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 120 Guatemalans, including relatives, friends, neighbors, and former teachers and classmates of Rigoberta Menchu, 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 Rohrter to Guatemala to attempt to verify Stolls findings, which he was readily able to do.
Perhaps the most salient of Stolls 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 part of the landless poor, and 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. Far from being a dispossessed peasant, Vicente Menchu had title to 2,753 hectares of land. The 22-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. Most importantly, Vicente Menchus "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 wifes 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 Seventies, coinciding with a global Soviet offensive, Cubas Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, launched a new turn in Cuban 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 Salvadoran guerillas even included a Lebanese Communist and Shiite Muslim named Shafik Handal.)
One of these forces, Guatemalas Guerrilla Army of the Poor, showed up in Uspantan, the largest township near Rigobertas village of Chimel, on April 29, 1979. According to eyewitnesses, the guerrillas 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, "Were 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 situation in Uspantan in which 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 Rigobertas 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 Guatemalas security forces, which had been primed for Castros 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 Rigobertas 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 Rigobertas book is the January 1980 occupation of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City 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 students ignited and set the embassy on fire. At least 39 people, including Vicente Menchu, were killed.
As a result of Stolls research 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 Rigobertas 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 dictatorships 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.)
Rigobertas response to this exposure of her lies has been, on the one hand, "no comment" and, on the other, to add another liethe 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 has concluded that the narrative they recorded is 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.
The fictional life of Rigoberta Menchu is a piece of Communist propaganda designed to incite hatred of Europeans and Westerners, 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 also become the single most influential social treatise read by American college students. Over 15,000 theses have been written on Rigoberta Menchu the world overall accepting her lies as gospel. Rigoberta herself has been the recipient of 14 honorary doctorates at 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 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 shes lying, shes telling the truth.
