Nobel Fraud Menchu Forms Political Group in Guatemala

It's been many years since we've seen this fraud on the scene. Now, Rigoberta Menchu has resurfaced in Guatemala to form her own political movement.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu on Monday announced the formation of an Indian-led political movement whose primary aim is to back her probable bid for Guatemala's presidency this fall.

Menchu is in talks with two minor leftist parties that have offered to make her their presidential candidate. The movement, known as Winaq, does not have time to register itself as a political party before September elections but would back Menchu's candidacy under the banner of one of the smaller registered parties.

Winaq is a Mayan word signifying "the wholeness of the human being."

Menchu won the Peace Prize in 1992 for her efforts to bring peace and reconciliation to her homeland, where a 36-year civil war killed about 150,000 -- most of them civilians of Guatemala's Indian majority.

Conveniently, the story fails to mention the fact this woman is a total phony. It sure would seem relevant to note the story upon which she was awarded the Nobel Prize is a fabrication.

As noted here, hers is a typical fabrication of the left, a feelgood story that seems too good to be true, and usually is.

For Rigoberta, the Nobel Prize proved to be a canonization in both senses of the term. This obscure Indian woman who published her 1983 autobiography when she was still in her mid-20s, suddenly received worldwide recognition as a leftist icon -- a modern-day Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of racist discrimination and colonial exploitation. She received several honorary doctorates and in 1992 was nominated as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and special representative of indigenous peoples. Her book, haled as a first-person account of Guatemalan bigotry and brutality against native Indians, spread from cutting-edge curricula like Stanford's to become part of the canon of required and frequently assigned readings in high schools and universities around the globe.

Then, just last week, the New York Times revealed that much of I, Rigoberta Menchu is a fabrication. Times reporter Larry Rohter corroborated the research of an American anthropologist, David Stoll, whose interview with over a hundred people and archival research during the past decade led him to conclude that Rigoberta's story "cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be."

Read the remainder. Rather eye-opening.

More at Front Page, which notes she didn't even write this piece of fiction.

THE STORY OF RIGOBERTA MENCHU, a Quiche Mayan from Guatemala, whose autobiography catapulted her to international fame, won her the Nobel Peace Prize, and made her an international emblem of the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere and their attempt to rebel against the oppression of European conquerors, has now been exposed as a political fabrication, a tissue of lies, and one of the greatest intellectual and academic hoaxes of the Twentieth Century.

During the last decade, Rigoberta Menchu had become a leading icon of the university culture. In one of the more celebrated "breakthroughs" of the multicultural left, a demonstration of left-wing faculty and students at Stanford University, led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had chanted "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go!" The target of the chant was Stanfords required curriculum in Western civilization. University officials quickly caved before the demonstrators, and the course title was changed simply to "CIV." Works by "Third World" (mainly Marxist) authors previously "excluded" were now introduced into the canon of great books as required reading. Chief among these was an autobiography by an indigenous Guatemalan and sometime revolutionary, I, Rigoberta Menchu, which now took its place beside Aristotle, Dante, and Shakespeare as the Stanford students introduction to the world.

Published in 1982, I, Rigoberta Menchu was actually written by a French leftist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, wife of the Marxist, Regis Debray, who provided the "foco strategy" for Che Guevaras failed effort to foment a guerilla war in Bolivia in the 1960s. The idea of the foco was that urban intellectuals could insert a military front inside a system of social oppression, and provide the catalyst for revolutionary change. Debrays misguided theory got Guevara and an undetermined number of Bolivian peasants killed, and as we shall see, is at the root of the tragedies that overwhelmed Rigoberta Menchu and her family, and that are (falsely) chronicled in I, Rigoberta Menchu.

Curious how none of these facts made it into the AP story, isn't it?