Daniel J. Flynn

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 Menchú 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 Menchú 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 Menchú 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 Menchús’ problems were with other Mayas. Court records demonstrate that over a 17-year period, 18 of the 19 petitions filed by the Menchús and their allies were directed toward other indigenous landowners. A greater number of complaints was filed against the Menchús 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 Menchú. 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 Menchú was an enthusiastic participant in Peace Corps and other programs that gave aid to farmers. In I, Rigoberta Menchú, 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 Menchú 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 Menchú 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? Menchú 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 Menchú, it speaks volumes about the intellectuals she sought to impress—they are a group that sees illiteracy as a virtue.

Menchú’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 Menchú’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 Menchú’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 Menchú, 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 Menchú 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.

"Rigoberta is a legitimate Mayan voice," Stoll permits. "So are all the young Mayas who want to move to Los Angeles or Houston. So is the man with a large family who owns three worn-out acres and wants me to buy him a chain saw so he can cut down the last forest more quickly. Any of these people can be picked out to make misleading generalizations about Mayas. But I doubt that the man who wants the chain saw will be invited to multicultural universities anytime soon. Until he does, books like I, Rigoberta Menchú will be exalted because they tell many academics what they want to hear."