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 3 of 3)
31. Is that guy going mad? I think we should send him back where he belong to India or Bangladesh.
Bob Duval at 4:07AM on Sep 14th 2007
32. yo, dinesh! what are you complaining about? yasser arafat/shimon perez/yitzhak rabin-troika of trouble and more trouble-1994 Peace Prize. Go figure. Peace Prize share: Nelson Mandela(sure makes sense) & F D DeKlerk (gotta be kidding)! Mother Teresa,another Peace Prize winner (for what?! she managed to bank upwards to 300-500millions-maybe they should have given her the Economics Prize). Henry Kissinger-that murky,murderous mad man given a Peace Prize!!! Gustav Stresemann-1926 Peace Prize-lenient toward Hitler and Social Democratic aims.
dinesh-Rigoberta is a saint in comparison to the above-listed mad-hatter opportunists. They,too,managed to deceive the committee.So Give the woman a break.
boredwell at 5:01AM on Sep 14th 2007
33. Sure, like that Left-leaning Nobel Prize winner Henry Kissinger. Or that other lefty, Yassir Arafat. Mother Theresa also won it, was she a lefty too?
Considering that at least four of the winners of the "peace prize" have been involved in planning war, it seems odd to be spending time criticizing a fraud rather than a murderer. Priorities I guess....
Ryan at 9:34AM on Sep 14th 2007
34. Per Karen in post #27. "Oh good grief. Flaunt your ignorance by referring to "llama's wool"------ llamas are from South America, Dinesh, not Central America...which happens to be where Guatemala is situated. They don't raise llamas in Guatemala. Sheesh!!!"
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Try to calm down Karen; D'Souza is just playing a little bit with words in order to make the article more interesting.
His reference to llama wool is a play on the old expression about "pulling the wool over someone's eyes". When one writes that "it was raining cats and dogs" that doe not mean cats and dogs were falling from the sky. When one says "a journey of a thosand miles begins with one step", it does not necessarily mean you are talking about actual physical travel.
To stand around and bawl that it is impossible for dags and cats to fall from sky, or in the case of the thousand-mile voyage, to inquire about travel plan details is at best pedantic.
You may not find D'Souza's use of this technique interesting or humorous, but in addition to revealing your tedious side, you really show your own literary shallowness by not recognizing this part of the piece as a simple writing technique rather that a statement of fact.
Ken Berg at 10:28AM on Sep 14th 2007
35. This is an old piece of news. Danesh must not have had a liberal cause to pick on today
Joe Hammons at 1:12PM on Sep 14th 2007
36. Disbelieving someone's version of their personal experience does not invalidate their experience, nor what they went through physically and emotionally on whatever level it was at. Only the first hand teller of their life can know the truth.
If everyone held your uneducated views of the world, we would all believe that the holocaust in Germany and in Europe never took place, and that genocide was not occuring this minute in Darfur.
I belive that Rigoberta spoke about what she went through, using the best connecting language she had to tell her story.
Tami at 8:57PM on Sep 26th 2007
37. First, Dinesh Guatemala is in Central America not South America, so do your research before you even start writing. We are not all the same, you know. And what's with the analogy of the llama's fur at the end, again llamas are native of the Peruvian Andes.
If you are a serious writer, historian, whatever you call yourself, please do write about the atrocities committed in Guatemala in the 80s by the army and paramilitary groups trained and armed by the Reagan administration, never heard of Iran Gate. Why, because we had to protect our interests as usual, yeah our Chiquita banana plantations in Central America.
JOn for Prez-Steve VP at 9:51AM on Sep 20th 2007
38. Rigoberta Manchu might be a fraud as Mr. D'Soussa claims I can't agree or contradict simply because I don't have the information I need to make such a judgement on her. However, there is no question in my mind having travelled to Guatemale many times as a Technical Advison on health to various grass-roots organization, that the Guatemalan people of indigenous ancestry have suffered undescribable horrors in the hands of the militrary and the so called "ladinos" or people of mixed ancestry (Spanish & indian) and of the white peopulation simply because they are indigenous looking. Think about what was done to blaks in the US and you get an idea.
Meg Gutierrez at 12:28PM on Sep 20th 2007
39. The worst possible thing that Rigoberta may have done was lied. If so, her lies caused the world to stop and think about Guatemala. Her voice, regardless of its honesty, was powerful enough the underline the repression of indigenous people that is often ignored.
It has been concluded without a reasonable doubt that native Mayan people were the victims of genocide during the civil war. Rigoberta's words helped her people.
Did she lie? It's uncertain. As is inevitable with personal verbal testimonials, there are inconsistencies. She may have exagerated on some things. She may have even invented other things (or her interpreter she spoke through in Paris.) However, most of what she said was true. In fact, worse things were happening in Guatemala and forensic anthropology as well as official human rights commisions have proven so.
Despite the fact that most of what she said can be proven as hard facts, and other things are at best laden with controversey, I'd say that if a using a lie can stop genocide, then lie all you can.
Some people seem so wrapped up in their bias that they will use anything to bash the other side. In this case, the bias and left-bashing gives me the impression you are glossing over genocide. You also seem to have this anti-victim edge that many conservatives seem to have. Although I'm no big fan of frivolous assumptions of victimhood, I'd say genocide victims should be respected. Just like it wouldn't be cool to tell a Holocaust survivor to "get over it and stop acting like a victim," I think the same should be said for Guatemalan genocide victims.
Msondo at 1:38AM on Sep 25th 2007
40. Rigoberta Menchu is an amazing woman, and at least she is true to her ethnic identity, unlike you who will do anything possible to please the blonde gods you worship. You are one of the most pathetic examples of an Indian man Ihave ever seen. You are so weak, and you attack innocent people to impress your owners. A right winged, conservative, dark skinned Indian..now I've seen it all. You have NO soul.
jen at 12:17PM on Sep 25th 2007