Rigoberta Menchu is probably the most famous Guatemalan of Mayan ancestry, having won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. While the wacky Scandinavians commended her as a representative voice of the native Indian people, just how "representative" Rigoberta Menchu is can be discerned from the results of Guatemala's presidential election. The results, released on Monday, show that Menchu came in sixth in a field of 14 with just 3 percent of the vote.
Who is Rigoberta Menchu? I first encountered her name in the Stanford multicultural curriculum while I was researching my first book Illiberal Education. Interestingly one Stanford professor described Rigoberta as a "quadruple victim" of oppression. That's right, a quadruple victim. She was a person of color and a victim of racism, a woman and a victim of sexism, a South Central American (thank you, commenters) and a victim of North American colonialism, and a Mayan of Indian descent and hence oppressed by the light-skinned ruling class of Guatemala. Rigoberta's harrowing tale of victim hood is eloquently told in her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu.
The only problem is that many of the actual details in that book are made up. Rigoberta tells of how the military killed her brother, but the New York Times found her brother alive and well and living in a neighboring town. Rigoberta describes how the Guatemalan right-wing military seized her family's land, but the mayor of her town said that her parents were actually involved in a longstanding inheritance feud with relatives, and that this family dispute was the reason the title to the land was undetermined. If you want the full story pick up my book Letters to a Young Conservative, but only if you are prepared to laugh out loud.
What, then, explains Rigoberta's curricular appeal at Stanford and elsewhere? The answer is pretty simple: she doesn't represent the Guatemalans, but she does represent the politics of victimization that is championed by many American left-wing professors. And of course by posing as an indigenous victim, showing up at the United Nations festooned in native garb and singing stereotypical songs of woe, Rigoberta completely fooled the wacky Scandinavians. Remember that Rigoberta won her Nobel Prize in 1992. This was the 500-year anniversary of the Columbus landing. Get it? The wacky Scandinavians were determined to stick it to Columbus by awarding the Nobel prize to a native Indian. Chief Sitting Bull has long been dead, so the choice pretty much came down to Rigoberta, some big-time Indian casino operators, or the woman who played Pocahontas in the Disney movie. That's how Rigoberta got her prize.
But the Guatemalans know that Rigoberta is a scam artist, and also that she is not one of them. Even one of her fellow-Mayans is quoted in Tuesday's New York Times saying, "She's one of us, but she's not." Another man, Diego Ramirez, complains that "Menchu has gotten all this money from the outside, and we haven't seen it." The lesson I draw from this episode is that it's easy to fool Stanford leftists and wacky Scandinavians, but it's harder to pull the llama's wool over the eyes of your own people.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 3)
1. IS AL QAEDA RUNNING MOVEON.ORG NOW. THEY ARE SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE.
AL QAEDA IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION NOT A RELIGIOUS ONE!!
CHARLIE at 12:34PM on Sep 13th 2007
2. THE SURRENDER MONKEY(NANCY PELOSI AND HARRY REID) WILL FAIL AGAIN. WHY? BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY A LARGE MAJORITY WANT US TO WIN IN IRAQ!!
AL QAEDA IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION NOT A RELIGIOUS ONE!!
CHARLIE at 12:39PM on Sep 13th 2007
3. Sadly, CHARLIE, it's foolish (and seemingly unstable) people like yourself that this administration find so easy to convince. Keep on believing everything is just fine. In 20 years we'll still be there (with the Republicans still asking for, "patience.")
You'll still be yelling out that we need to stay there.
gd at 1:06PM on Sep 13th 2007
4. Rigoberta Menchu sounds like a real wacko and con artist, but no one has died because of her deceit and egotistical delusions. Lets give the people of Guatemala a big round of applause. At least they know a fraud when they see one
randy at 1:30PM on Sep 13th 2007
5. "In 20 years we'll still be there (with the Republicans still asking for, "patience.")"
Why not? We're still in Germany and Japan, therefore World War II must be a quagmire. :-D
Mark at 1:53PM on Sep 13th 2007
6. Way off topic though...
Mark at 1:53PM on Sep 13th 2007
7. Minorities are indeed victims in as much as the liberal school establishment does not teach them to write the alphabet fluently in kindergarten, nor to give fluent answers to simple addition facts in the second-grade....Bob
Bob at 1:54PM on Sep 13th 2007
8. Sad, Dinesh, you have to go back to 1992 to trash anyone that does not agree with your conservative philosophy. Perhaps this woman was not deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, but bringing it up 15 years later serves what purpose?
Notice how Dinesh seems to almost always pick on anyone of a different ethnicity than Anglo-Saxons? Never mind that he too is of some other ethnicity. His hero worship of caucasian conservatives borders on the pathological.
I cannot see that Scandanavians are any "wackier" than those who think this man is a serious writer.
David S. at 2:14PM on Sep 13th 2007
9. So, what is the point of this?
Did you have nothing else to write about?
All you have said has been known for years dear..
This has been written about before and even published in books...
Maybe if you wrote about things that people did not stress years ago (she won the prize in 1992 and after that people have written tons of stuff about it)
Lets ask ourselves this question:
Does it matter if she really went through what she said she went through or that it is still happening today in Guatemala?
She may be a fraud, but her tactics have made the world much more aware of what has been going on in Guatemala.
Magda at 2:20PM on Sep 13th 2007
10. Yeah DD it's too bad the Guatemalans were a lot smarter at figuring out a lying fraud running for president than Americans were.
Larry at 2:30PM on Sep 13th 2007
11. Maybe these would add some truth to your story.
There are at least 21 Mayan groups and maybe they all don't get along, therefore she wasn't expected to have all Mayans vote for her.
Maybe some Mayans wanted her to share her Nobel Prize money.
And on August 27, 2007 she withdrew:
Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu on Sunday halted her campaign for Guatemala's presidency due to a shortage of fund and poor showing in opinion polls, according to news reaching here.
Menchú’s father, a leader of the rural Campesino Unity Committee, died when the POLICE burned the Spanish embassy in 1981, when it was occupied by activists.
Joe at 3:09PM on Sep 13th 2007
12. #10 "She may be a fraud, but her tactics have made the world much more aware of what has been going on in < You fill in the blank>"
The old "Michael Moore" rationalization........
johnzabchuk at 3:17PM on Sep 13th 2007
13. I get the distinct impression that Dinesh was rejected by the so-called liberal professors at Stanford U. and that he has been on a tear against them ever since. Concerning Dinesh obvious lack of knowledge and reasoning powwer, I bet they laughed him right out of the building for being a jerk. Of course, Leland Stanford was infamous for importing cheap Chinese labor to build his railroad at the end of the nineteenth century. Their living and working conditions were so harsh, while so many of them unnecessarily died (thanks to Leland) that that is where we came up with the term "A Chinaman's chance in hell." So it doesn't surprise me in the least that Dinesh probably feels alienated with the university, since Leland would have had him working a real job.
gshort3011 at 4:24PM on Sep 13th 2007
14. THESE "PRIZES" ARE ALWAYS GIVEN TO THE "LEFT" IN OUR WORLD, (BY THIS COMMITTEE) SO I'M HAPPY TO SEE THAT THEY FINALLY GOT THEIRS... BY BEING THE ONES THAT WERE "FOOLED" THIS TIME AROUND.
MIKE at 4:31PM on Sep 13th 2007
15. I think if Ms. Menchu really wanted to bring attention to the atrocities in Guatemala, she should have written a work of fiction based on historical facts. Isabel Allende and Julia Alvarez have effectively used fiction in this regard. Had Rigoberta Menchu written her book as a novel based on a very real situation, she would not have come under fire. Lying to try to establish validity by writing under the guise of non-fiction only hurt her cause.
Tab at 4:51PM on Sep 13th 2007