POLI 319 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Guatemalan Civil War
13 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
POLI319: Friday Feb. 16th, 2018
Truth and Political Violence in Latin America
Rigoberta Menchu
- Won 1992 Nobel Peace Prize
- Her activism captured international attention and catapulted her to a fame (many times
unknown to poor indigenous people from Latin America)
- Fled Guatemala as refugee in the 1980s
- Book (translated from Spanish to English, lots of the meaning lost) widely assigned in
universities throughout north America
- Guatemalan civil war ended in 1996
Overview of Guatemalan Cause
Mehu’s Testioio
- Narrative style as a collective experience (tells the story in first person, describing experiences
she underwent personally but them it emerges that she is using her voice to tell a collective
story
- Relating stories for which she was not necessarily present but she heard from other members
of her community etc.
- Family accused of communism
- They left their village to make sure the army would not come after them and would not come
after their village
- They joined Army of the Poor guerrillas (did not become as popular as counterparts in El
Salvador etc.)
- Her brother betrayed, tortured killed for 15 quetzals (says she was present turns out she was
not)
- Guatemalans seized Spanish embassy to raise international awareness of their plight and the
embassy set on fire in the midst of this (suspect that the Guatemalan regime set it on fire)
- Knowing regime is hunting hr as well, flees across border to Mexico
- Guatemalan regime worried about guerrilla activity
- Stoll saying what of it was actually the insurgency that brought upon the wrath of the
Guatemalan regime
- What if the
Beele’s Defese of Testioio
- Cites “toll’s ook idel
- Something of the experience of body in pain or hunger, trace of the real that you find in
Testimonio that you would not find in a scholarly account or a non-first person account of the
experiences of someone like Menchu growing up in an oppressed population and experience
death of her family in the midst of oppression
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Her activism captured international attention and catapulted her to a fame (many times unknown to poor indigenous people from latin america) Fled guatemala as refugee in the 1980s. Book (translated from spanish to english, lots of the meaning lost) widely assigned in universities throughout north america. Narrative style as a collective experience (tells the story in first person, describing experiences she underwent personally but them it emerges that she is using her voice to tell a collective story. Relating stories for which she was not necessarily present but she heard from other members of her community etc. They left their village to make sure the army would not come after them and would not come after their village. They joined army of the poor guerrillas (did not become as popular as counterparts in el. Her brother betrayed, tortured killed for 15 quetzals (says she was present turns out she was not)
