Of Truth, Secrets, and Ski Masks: Counterrevolutionary Appropriations and Zapatista Revisions of Testimonio

There are many survivors of this battle and each of them is encouraged to contribute his [sic] recollections so that the story may be filled out. I ask only that the narrator be strictly truthful. He should not present any inaccuracy in order to clarify his own role, exaggerate it or claim to have been where he was not.

—Ernesto Che Guevara, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary 1956–58 (1996 [1959])

I'm still keeping secret what I think no one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets.

—Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984 [1982])

The hood is so there would be no superstar or such, you understand. Sometimes there is, well, those of us who are involved in this stand out a lot. So now, as you don't know much of who is who, perhaps one will leave in a while and perhaps it's the same. What's happening here is the issue of anonymity, not because we fear for ourselves but rather so we don't become corrupted. And so some wear ski masks.

—Subcomandante Marcos, interview in L'unitá (1 January 1994)

Che, Testimonio, and the CIA

In the introduction to his edited anthology of testimonial criticism, The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, Georg Gugelberger (1996, 14) argues that the commodification and “reterritorialization of the testimonio in institutions of higher learning” in the past two decades requires that we “go beyond this genre, learn from the implications of the discourse that accompanied it, and find other developments that now have the potential the testimonio had years ago.” While Gugelberger's call for a renewed historicization of the cultural production and consumption of testimonio is directed toward the academic audience complicit in the reification of the testimonial text, he does not address the contradictions inherent to testimonial practice itself. That is, he does not address testimonio's contradictory teleology of telling, or bearing witness, and the even more problematically hierarchical foco model of revolutionary subjectivity and praxis that animates the foundational testimonial subgenre—the testimonio guerrillero.¹

I submit that testimonio's declining counterhegemonic resonance is foregrounded in its originary moment by the first modern testimonialista—Ernesto Che Guevara. In fact, Che's call for veracity in the prologue to his 1959 testimonio, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, quoted in the first epigraph above, contradicts one of the most fundamental edicts of the guerrilla praxis he outlines in his corresponding 1960 strategic tract, Guerrilla Warfare: “Absolute secrecy, a total absence of information in the enemy's hands, should be the primary base of the movement . . . . In underground conditions no one, absolutely no one, should know anything more than the strictly indispensable; and there ought not to be talk in front of anyone” (Guevara 1985 [1960], 156–57). Che adds that “there should be no compromising documents” in the central headquarters or anywhere insurrectionary meetings or actions take place (158). However, Che's own negotiation of the competing imperatives to truthfully bear witness while strategically occulting and dissimulating truths inevitably proved unsuccessful, lethal, and potentially counterrevolutionary: the inaugural testimonialista was killed in Bolivia in 1967 by U.S.-trained commandos deploying counterinsurgency tactics inversely modeled on Che's own widely disseminated science of guerrilla warfare. Similarly, the mortally abbreviated testimonio-in-progress that would come to be known as Che's Bolivian Diary (1994 [1968]), which purports to chronicle the episodes of a new and imminently victorious revolutionary insurgency in Bolivia, also functions as a loser's narrative. That is, it chronicles the events and circumstances leading to the defeat of Che's self-ordained vanguard force, and thus provides even more tactical insight on how one might wage a successful counterinsurgency operation! Ironically, but perhaps inevitably, testimonial practice serves both...