ABSTRACT
Rigoberta Menchu's unacknowledged school career provided the architecture for her 1982 account of the revolutionary movement’s smuggling her to Mexico. In Paris Rigoberta extolled the superior revolutionary consciousness of one of her sisters, who joins the guerrillas unbeknownst to her parents at the age of eight, who lectures Rigoberta on the need for stoicism, and who, after the death of their mother, goes back to Chimel to take her even smaller sister to safety in Mexico. The idea was to use the imagery of the embassy martyrs to mobilize the masses for insurrection. According to FP-31 announcements, the guerrillas were the unquestionable vanguard of the Guatemalan people and popular revolutionary war was the people’s only road forward. In the highlands, the implications of guerrilla strategy for grassroots activists were just as devastating. Even if organizations were not infiltrated by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, the mere fact of doing community work in area where guerrillas were active was lethal.
