” a sacred archeological site Mr. Bush recently defiled with his presence after hobnobbing with President Oscar Berger, a man known to have consorted with Guatemala’s most vicious human rights violators.
Also in this section:
Bernal, Martín's "Fifth Bench" throne room Syracuse, High profile political murders in Guatemala Jackson, Mitt Romney leads GOP candidate fundraising Sirias, A painful plunge back into English
Unclassified Ads | Calendar | Outdoors | Dining | Science | Sports | Español | Front Page Archives | Wappin' Radio Show | Just Music
Make the
Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City ---
http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com
Find the boat of your dreams through Evermarine --- http://www.evermarine.com |
||||||||||
|
