I think it's time to put together a series on leftist icons and the reality behind them. For the first entry, I choose Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu.
The fact that she's a fraud hasn't much diminished Rigoberta Menchu's status with the PC Left. She didn't have to give back her Nobel Peace Prize and her book is still quite the hit with the stooges of Academia. Her story is just too "good", so its veracity, in the tradition of agit-prop, matters little. Who cares, e.g. that her allegedly starved to death brother was found alive and well by the New York Times? She's still an icon for "social justice" and "peace".
Here excerpts from a few articles on the topic. They're, by the way, drowned out by all the pro-Menchu hype online.
By David Horowitz
ONE OF THE GREATEST HOAXES of the Twentieth Century, the story of Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Mayan from Guatemala, whose autobiography catapulted her to international fame, won her the Nobel Peace Prize, and made her an international emblem of the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere and their attempt to rebel against the oppression of European conquerors, has now been exposed as a political fabrication, a tissue of lies.
Equally remarkable, and indicative of the cultural power of the perpetrators of this hoax, the revelation of Rigobertas mendacity has changed nothing. The Nobel committee has already refused to take back her prize; the thousands of college courses that make her book a required text for American college students will continue to do so; and the editorial writers of the major press institutions have already defended her falsehoods on the same grounds that supporters of Tawana Brawleys parallel hoax made famous: even if she's lying, she's telling the truth.
The 1982 autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu, which launched the hoax was actually written by a French leftist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. She is the wife of the Marxist, Regis Debray, who provided the "foco" strategy for Che Guevara's failed effort to foment a guerilla war in Bolivia in the 1960s. Debrays misguided theory got Guevara and an undetermined number of Bolivian peasants killed and, as we shall see, is at the root of the tragedies that overwhelmed Rigoberta Menchu and her family.
As told in her autobiography, the story of Rigoberta is a classic Marxist myth. The Menchus were a poor Mayan family living on the margins of a country from which they had been dispossessed by the Spanish conquistadors, whose descendants are known as ladinos, and who try to drive the Menchus and other Indian peasants off unclaimed land that they had cultivated. The child Rigoberta was illiterate. Her peasant father, Vicente, refused to send her to school because he needed her to work in the fields. So poor is the Menchu family because of their lack of land that Rigoberta has to watch her younger brother die of starvation. Meanwhile, her father is engaged in a heroic but ultimately hopeless battle with the ladino masters of the land for a plot to cultivate. Finally, Vicente organizes a resistance movement called the Committee for Campesino Unity to advance the land claims of the indigenas against the ladino masters. Rigoberta becomes a political organizer too. The resistance movement links up with a Guatemalan revolutionary force called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (ERG). To suppress the roused people, the brutal security forces of the conquistadors are called into the fray and eventually prevail. The family is forced to watch Rigoberta's brother burned alive. Vicente Menchu is killed. Rigoberta's mother is raped and killed.
As told by Rigoberta, the tragedy of the Menchus is "the story of all Guatemalas poor." It is a call to people of good will all over the world to help the good but powerless indigenous peoples of Guatemala and other Third World countries to their rightful inheritance. Made internationally famous by the success of her book and by the Nobel Prize she was awarded in 1992, Rigoberta is now head of the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation for Human Rights and a spokesperson for the cause of "social justice and peace."
Unfortunately for this political fantasy, virtually everything that Rigoberta has written is a lie. Her lies, moreover, are neither incidental nor accidental. They are lies about the central events and facts of her story, and they have been concocted to shape its political content, to create a specific political myth. This begins on the very first page of her text:
When I was older, my father regretted my not going to school, as I was a girl able to learn many things. But he always said: "Unfortunately, if I put you in school, they'll make you forget your class; they'll turn you into a ladino. I don't want that for you and that's why I don't send you." He might have had the chance to put me in school when I was about fourteen or fifteen but he couldn't do it because he knew what the consequences would be: the ideas that they would give me.
To the unsuspecting reader, this looks like an all-too perfect realization of the Marxist paradigm, in which the ruling ideas become the ideas of the ruling class through its control of the means of education. But, contrary to her assertions, Rigoberta was not uneducated. Nor did her father oppose her education because he feared it would indoctrinate her in the values of the ladino ruling class. Her father, in fact, sent her to two prestigious private boarding schools, operated by Catholic nuns, where she received the equivalent of a middle-school education. (Although it has not been established, it is probably there, in a telling irony, that she was recruited to the Marxist faith, and became a spokesperson for Communist guerrillas.) Because Rigoberta was indeed away at boarding school for most of her youth, her detailed accounts of herself laboring eight months a year on coffee and cotton plantations and organizing a political underground are also probably false.
These and other pertinent details have now been established by anthropologist David Stoll, one of the leading academic experts on Guatemala, who interviewed more than 120 Guatemalans, including relatives, friends, neighbors, and former teachers and classmates, over a ten-year period, as the basis of his new biography, Rigoberta Menchu And The Story of All Poor Guatemalans. To coincide with the publication of Stolls book, the New York Times sent reporter, Larry Rohter, to Guatemala to attempt to verify Stoll's findings, which he did.
Perhaps the most salient of Stoll's findings is the way in which Rigoberta has distorted the sociology of her family situation, and that of the Mayans in the region of Uspantan. Rigoberta had no brother who starved to death, at least none that her own family could remember. The ladinos were not a ruling caste in Rigobertas town or district, in which there were no large estates or fincas as she claims. The Menchus, moreover, were not poor in the way Rigoberta describes them. Vicente Menchu had title to 2,753 hectares of land. The 22-year land dispute described by Rigoberta, which is the central event in the book leading to the rebellion and the tragedies that followed was, in fact, over a tiny 151 hectare parcel of land. Most importantly, Vicente Menchu's "heroic struggle against the landowners who wanted to take our land" was in fact not a dispute with representatives of a European-descended conquistador class but with his own Mayan relatives, the Tum family, headed by his wife's uncle.
Vicente Menchu did not organize a peasant resistance called the Committee for Campesino Unity, and was a conservative insofar as he was political at all. His consuming passion was not any social concern, but the family feud with his in-laws, who were small landowning peasants like himself. It was his involvement in this feud that caused him to be caught up in the larger political drama, that was really irrelevant to his concerns and that ultimately killed him.
At the end of the Seventies, Cuba's Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, launched a new turn in Cuban foreign policy, sponsoring and arming a series of guerrilla offensives in Central America -- Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala -- along lines laid down by Regis Debray and Che Guevara a decade before. The leaders of these movements were generally not Indians but Hispanics, principally the disaffected middle- and upper-class scions of the ruling castes of those countries. They were often the graduates of cadre training centers in Moscow and Havana, and of terrorist training camps in Lebanon and East Germany. (The leaders of the Salvadoran guerillas even included a Lebanese Communist and Shiite Muslim named Shafik Handal.)
One of these forces, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, showed up in Uspantan, the largest township near Rigobertas village, on April 29, 1979. According to eyewitnesses, they painted everything within reach red, grabbed the tax collectors money and threw it in the streets, tore down the jail, released the prisoners, and chanted in the town square "We're defenders of the poor" for fifteen or twenty minutes.
None of the guerillas was masked because none of them was local. As strangers, they had no understanding of the Uspantan situation in which virtually all the land disputes were between the Mayan inhabitants themselves. Instead, they perceived things according to the Marxist textbook version perpetuated now by Rigoberta and the Nobel Prize committee, and executed two local ladino landholders. Thinking that the guerrillas were now the power in his region, Vicente Menchu cast his fate with them by providing them with a meeting place, and accompanying them on a protest. But the Guatemalan security forces, primed for the hemispheric offensive that Castro had launched, quickly descended on the region with characteristic brutality. They were abetted by enraged relatives of the murdered ladino peasants seeking revenge on the leftist assassins. The violence this triggered resulted in the deaths of many innocents, including Rigoberta's parents and a second brother (although it is certain that Rigoberta did not witness his death as she falsely claims).
The most famous incident in Rigoberta's book is the occupation of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City in January, 1980, by a group of guerrillas and protesting peasants. Vicente Menchu was the peasant spokesman. The occupation itself was led by the Robin Garcia Revolutionary Student Front. A witness, recorded by David Stoll, described how Vicente was primed for his role:
They would tell Don Vicente, "Say, The people united will never be defeated, " and Don Vicente would say, "The people united will never be defeated." They would tell Don Vicente, "Raise your left hand when you say it," and he would raise his left hand.
...
As a result of Stoll's research, Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu has been exposed as a Communist agent working for terrorists who were ultimately responsible for the death of her own family. So rigid is Rigoberta's party loyalty to the Castroist cause that she refused to denounce the Sandinista dictatorships genocidal attempt to eliminate its Miskito Indians, despite billing herself as a champion of indigenous peoples. She even broke with her own translator, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, over the issue of the Miskitos (Burgos-Debray, along with other prominent French leftists had protested the attacks).
In 1982, an unlettered Guatemalan peasant exiled in Paris told her story to a Marxist scholar. The book she dictated, I, Rigoberta Menchú, would be published in twelve languages and assigned at thousands of colleges. She would become the Shakespeare of the emerging multicultural canon. With such chapters as "Rigoberta Denounces Marriage and Motherhood," the text reported that the typical poor Central American bought into every faddish ideology exalted on campus—Marxism, environmentalism, feminism, liberation theology, etc. The book's introduction maintains that the word of this indigenous Guatemalan "allows the defeated to speak." Her book goes beyond the power of a mere autobiography and "speaks for all the Indians of the American continent."
The Marxist refugee held audiences with the Pope, the Dalai Lama, UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali, and numerous world leaders. This woman that gloried in her illiteracy was awarded more than a dozen honorary doctorates and appointed goodwill ambassador by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. In 1992, 500 years after Columbus landed in the New World and in the midst of peace talks aimed at ending her nation's protracted civil war, Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize.
"What a miracle that someone like us who eats tortillas and chili arrived at the Nobel Prize," a Guatemalan peasant wondered. "How I would like to know how that happened!"
How it happened isn't quite the "miracle" it seemed. More earthly forces were at work. Specifically, dishonesty and the gullibility of an intellectual world willing to buy into any story so long as it fit its ideological needs. In Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, anthropologist David Stoll reveals this secular saint of the intellectual class to be a fraud, understating that "the nature of my findings is inopportune for many scholars."
At the core of I, Rigoberta Menchu is her family's struggle against wealthy ladino (European-descended) landowners. It is this racist oppression that brings about the deaths of members of her family and Rigoberta's Marxism. Yet, this example of modern day colonialism is a fabrication.
The unanimous recollection of those interviewed by Stoll show that the Menchus' problems were with other Mayas. Court records demonstrate that over a 17-year period, 18 of the 19 petitions filed by the Menchus and their allies were directed toward other indigenous landowners. A greater number of complaints was filed against the Menchus by other Maya families. The family patriarch was even beaten by fellow peasants as a result of the land feud. There is no record of him as a "political prisoner," as Rigoberta claimed, but it seems that his own peers forced authorities to jail him at one point. "Unfortunately" Stoll observes, "a heroic view of peasants blinds us to the possibility that they consider their main problem to be one another. Instead of resisting the state, peasants are using it against other members of their own social class."
"To include the conflict with [other Indians] would bring up the internecine disputes that absorb so much of the political energy of subordinate groups," notes Stoll. "It would contradict the vision of the virtuous peasants rising up against their true class enemies. How more appropriate, then, to attribute all the boundary problems to ladino planters."
The hero of Rigoberta's narrative is her father, Vicente Menchu. At every turn, his life is distorted to justify the Marxist worldview. He is portrayed as having been conscripted against his will as a young man, yet "according to a member of Vicente's family, he joined the army as a volunteer. An elder recalled that, after his first year and a half of duty, he liked the army well enough to reenlist."
A similar invention surrounds her description of his rejection of Western missionaries attempting to improve local farming techniques. "Indians reject the chemical fertilizers they tried to teach us about. They weren't really welcome so they left," she claimes. Yet by all accounts Vicente Menchu was an enthusiastic participant in Peace Corps and other programs that gave aid to farmers. In I, Rigoberta Menchu, Vicente is radicalized and helps build the foundation of the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC), a revolutionary group seeking the overthrow of the Guatemalan government. Stoll rejects this claim. "If there is a single CUC publication that claims Vicente as a member, let alone founder, I have yet to find it," he states.
Rigoberta infers that her father was an innocent killed by the army because of his participation in a political demonstration. In reality, Vicente Menchu joined a mob of peasants and guerrillas who stormed the Spanish Embassy, taking prisoners and brandishing homemade explosives. In the ensuing confrontation, there was a fire that consumed the rebels and their hostages. Thirty-six people died. While no one can be sure how the fire started, there is considerable evidence suggesting that it spread as a result of a Molotov cocktail thrown by one of the guerillas at the Guatemalan police.
Her brother Petrocinio, whom she dramatically claims was tortured and immolated in the public square, was killed, but not in such an unforgettable manner. Stoll reports, "when I brought up Rigoberta's story of prisoners being burned alive in the plaza of Chajul, all I harvested were quizzical looks." Another brother that is killed by the "right wing" army in I, Rigoberta Menchú, turns up alive and well. It is beyond dispute that Rigoberta and her family suffered greatly during the Guatemalan civil war. It is also clear, however, that this truth is twisted and exploited for political ends. It is also simply not the case that Rigoberta was herself in the middle of the action.
Nor was Rigoberta an illiterate peasant toiling in the fields by day and organizing workers by night. During the period she purports to have been laboring as a migrant worker active in the revolutionary movement, Rigoberta was actually attending a prestigious boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In I, Rigoberta Menchú, the future Nobel Laureate quotes her father as explaining, "if I put you in school, they'll make you forget your class, they'll turn you into a ladino."
If schooling really did bring class and cultural transformation, that prospect was apparently so endearing to Vicente Menchu that he sacrificed greatly to make it happen. "I interviewed six women who studied with Rigoberta," reports Stoll, "plus three others who had heard stories about her." Additional testimony came from members of Rigoberta's family. "Her way of talking was no longer that of ours," remembers a brother of her visits home. "She admonished us to speak correctly."
But why would Rigoberta deem it necessary to lie about the seemingly trivial matter of her educational background? Is it because within the Marxist circles in which Rigoberta traveled it was no trivial matter? Menchu certainly was correct in seeing the currency in fitting into multiple categories of oppression. Being a woman and an Indian in war-torn Central America gave her a platform—exaggerating her poverty and falsely claiming illiteracy guaranteed people would listen. Whatever this instance of dishonesty says about Menchu, it speaks volumes about the intellectuals she sought to impress—they are a group that sees illiteracy as a virtue.
Menchu's reaction to the recent revelations is perhaps predictable -— "racism!" "Whites have been writing our history for five hundred years, and no white anthropologist is going to tell me what I experienced in my own flesh," she expounds defiantly. She also claims that Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, the woman who edited her story, reworked it for maximum effect. Alas, Burgos-Debray still has the tapes proving Menchu's guilt.
It is perhaps understandable that an orphaned twentysomething peasant embroiled in a civil war would concoct an untruthful story to gain sympathy for the combatants she saw as on the side of the angels. Wartime propaganda is far from unusual. What is perhaps unforgivable is that the story would be promoted -- without inspection -— by so many whose task is purportedly to search out the truth.
Even the author finds excuses for those who championed Menchu's tale. "Given the need to arouse international opinion, it is hard to fault Elisabeth [Burgos-Debray] for publishing as soon as she could." But is it the role of scholars to "arouse international attention" or expose what is true?
More distressing is that even after Stoll's earth-shattering revelations, many scholars plan to assign the book as if nothing has changed. An ad hoc survey conducted by a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals that most professors will continue to assign the book without apologies.
It is Stoll, and not Menchu, who is seen as deserving of censure. Stoll observes:
Certainly Rigoberta was a representative of her people, but hiding behind that was a more partisan role, as a representative of the revolutionary movement, and hiding behind that was an even more unsettling possibility: that she represented the audiences whose assumptions about indigenas she mirrored so effectively. I believe this is why it was so indecent of me to question her claims. Exposing problems in Rigoberta's story was to expose how supporters have subliminally used it to clothe their own contradictions, in a Durkheimian case of society worshiping itself. Here was an indigena who represented the unknowable other, yet she talked a language of protest with which the Western left could identify. She protected revolutionary sympathizers from the knowledge that the revolutionary movement was a bloody failure. Her iconic status concealed a costly political agenda that by the time her story was becoming known, had more appeal in universities than among the people she was supposed to represent.
In a world where Rigoberta Menchu is viewed as an icon, it is amazing that this book was ever printed. David Stoll is an anthropologist who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. Untenured, Stoll's professional courage is admirable, although much of the story has been known to him throughout the 1990s. He admits to yielding for several years "to the self-censorship that is pervasive in graduate schools and junior faculties" by suppressing the story. Nevertheless, his research is hardly suppressed these days, as the New York Times recently ran a front-page article corroborating his findings.
"Now that Rigoberta has won the Nobel Prize," the reporter asked, "what is your reaction?"
"All I can say," I replied, "is that I am relieved she didn't win for literature."
For Rigoberta, the Nobel Prize proved to be a canonization in both senses of the term. This obscure Indian woman who published her 1983 autobiography when she was still in her mid '20s, suddenly received worldwide recognition as a leftist icon -- a modern-day Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of racist discrimination and colonial exploitation. She received several honorary doctorates and in 1992 was nominated as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and special representative of indigenous peoples. Her book, haled as a first-person account of Guatemalan bigotry and brutality against native Indians, spread from cutting-edge curricula like Stanford's to become part of the canon of required and frequently assigned readings in high schools and universities around the globe.
Then, just last week, the New York Times revealed that much of I, Rigoberta Menchu is a fabrication. Times reporter Larry Rohter corroborated the research of an American anthropologist, David Stoll, whose interview with over a hundred people and archival research during the past decade led him to conclude that Rigoberta's story "cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be."
For example, in one of the most moving scenes in the book, Rigoberta describes how she watched her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition. But the New York Times found Nicolas alive and well enough to be running a relatively prosperous homestead in a Guatemalan village. According to members of Rigoberta's own family, as well as residents of her village, she also fabricated her account of how a second brother was burned alive by army troops as her parents were forced to watch.
Central to Rigoberta's story -- and the supposed source of her Marxism -- is a land dispute in which her impoverished family, working for slave wages on plantations, is intimidated and oppressed by wealthy landowners of European descent. Those nefarious oligarchs supposedly manipulated the government into forcing the Menchu family and other poor Indians off unclaimed land that they had farmed. According to the locals, however, this dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigoberta's father against his in-laws. "It was a family quarrel that went on for years and years," Efrain Galindo, the mayor of the town, told Rohter. "I wanted peace, but none of us could get them to negotiate a settlement."
Even on small matters, Rigoberta's account turns out to be unreliable. On the very first page of her autobiography, Rigoberta says that she "never went to school" and only learned Spanish as an adult. In fact, she received the equivalent of a middle school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Catholic nuns. Her half-sister Rosa Menchu confirms that since Rigoberta spent much of her youth in boarding schools, she could not possibly have worked as a political organizer and labored up to eight months a year on coffee and cotton plantations, as described in considerable detail in her autobiography.
No less interesting than these revelations has been the reaction to them by Rigoberta Menchu, her champions and advocates. Rigoberta herself senses a racist plot and denounces her critics for "political provocations." The Nobel committee, having found Rigoberta a suitably obscure and politically correct candidate for its peace prize in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in North America, said that it will not rescind the prize even though her only credential for winning was her life story, as narrated in her autobiography.
Equally recalcitrant is the academic community that enshrined, I, Rigoberta Menchu in the multicultural canon in American colleges and universities. The Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, based in New York, boasts that her book is one of the most widely read in classrooms in American and Europe. My cursory check at such leading universities as Stanford, Columbia and Princeton shows that I, Rigoberta Menchu is still widely assigned. So many high schools use the book that there is even a textbook, Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchu and the North American Classroom, about how to teach Rigoberta Menchu's life story.
According to reporter Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education, who has been calling professors around the country who teach I, Rigoberta Menchu, most of them are outraged -- not with Menchu for making things up, but with anthropologist David Stoll for exposing her fraud. Virtually all of the professors Wilson contacted defiantly told her that they would not stop assigning I, Rigoberta Menchu to their students.
Some of this may be the defensiveness of those in shock. But still it raises the question of how universities, supposedly dedicated to truth and critical thinking, can continue to teach a book that is full of falsehoods. For now, Rigoberta's academic fan club resorts to what may be termed the Tawana Brawley defense, named after the New York teenager who faked a racially motivated rape. The lawyers and civil rights activists who defended Brawley said it didn't matter that she had concocted her tale, because a racist society causes such desperation. As legal scholar Patricia Williams put it, "No matter who did it to her, and even if she did it to herself, Tawana Brawley has been the victim of some unspeakable violation."
In a similar vein, Rigoberta apologists like Marjori Agosin of Wellesley College now argue that whether or not Rigoberta's autobiography was faked, the native Indians of Guatemala have endured unimaginable hardships, the death squads of Latin America were a reality of the 1970s and 1980s, and so despite a few inconveniences of detail, the general message of I, Rigoberta Menchu is essentially true.
Rather, the argument for teaching I, Rigoberta Menchu is based on the claim that, for all its literary flaws, the book is an accurate and authentic representation of the sufferings of a people, perhaps of all oppressed peoples. Rigoberta Menchu's translator and literary collaborator, the French feminist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, recognized this fact in her introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchu: "Her life story is an account of contemporary history. [...] She speaks for all the Indians of the American continent. [...] The voice of Rigoberta allows the defeated to speak. She is a privileged witness. [...] Her story is overwhelming because what she has to say is simple and true." By the same token, if what she has to say is neither accurate nor representative, there can be no possible case for teaching the book, unless one wants to include it in a survey of celebrated hoaxes.
So what explains the continuing allegiance to her autobiography among Western academics? The answer is, even if Rigoberta does not accurately reflect the experiences of oppressed people in Guatemala, she does reflect the political ideology of American professors who came of age in the 1960s. She embodies a projection of Western Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture, which is manipulated and distorted to serve Western political objectives. Her radicalism provides Third World confirmation of Western progressive ideology. She is in fact a mouthpiece for a left-wing critique of the West that is all the more powerful because it seems to come from an "authentic" Third World source.
Rigoberta thus provides a model with which American minority and female students are meant to identify: They, too, are oppressed like her; they, too, can make victimology a basis for group solidarity. And if they spend their precious college years reading this stuff and thereby waste the opportunity to have a genuine liberal arts education? Well, that's just too bad. For Rigoberta's admirers to renounce her now would be to give up a standard-bearer of progressive grievance and alienation.
Rigoberta Menchu has all along been a willing and crafty accomplice in this cultural transaction. With extraordinary canniness, she presented herself in her autobiography as the consummate victim, a quadruple victim of oppression. She is a person of color, and thus a victim of racism. She is a woman, and thus a victim of sexism. She is a Latin American, and thus a victim of European and North American colonialism. She is an Indian, and thus victimized by the Latino ruling class of Latin America.
For such ingenuity in seizing the bottom rung of the ladder, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize?
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