I, Rigoberta Menchu

by Rigoberta Menchu

  My brothers and sisters decided not to go down to the finca now. They said: ‘From now on we’ll stay here, even if we starve to death, because we have to cultivate our land. We’ll try and grow enough crops to live on and not go to the finca.’ My mother used to come once every fifteen days perhaps. She’d stay a day and then go back. We had a little sister and we looked after her so that my mother didn’t have to take her with her. Some neighbours had a little goat which gave milk. We gave her goat’s milk because we didn’t have any cows. My little sister was about one and a half then.

  Later on we received another threat. A message came saying that they were going to kidnap my father from the hospital. The community was frightened and said it would be better for him to come home and be looked after here where they couldn’t kidnap him. We told my mother straight away. One of my brothers went to El Quiché to warn her about the message we’d received. With the help of the priests and nuns, who gave us money, we put my father in a secret place where the landowners couldn’t find him. He was in the hospital of San Juan de Dios for six months and in the other place for another five months. After that he came home but he was in so much pain that he was never his old self again. He couldn’t carry things; he couldn’t walk very well and it was a big effort for him to walk to the town. At night he couldn’t sleep because his bones ached and all the parts where he’d been beaten hurt him.

  He returned home with a greater hate for his enemies. If before they’d been enemies of the community, now they were even more the enemies of my father. We hated all those people. We weren’t only angry with the landowners, but with all the ladinos. To us, all the ladinos in that region were evil. In the hospital my father had talked to many people and found that we had many things in common with the Indians in other areas. This gave us a different view; another way of seeing things. After this my father went on working with the help of the unions. When he couldn’t go to the capital, the unions looked after his affairs there. Whatever my father was organizing was done by one of the unions helping us.

  Then in 1977, my father was put in prison again. They wouldn’t leave us in peace. After my father came out of hospital and returned home, they kept on threatening him because they knew as long as the community was united they couldn’t send their engineers to the villages. We would use machetes or stones. So they went on threatening my father and said they were going to catch him on the road again and kill him. But my father said: ‘They are cowards, they just talk, they never do it.’ But it worried us a lot because it would be very difficult for us if they did. That was when my father started advising us not to put our trust in him alone but in the whole community. ‘I’m your father now,’ he said, ‘but afterwards the community will be your father.’ He went on travelling and refused to keep quiet. He went on doing his work. It was in 1977 that they arrested him again and sent him to prison.

  I was learning some Spanish at the time with the priests and nuns. I used to travel too. The priests helped me to go to the capital and stay with the nuns in a convent for a few days. When my father came out of hospital, I started travelling with him too, to get to know the circles he moved in. We were already thinking about my father’s death. They could kill him any minute, so we needed to know where it was he went. I began accompanying him all the time. The community, the priests and some friends of my father helped us. Some Europeans were helping us too. They sent us a lot of money. They were people who had worked for a time teaching the peasants how to farm. But the way they plant isn’t the way we do it. Indians reject the chemical fertilizers they tried to teach us about. They weren’t really welcomed so they left, but they were very good friends of my father and helped us. They knew the problems of our village. They went back to their country but they still love Guatemala and help my father. We saved the money we received for my father’s trips, all our trips, so that the village wouldn’t have to contribute. At that time the INTA was asking for forty-five quetzals a month for papers and expenses. They never gave us a receipt. Who knows where all that money has gone!

  When my father was arrested the second time, they considered him a political prisoner. The case against him was much worse this time. Now that he was a political prisoner, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was a communist, a subversive, they said. The same military commissioners as the first time came and got him from our house with clubs and took him to prison. They beat him and tied him up. He was a political prisoner. This was much worse for him. But by now the community was more aware of all these things. They had their own means of self-defence against the landowners. My brothers now spoke a bit of Spanish and my mother had also learned something from all the suffering, all the knocks, all the responsibility she’d had. We also had the support of the priests, the nuns, the unions and our community. It wasn’t just my father now, it was a whole people behind him. My father was well known and well loved in many places so there was a big protest against my father’s arrest. The unions especially pressed for his release. They still wanted witnesses, lawyers and all those things of course, but my father was soon out of prison. They started threatening him again even before he was out. They said if he continued his work, he would be assassinated and this time if they couldn’t kill him they’d kill one of his children. This was his death sentence from the authorities. Of course, the authorities didn’t exactly say that they would kill him, but they said the landowners would take care of it.

  He was in prison for fifteen days. Then he came home. He was very proud and very happy because in prison he’d met another prisoner who really was a political prisoner. He was someone who defended the peasants and he told my father the peasants should unite and form a peasants’ league to reclaim their lands. He said it wasn’t our problem alone: our enemies weren’t the landowners but the whole system. This man saw things more clearly than my father. So my father came back very proudly and said, ‘We must fight the rich because they have become rich with our land, our crops.’ That was when my father started to join up with other peasants and discussed the creation of the CUC with them. A lot of peasants had been discussing the committee but nothing concrete had been done, so my father joined the CUC and helped them understand things more clearly. My father didn’t have to be told how to organize. Many peasants had been thinking of how they would form the CUC, so, in fact, the peasants had already shown they were unhappy with their situation. My father was in clandestinity from 1977 onwards; that is, he was in hiding. He left our house so he wouldn’t involve us. He left his family and went to work with the peasants in other regions. He came back now and again but had to come via the mountains because if he passed through the town the landowners would know he was at home.

  It was very sad for us that he couldn’t live with us at home. He came at night and left at night. Or he spent several days at home but didn’t go out. Our community suffered a great deal because they loved him as if he were their own father. Everything in our life is like a film. Constant suffering. We began thinking, with the help of other friends, other compañeros, that our enemies were not only the landowners who lived near us, and above all not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger, poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership of land. The best land was not in our hands. It belonged to the big landowners. Every time they see that we have new land, they try to throw us off it or steal it from us in other ways.

  XVI

  PERIOD OF REFLECTION ON THE ROAD TO FOLLOW

  ‘An obscure vision, obscure because he dared not free it from his consciousness and examine it; he was content to half look at it, and seek no explanation.’

  —Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Maize

  I’d like to say here, that I wasn’t the only important one. I was part of a family, just like all my brothers and sisters. The whole community was importa
nt. We used to discuss many of the community’s problems together, especially when someone was ill and we couldn’t buy medicine, because we were getting poorer and poorer. We’d start discussing and heaping insults on the rich who’d made us suffer for so long. It was about then I began learning about politics. I tried to talk to people who could help me sort my ideas out. I wanted to know what the world was like on the other side. I knew the finca, I knew the Altiplano. But what I didn’t know was about the problems of the other Indians in Guatemala. I didn’t know the problems other groups had holding onto their land. I knew there were lots of other Indians in other parts of the country, because I’d been meeting them in the finca since I was a child, but although we all worked together, we didn’t know the names of the towns they came from, or how they lived, or what they ate. We just imagined that they were like us. Well, I started thinking about my childhood, and I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t had a childhood at all. I was never a child. I hadn’t been to school, I hadn’t had enough food to grow properly, I had nothing. I asked myself: ‘How is this possible?’ I compared it to the life of the children of rich people I’d seen. How they ate. Even their dogs. They even taught their dogs only to recognize their masters and reject the maids. All these things were jumbled up in my mind, I couldn’t separate my ideas. That’s when I began making friends from other villages in Uspantán. I asked them: ‘What do you eat? How do you make your breakfast? What do you have for lunch? What do you eat for supper?’ And yes, they said the same: ‘Well, in the morning we eat tortillas with salt and a little pinol. At midday, our mother brings tortillas and any plants she finds in the fields.’ ‘At night we eat tortillas with chile,’ they said, ‘chile with tortillas, and then we go to sleep.’ So everything was the same. It gave me a lot to think about. I have to tell you that I didn’t learn my politics at school. I just tried to turn my own experience into something which was common to a whole people. I was also very happy when I realized that it wasn’t just my problem; that I wasn’t the only little girl to have worried about not wanting to grow up. We were all worried about the harsh life awaiting us.

  The CUC started growing; it spread like fire among the peasants in Guatemala. We began to understand that the root of all our problems was exploitation. That there were rich and poor and that the rich exploited the poor–our sweat, our labour. That’s how they got richer and richer. The fact that we were always waiting in offices, always bowing to the authorities, was part of the discrimination we Indians suffered. So was the cultural oppression which tries to divide us by taking away our traditions and prevents unity among our people. The situation got worse when the murderous generals came to power, although I didn’t actually know who was the president at the time. I began to know them from 1974 on, when General Kjell Laugerud came to power. He came to our region and said: ‘We’re going to solve the land problem. The land belongs to you. You cultivate the land and I will share it out among you.’ We trusted him. I was at the meeting when Kjell Laugerud spoke. And what did he give us? My father tortured and imprisoned. I know it was because he’d discovered all their underhand tricks. He hated those people. He used to say: ‘What do they know about hunger when they suck the blood of our people every day?’ It angered me too not to have my elder brothers with us, not to know them, because they’d died of hunger, of malnutrition, of not having enough to eat in the finca. I said: ‘If they’d had enough to eat, my brothers would still be alive with us today. They didn’t die because they wanted to.’

  Later I had the opportunity of meeting other Indians, Achi Indians, the group that lives the closest to us. And I got to know some Mam Indians too. They all told me: ‘The rich are bad. But not all ladinos are bad.’ And I started wondering: ‘Could it be that not all ladinos are bad?’ I used to think they were all bad. But they said that they lived with poor ladinos. There were poor ladinos as well as rich ladinos, and they were exploited as well. That’s when I began recognizing exploitation. I kept on going down to the finca but now I really wanted to find out, to prove if that was true and learn all the details. There were poor ladinos in the finca. They worked the same, and their children’s bellies were swollen like my little brother’s. So I said: ‘It must be true, then, that not all ladinos are bad.’ I was just beginning to speak a little Spanish in those days and I began to talk to them. I said to one poor ladino: ‘You’re a poor ladino, aren’t you?’ And he nearly hit me. He said: ‘What do you know about it, Indian?’ I wondered: ‘Why is it that when I say poor ladinos are like us, I’m spurned?’ I didn’t know then the same system which tries to isolate us Indians also puts up barriers between Indians and ladinos. I knew that all ladinos rejected us but I didn’t know why. I was more confused. I still thought all ladinos were bad. Soon afterwards, I was with the nuns and we went to a village in Uspantán where mostly ladinos live. The nun asked a little boy if they were poor and he said: ‘Yes, we’re poor but we’re not Indians.’ That stayed with me. The nun didn’t notice, she went on talking. She was foreign, she wasn’t Guatemalan. She asked someone else the same question and he said: ‘Yes, we’re poor but we’re not Indians.’ It was very painful for me to accept that an Indian was inferior to a ladino. I kept on worrying about it. It’s a big barrier they’ve sown between us, between Indian and ladino. I didn’t understand it.

  In our village, we went on working. I still didn’t have a clear idea of who exactly our enemies were. We began putting safety measures into practice in our village. We used the methods our forefathers had used, and which our own grandparents told us about. Our forefathers passed them down to us. We said that if the landowners’ soldiers come, we’ll kill them right here. That’s when we decided to use violence. I remember that it was my job to explain to the children of the community that our situation had nothing to do with fate but was something which had been imposed on us. I taught them that they had to defend themselves against it, to defend our parents’ rights. I’d have a sort of political chat with the children, although I wasn’t very clear about our situation politically. But my experiences told me what I needed. I didn’t need speeches or courses or anything like that. I didn’t have to read books because my experiences were born of suffering. I, who’d hardly had a pair of shoes by the time I was fifteen. Shoes: they protected feet against the heat and the stones. But, all the same, I didn’t really know what to do with them.

  I didn’t sleep much during this period, thinking about the future. What would it be like if all the Indians rose up and took the land and the crops away from the landowners? Would they get weapons and kill us? I had incredible dreams. But, in fact, they weren’t just empty dreams. My dreams came true when we started organizing. Children had to behave like grown-ups. We women had to play our part as women in the community, together with our parents, our brothers, our neighbours. We all had to unite, all of us together. We held meetings. We began by asking for a community school. We didn’t have a school. We collected signatures. I was involved in this. I played a key role because I was learning Spanish and because the priests knew me and so did some of my father’s other friends. I asked for help wherever I could, and I got it. We had a ladino friend in the town who gave us a little money, both for my father and us at home. But we didn’t use this money for ourselves: we shared it with the community. We were now getting organized. We already had various organisations: children’s groups, young people’s groups, women’s groups, catechists’ groups, and we began strengthening these groups. We wanted to make plans for us all to learn Spanish. I spent one afternoon teaching the children the bit of Spanish I knew. Not to write, of course, because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t read or write. But to teach them to speak as we spoke in our language.

  At the end of 1977, I decided to join a more formal group–a group of peasants in Huehuetenango. It was a clandestine group and we’d go down to the finca and work among the workers in the finca. The compañeros of the CUC worked among them too. And yet, I still hadn’t reached the rewarding stage of participating
fully, as an Indian first, and then as a woman, a peasant, a Christian, in the struggle of all my people. That’s when I started being more involved.

  My father went on with his work. He used to say: ‘My children, there are rich people and there are poor. The rich have become rich because they took what our ancestors had away from them, and now they grow fat on the sweat of our labour. We know this is true because we live it every day, not because someone else tells us. The rich try to obstruct us. The rich come from over there, where the ladinos’ government is. It’s the government of the rich, the landowners.’ We began seeing things more clearly and, as I said, it was not difficult for us to understand that we had to join together in the struggle, because for us this was something real, something we’d all experienced.

  I began travelling to different areas, discussing everything. I must say one thing, and it’s not to denigrate them, because the priests have done a lot for us. It’s not to undervalue the good things they have taught us; but they also taught us to accept many things, to be passive, to be a dormant people. Their religion told us it was a sin to kill while we were being killed. They told us that God is up there and that God had a kingdom for the poor. This confused me because I’d been a catechist since I was a child and had had a lot of ideas put in my head. It prevents us from seeing the real truth of how our people live. I tried to get rid of my doubts by asking the nuns: ‘What would happen if we rose up against the rich?’ The nuns tried to avoid the question. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but in any case no-one answered my question. I was very disturbed. In my community’s terms, I was already a grown woman, and I was very ashamed at being so confused, when so many of my village understood so much better than I. But their ideas were very pure because they had never been outside their community. We’d been down to the fincas, but they hadn’t known anything different. Going to the capital in a lorry brings about a change in an Indian, which he suffers inside himself. That’s why my little brothers and my brothers and sisters understood more clearly than I did.