That would be motive enough in Guatemala to say to him whatever the informant thought the government wanted him to say. At issue in the discipline is who speaks for the native American. That Rigoberta Menchu spoke for herself makes an attack against her veracity inevitable because she did not allow a European ethnographer to speak for her, to speak in place of her, to take her place and speak the truth about Guatemala. To the Mayan person time is not a linear sequence of days that are always already lost to the past before they begin to happen in the present moment. Time has that characteristic only in a circumstance where its progression is predicated on nothing whatsoever except a meaningless revolution of one dead and lifeless celestial body around the fixed position of another dead and lifeless celestial body.
Time is dead before it begins only in European conceptions of reality.
In native American perceptions of the world time is a living entity that has always already existed as a place where living people interact with the living spirits that animate all celestial bodies. The past cannot live in Eurocentric thought processes because European calendars have virtually no connection to anything natural that determines what time is. The idea that the past still exists, of course, is a positive horror to any European because everyone of them hopes against hope that the genocide they have already managed to commit and forget will not and cannot come back to haunt them. It does and it will. No European could ever mimic the simplicity of that statement.