Revisiting Rigoberta

The New York Times reports that Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu finished sixth of fourteen candidates in Guatemala's presidential election on Sunday, getting a mere 3 percent of the vote. "The reasons for her poor showing," the Times says, "include her outsider status, gender and lackluster campaign." It was, says the headline, a "complex defeat." 

Menchu, whose book I, Rigoberta is a canonical text in the world of Ethnic Studies, took home $1.2 million from Oslo in 1992 and, according to the Times, "invested in a chain of pharmacies." Because of this, "she found herself on the defensive" throughout her campaign; the icon of poor, indigenous Guatemalans "insist[ed] that she had helped her people and was not rich."

Oddly, Times reporter Marc Lacey fails to mention either the work of Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll, author of Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, or the shoe-leather reporting of his own newspaper, who, in 1998, published a "special report" called "Tarnished Laureate." Both confirmed that Menchu had invented large swathes of her autobiography. 

As Larry Rohter reported at the time:

"A younger brother whom Ms. Menchu says she saw die of starvation never existed, while a second, whose suffering she says she and her parents were forced to watch as he was being burned alive by army troops, was killed in entirely different circumstances when the family was not present.

Contrary to Ms. Menchu's assertion in the first page of her book that ''I never went to school'' and could not speak Spanish or read or write until shortly before she dictated the text of ''I, Rigoberta Menchu,'' she in fact received the equivalent of a middle-school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Roman Catholic nuns.

Further Times coverage of the Menchu scandal here.