Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born in Chimel, January 9, 1959) is an indigenous Guatemalan, of the Quiché-Maya ethnic group. She was the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and Prince of Asturias Award in 1998. Menchú is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She is the subject of the testimonial biography I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) and the author of the autobiographical work, Crossing Borders.

Career

Menchú received a primary-school education as a student at a Catholic boarding school. After leaving school, she worked as an activist campaigning against human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan armed forces during the country's Civil War war that lasted from 1960 to 1996.

In 1982 she was the subject of a book about her life, "Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia" (translated into English as "I, Rigoberta Menchú") that was transcribed from taped interviews and edited by Venezuelan-French author and psychologist Elizabeth Burgos. The book became a great success when translated into English, giving her a role on the international stage at the time of the ongoing conflict in Guatemala. In 1991 Menchú participated in the ongoing preparation by the United Nations of a declaration of the rights of indigenous people. Since the civil war has ended Menchú has also campaigned to have members of the Guatemalan political and military establishment tried in Spanish courts (in 1999) for purported crimes committed against Spanish citizens. These include ex-military dictator and failed 2003 presidential candidate Efraín Ríos Montt. These attempts stalled as the Spanish courts determined that the plaintiffs had not yet exhausted all possibility of seeking justice through the legal system of Guatemala. In addition to the deaths of Spanish citizens, the most serious charges include genocide against the Mayan people of Guatemala.

She has become involved in the Mexican pharmaceutical industry as President of the company Salud para Todos ("Health for All") and the company "Farmacias Similares", with the goal of offering low-cost generic medicines. She currently serves as presidential goodwill ambassador for the 1996 peace accords.

Controversies about her autobiography

More than a decade after the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, anthropologist David Stoll conducted a thorough investigation of Rigoberta's story, both researching government documents, reports, and land claims (many filed by Rigoberta's very own family), as well as interviewing former neighbours, locals, friends, enemies, and others (although not Menchú) for his 1999 book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Stoll confirmed that Menchú grew up in a Mayan peasant village, which was visited by Marxist guerrillas and then attacked by the Guatemalan army. However, Stoll discovered that Menchú changed many elements of her life, family and village to meet the publicity needs of the guerrilla movement, which she joined as a political cadre after her parents were assassinated. Subsequently many, but not all, of Stoll's findings were corroborated by Larry Rohter of the New York Times.

In Menchú's 1982 oral life-story for anthropologist and editor Elizabeth Burgos, she maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had founded the peasant movement known as the Committee for Campesino Unity.

Instead, Stoll and Rohter found that Vicente Menchú, while poor, was relatively prosperous by local Mayan standards. As leader of his community, he won a 27.53 km² land grant from the Guatemalan government. Unfortunately, his success led to a long-running dispute with his wife's relatives, in the Tum family, who claimed some of the same land. During the late 1970s when Vicente Menchú's daughter claimed that he was an underground radical political organizer, he was at home in his village of Chimel working with U.S. Peace Corps volunteers.

In her 1982 life story, Menchú claimed that she and her family had been forced to work as peons on a distant coastal plantation for eight months of the year, as millions of other impoverished Mayan farmworkers continue to do every year. According to neighbors, however, the family was sufficiently well-off to avoid this fate. Menchú also claimed that her father refused to allow her to attend school, on the grounds that it would turn her into a non-indigenous "ladino" who would forget her Mayan roots. In reality, Catholic nuns supported her in a succession of schools until she reached the eighth grade.

In the most dramatic episode in her 1982 story, Menchú claimed that her younger brother Petrocinio had been burned alive by Guatemala's right-wing military as she and her family were forced to watch in a town plaza. After interviewing local townspeople and reviewing contemporary human rights reports, Stoll concluded that Petrocinio was shot by Army-supported paramilitary groups, rather than burned to death and that Menchú and her family had not witnessed his death. However, Stoll argues that her 1983 story is not a hoax. The reason is that she in fact lost both her parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law and three nieces and nephews to the Guatemalan security forces.

In response to Stoll's findings, Menchú initially accused him of defending the Guatemalan military and seeking to discredit all victims of the violence. Later she acknowledged making certain changes in her story. The Nobel Committee has dismissed calls to revoke her Nobel prize because of these inaccuracies; Professor Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the Committee, said her prize "was not based exclusively or primarily on the autobiography". ^*

While conservative ideologues like David Horowitz and others point to Menchú's continued prominence despite the discrepancies unearthed by Stoll as proof of a residual leftist political and cultural prejudice prevalent in American universities, Stoll himself acknowledges that his book was not meant to discredit Menchú, but rather to discuss the problematic nature of testimonial literature.

External links

Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation
Biography at the official nobel site
Nobel Peace Prize lecture
Salon.com: Rigoberta Menchú meets the press
"Peace Prize Winner Admits Discrepancies", AP story in New York Times, February 12, 1999 (subscription only)
"Spain may judge Guatemala abuses", BBC News, 5 October 2005
Truth Commission report "Guatemala: Memory of Silence"
"Fraudulent Storyteller Still Praised" by Dinesh D'Souza, Boundless Webzine, 1999

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Career

Controversies about her autobiography

See also

External links