Who Is Rigoberta Menchu? - Greg Grandin

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to what was taking place in Guatemala. Her time in Paris therefore was the first sustained opportunity Menchú had to process memories and survivor guilt. And what pours forth like a flood is a rich portrait of a complex, unique individual.

      The final product—what became, first, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia and then, in English translation, I, Rigoberta Menchú—is a composite of many people’s work abridging, resequencing, and editing the raw material of Menchú’s nearly week-long testimony. It is worth, then, reproducing here an extended portion of her interview, drawn from the session Menchú did with Arturo Taracena where she discusses one of the most disputed episodes of the book, the murder of her brother, Petrocinio. The selection is unabridged, translated as literally as possible to match Menchú’s syntax and phrasing:

      His only sin was because since he was little he had participated with the community. He was kidnapped. My little brother was held captive for more than sixteen days by the enemy, who gave him great tortures, where they cut out his nails, they cut his tongue, they cut the bottom of his feet, they passed fire over all his body. The first wounds became infected, they swelled, they bled. Later they took out a, um, an announcement where they said there would be a punishment for the guerrillas. And we said, well, my mother said, “surely, my son is going to be there, surely he is going to be there.” And we had to walk all the night and part of the day to go and see the place where there would be punishment for the guerrillas. And there my brother appeared. Together with twenty more tortured men. One woman where they had cut off her breast. And they had shaved her, they cut her, and nearly all the twenty men had different kinds of tortures. When we saw my brother it was difficult to recognize him, we doubted it was him because now he didn’t seem like a human being. He seemed . . . We saw with our own eyes all this great suffering that they gave to our compañeros. We learned that among those that they called guerrillas was one of my brothers, they were neighbors, they were catequistas that we knew from elsewhere. And for us, we saw the savagery of these men, these humans who didn’t realize, didn’t have a heart to see all of the great pain of the people.

      After a speech of more than three hours by the captain, and with every pause that he made in his speech they would beat the tortured ones, order the troops to hit them, forced them to stand up by beating them with sticks, and they couldn’t stand up because of all their pain, they immediately fell to the floor. They bled. A uniformed soldier dressed in green came, when the captain had finished his speech, and cut the cloths off the tortured because now they couldn’t take them [the clothes] off because they were stuck on top of the wounded. And they cut off their cloths, they took them, and when we saw the all the bodies they were disfigured. They didn’t have the form of a human body. That is when they dragged them, closer, and piled them together in the place. They threw gasoline on them and burned them. We saw there that my own little brother was not dead. Many still shouted and many, though they cut off their breathing, didn’t die. The bodies jumped. Unfortunately in our lands, in our places, there is no potable water. There was no public fountain to quickly get water to put out the fire that burned over the bodies of the dead. The neighbors had to run to get water. They went to look for water, and the fire was almost out when they returned. The army brazenly said Long Live the Army! Long Live Power! Long Live Lucas! Death to the Guerrillas! Those were their slogans. But we knew it was a humble people shouting for their just cause. My father was there, my mother was there, we were all there and my mother still embraced the body of my burned little brother. But not only was it us, but all the people was there crying, and, um, nobody else, we couldn’t say anything else. And all the people had a hatred for the army, but that hatred we couldn’t demonstrate by killing them as they kill us. But that was a hatred we were going to take with us to the struggle, a struggle for all and not against any group. There we watched, there we mourned the body of the dead. The following day they were buried, and whole town cried and went to bury the bodies. Later we returned to our house and we seemed drunk because we couldn’t believe what we had seen. It seemed like a dream. Or it seemed, it seemed like a telenovela.11

      Su único delito era porque desde pequeño estaba participando con la comunidad. Fue secuestrado. Estuvo mi hermanito más de 16 días bajo poder del enemigo donde le dieron grandes torturas, donde le cortaron las uñas, le cortaron la lengua, le cortaron la planta de los pies, y le pasaron fuego encima de todo su cuerpo. Los primeros heridos estaban infectados, estaban hinchados, echaba sangre. Luego sacan un, er, un anuncio donde decían que iba a haber un castigo para los guerrilleros. Y nosotros dijimos pues, “de seguro él iba a estar mi hijo,” decía mi madre, “de seguro el iba a estar.” Y tuvimos que caminar toda la noche, parte del día para ir a ver el lugar donde iba a haber castigo para los guerrilleros. Y ahí apareció mi hermanito. Junto con 20 hombres más torturados. Una mujer donde le habían quitado el pecho. Y le habían rasurado, le habían cortado, y casi los 20 hombres tenían diferentes clases de torturas. Cuando vimos a mi hermanito, es difícil que lo reconocimos, dudábamos si era el porque ya no se veía como persona humano. Se veía . . . Vimos con nuestros propios ojos todo ese gran sufrimiento que dieron a nuestros compañeros. Adivinamos que los que ellos los que llamaban guerrilleros era uno mis hermanos, eran vecinos, eran catequistas que nos conocíamos en otros lugares. Y esta para nosotros, descaradamente vimos lo que es el salvajismo de esos hombres, esos humanos, que ya no se dan cuenta, no tienen corazón para ver todo ese gran dolor del pueblo.

      Después del discurso del capitán por más de tres horas, y cada pausa que hacía en su discurso pegaban a los torturados, obligaban la tropa que los pegaban, que los paraban a puras palotazos, y ellos no se pararon por todos los dolores, inmediatamente se caían en el suelo. Echaban sangre. Iba un uniformado con uniforme [verde oliva?] luego cuando ya acaba el discurso del capitán, corta la ropa de los torturados ya que ya no podían sacarlos porque estaba pegado encima de los heridos. Y cortaron la ropa, los quitaron, y cuando vimos los cuerpos de todos eran desfigurados. No tenía ya forma de cuerpo humano. Y así es cuando los llevan arrastrado, acercaron, los amontonaron en el lugar. Y los echaron gasolina y los quemaron. Vimos ahí que hasta mi propio hermanito no se moría. Muchos todavía gritaron y muchos se les tapó la respiración pero no se morían. Brincaban los cadáveres. Y desgraciadamente en nuestras tierras, en nuestros lugares, no hay agua potable. No hay pila para buscar agua inmediatamente para apagar el fuego que se rociaba encima de los muertos de los cadáveres. De los vecinos tuvieron que ir corriendo a buscar agua. De que fueron a buscar el agua, ya casi estaba apagado el fuego cuando llegaron. El ejército sale con mucho lujo donde decía “¡Viva el ejército!”, “¡Viva el poder!”, “¡Viva Lucas!”, “¡Que se mueran los guerrilleros!”, esos eran sus consignas. Y sin embargo nosotros sabíamos que era un pueblo humilde que estaba gritando por su causa justa. Así es que estaba ahí mi padre, estaba mi madre, estábamos todos, y mi madre todavía abraza el cadáver de mi hermanito quemado. Pero no solo éramos nosotros, todo el pueblo estaba ahí llorando, y nadie mas, er, no podíamos decir otra cosa. Y todo el pueblo teníamos un odio hacia el ejército, pero aquel odio que no podemos demostrar matándoles igual como a nosotros nos matan, sino que era odio que nos iba a llevar hacia una lucha, una lucha por todo y no son en contra de un grupo. Ahí se vigilaba, ahí se veló el cadáver de los muertos. Al siguiente día fueron enterrados donde masivamente el pueblo lloraba y fue a enterrar los cadáveres. Luego regresamos en casa donde parecíamos borrachos porque no creíamos lo que vimos. Pareciera ser un sueño. O pareciero, o pareciera ser una telenovela.

      Before and after this passage, Menchú at times uses the singular, “yo,” or “I.” But here, relating her brother’s murder, she refers to herself exclusively, and repeatedly, with plural verbs and the pronoun “nosotros,” or “we,” an illustration of what the historians Lutz and Lovell say is the resonance between Menchú’s oral testimony and historic Mayan accounts of atrocities associated with the Spanish conquest (in contrast, both the Spanish- and English-language editions of the book record Menchú as using a mix of singular and plural tenses to describe Petrocinio’s execution). The collective voice is perhaps Menchú’s acknowledgement that she did not witness her brother’s death but was repeating her family’s account of what happened. She was synthesizing accounts of other, similar executions; or she was repeating what her family had told her about how her brother had died. Whatever the case, Menchú’s first return to the singular tense following the above passage

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