Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (21 page)

As recounted in this autobiography, the story of Rigoberta Menchu is the stuff of classic marxist myth. The Menchus were a poor Mayan family living on the margins of a country from which they had been dispossessed by Spanish conquistadors whose descendants, known as
ladino
s, tried to drive the Menchus and other Indian peasants off unclaimed land they cultivated. As she tells her story, Rigoberta was illiterate and was denied an education by her peasant father, Vicente. He refused to send her to school because he needed her to work in the fields and because he was afraid that the school would turn his daughter against him. So poor was the Menchu family because of their lack of land that Rigoberta had to watch her younger brother die of starvation. Meanwhile, her father was engaged in a heroic but frustrating battle with the
ladino
masters of the land for a plot to cultivate. Finally, Vicente organized a resistance movement called the Committee for Campesino Unity to advance the land claims of the
indigenas
against the
ladino
masters. Rigoberta became a political organizer, too.

Enter the Guevara-Debrayist guerrilla
foco
. The indigenous resistance movement organized by Rigoberta's peasant father linked up with an armed revolutionary force — the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (ERG). Now the peasants had a fighting chance. But the
ladino
descendants of the conquistadors called on the brutal Guatemalan security forces to crush the rebellion and preserve the status quo of social injustice. Vicente Menchu was killed, and the surviving family was forced to watch Rigoberta's brother burned alive. Rigoberta's mother was raped and also killed.

As told by Rigoberta, the tragedy of the Menchus is "the story of all Guatemala's poor." The author of
I, Rigoberta Menchu
makes this linkage explicit: "My personal experience is the reality of a whole people." It is a call to people of good will all over the world to help the noble but powerless indigenous peoples of Guatemala and other Third World countries to gain 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 every important claim that Rigoberta makes is a lie. These lies concern the central events and facts of her story and have been deliberately concocted to shape its political content and to create a specific political myth. This myth begins on the very first page of Rigoberta's 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 trusting reader, this looks like a perfect realization of the marxist paradigm, in which the ruling ideas become the ideas of the ruling class that controls the means of education. But, contrary to her assertions, Rigoberta was not uneducated. Nor did her father oppose her education because he feared the schools would indoctrinate her in the values of the
ladino
ruling class. According to classmates, teachers, and family members, Vicente Menchu did send his daughter, Rigoberta, to school. In fact, he sent her to two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Catholic nuns, where she received the equivalent of a middle-school education. (In a telling irony, it is most likely that she was recruited there to the marxist faith and became a spokesperson for the communist guerrillas.) Because Rigoberta was indeed away at boarding school for most of her youth, moreover, her detailed accounts of herself laboring eight months a year on coffee and cotton plantations and organizing a political underground are also false.

These and other pertinent details have now been established by anthropologist David Stoll, one of the leading academic experts on Guatemala. Stoll interviewed more than no 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 Stoll's book, the New York Times sent reporter Larry Rohter to Guatemala to attempt to verify Stoll's findings, which he was readily able to do.

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, to conform to marxist precepts. The Menchus were not landless poor, and Rigoberta had no brother who starved to death, at least none that her own family could remember. The
ladino
s were not a ruling caste in Rigoberta's town or district, in which there were no large estates or
fincas
as she claims. Far from being a dispossessed peasant, Vicente Menchu had title to 2,753 hectares of land or about seven thousand acres. The twenty-two-year land dispute described by Rigoberta, which is the central event in her book leading to the rebellion and the tragedies that followed was, in fact, over a tiny, but significant, 151 hectare parcel or less than 400 acres. 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. He was a conservative peasant insofar as he was political at all. Even more importantly, 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 family feud that caused him to be caught up in the larger political drama enacted by students and professional revolutionaries, that was really irrelevant to his concerns and that ultimately killed him.

At the end of the 1970s, coincident with a global Soviet offensive, Cuba's Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, launched a new phase in Cuba's foreign policy, sponsoring and arming a series of guerrilla uprisings in Central America. The most significant of these were in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and followed lines that had been laid down by Regis Debray and Che Guevara a decade before. The leaders of these movements were generally not Indian peasants but urban Hispanics, principally the disaffected scions of the middle and upper classes. 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 Salvadorean guerillas even included a Lebanese communist and Shi'ite muslim named Shafik Handal.)

One of these forces, Guatemala's Guerrilla Army of the Poor showed up in Uspantan, the largest township near Rigoberta's village of Chimel, on April 29, 1979. According to eyewitnesses, the guerrillas painted everything within reach red, grabbed the tax collector's 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 guerilla intruders was masked, because none of them was local. As strangers, they had no understanding of the Uspantan situation in which (as Stoll verified) virtually all the land disputes were between the Mayan inhabitants themselves. Instead, they perceived the social problem according to the marxist textbook version, which has now been perpetuated by Rigoberta and the Nobel prize committee through Rigoberta's book. In their first revolutionary act, the guerrillas executed two local
ladino
landholders.

Thinking that this successful violence had established the guerrillas as the power in his region, Vicente Menchu cast his fate with them, providing them with a meeting place, and accompanying them on a protest. But Guatemala's security forces, which had been primed for Castro's Soviet-backed hemispheric offensive, responded by descending on the region with characteristic brutality. The killings that ensued were abetted by enraged relatives of the murdered
ladino
peasants seeking revenge on the leftist assassins. The trail of violence left many innocents slaughtered in its wake, including Rigoberta's parents and a second brother (whose death Rigoberta sensationalizes by falsely claiming that he was burned alive and that she and her parents were forced to witness the act).

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 described to David Stoll how Vicente Menchu 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."

When they had set out on the trip that brought them to the Spanish Embassy, the Uspantan peasants who accompanied the student revolutionaries had no idea where they were going or what the purpose of the trip actually was. Later, David Stoll interviewed a survivor whose husband had died in the incident. She told him that the journey originated in a wedding party at the Catholic church in Uspantan. Two days after the ceremony, the wedding party moved on. "The señores said they were going to the coast, but they arrived at the capital." Once there, the student revolutionaries proceeded with their plan to occupy the embassy and take hostages, with the unsuspecting Mayans ensnared. Although the cause of the tragedy that ensued is in dispute, David Stoll presents persuasive evidence that a Molotov cocktail brought by the revolutionaries ignited and set the embassy on fire. At least thirty-nine people, including Vicente Menchu, were killed.

As a result of Stoll's research, Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu has been exposed as a political 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 after her book was published and she became an international spokesperson for indigenous peoples, she refused to denounce the Sandinista dictatorship's genocidal attempt to eliminate its Miskito Indians.

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 Sandinista attacks.)

Rigoberta's first response to Stoll's exposure of her lies was, on the one hand, "no comment" and, on the other, to add another lie — the denial that she had anything to do with the book that made her famous. But David Stoll listened to two hours of the tapes she made for Burgos-Debray (which provided the text for the book) and concluded that the narrative they recorded was identical to the (false) version of the facts in the book itself. Of course, Rigoberta did not disclaim authorship of the book when she accepted her Nobel Prize.

Under the pressure of Stoll's scrutiny, Rigoberta erected a second line of defense — that her self-portrait was really a composite reality based on many Guatemalan lives. But, if the source pool is large enough, a composite portrait becomes a license to select any data that will "prove" any particular case. If Rigoberta's own story had to be falsified so extensively to make it conform to her political "truth," why is there any reason to believe that it is in fact true?

The fictional life of Rigoberta Menchu is a piece of communist propaganda designed to incite hatred of Europeans, and the societies they have built, and to organize support for communist and terrorist organizations at war with the democracies of the West. It has become the single most influential social treatise read by American college students. At the behest of leftist professors, over fifteen thousand theses have been written on Rigoberta Menchu the world over-all accepting her lies as gospel. Rigoberta herself has been the recipient of fourteen honorary doctorates from prestigious institutions of higher learning, and the Nobel Prize committee has made Rigoberta an international figure and spokesperson for "social justice and peace."

Almost as remarkable as the hoax itself, and indicative of the enormous cultural power of its perpetrators, is the fact that the revelation of Rigoberta's mendacity has changed almost nothing. The Nobel committee has already refused to take back her prize, many of 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 Brawley's parallel hoax made famous: even if she's lying, she's telling the truth.

In an editorial responding to these revelations and typical of press reactions, the
Los Angeles Times
, glossed over the enormity of what Rigoberta, the Guatemalan terrorists, the French left, the international community of "human rights" leftists, the Nobel Prize committee fellow-travelers, and the tenured radicals who dominate the American academic community have wrought. While recognizing that something has gone amiss, the Times concludes that t would be wrong to tarnish the entire cause because of the excesses of Rigoberta's book: "After the initial lies, the international apparatus of human rights activism, journalism and academia pitched in to exaggerate the dire condition of the peasants when a simple recounting of the truth would have been enough."

But would it? If a simple recounting of the truth would have been enough, then Rigoberta's lies would be unnecessary. So why tell them? If there was any truth in the myth itself, the Guatemalan guerillas would have had more support among the indigenous people and would not have been wiped out in two or three years. The fact is that there was insufficient social ground for the armed insurrection that these Castroists tried to force, as there was insufficient ground for Guevara's suicidal effort in Bolivia years before. Ultimately, the source of the violence and ensuing misery that Rigoberta Menchu describes in her destructive little book is the leftist intelligentsia itself. Too bad leftists in United States universities haven't the decency to acknowledge this, and to leave the Third World alone.