Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born in Chimel, Guatemala, January 9, 1959) is a member of the indigenous Quiché Maya group, author of the widely-read but disputed autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú (1987). She was the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.

Controversies about her autobiography

Several years after the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, anthropologist David Stoll conducted a series of interviews with Menchú's former acquaintances for a follow-up book. During this time he discovered that many elements of her account were fabricated. Although it was confirmed that Menchu had indeed grown up a Mayan peasant from a small farming family, the details surrounding her childhood and early adulthood as well as the specific details about her family were fabricated., Larry Rohter, of the New York Times also spent several weeks in Guatemala verifying Stoll's findings.

Related Topics:
Anthropologist - David Stoll - New York Times

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Menchú had maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She had also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had organized a peasant movement named the Committee for Campesino Unity and had been killed by the government for his activities and this event was the catalyzing event in her political activism. Stoll determined that both of these were fabricated.

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Vicente Menchú had in fact been quite prosperous, by local Mayan standards, and decidedly apolitical. He had owned land with an area of 27.53 km² and was involved in a 22 year dispute with the Tum family, led by a relative of Vicente Menchú. It was during one of the many arguments with his in law in which he lost his life, not at the hands of government forces, and Vicente Menchú had not organized any peasant movement.

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Her accounts of her early life also appear to be inconsistent with Stoll?s research. Menchu claimed that her father would not send her to school, claiming that it would turn her into a "ladino", or light skinned ruling class, and that it would make here forget her Mayan roots. Although Menchu says she never received any formal educated, Stoll discovered that Vicente Menchú paid for her to be educated at a Catholic boarding school, where she was educated to an eighth grade level. She also claimed that she was forced to work 8 months a year on a plantation, but Menchu was in fact away at boarding school during the growing season.

Related Topics:
Ladino - Catholic - Boarding school - Plantation

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Menchu had also claimed that her younger brother Petrocinio was killed by elements of Guatemala's right-wing military and had been burned alive as she and her family were forced to watch in the town?s plaza. After interviewing local townspeople as well as friends of her brother, Stoll had discovered that army had never burned prisoners alive in the plaza and that her brother had in fact been arrested for petty crimes and executed by a firing squad. Two of her other brothers supposedly died of malnutrition while laboring in the brutal conditions of a local plantation, but Stoll could not corroborate this with any of Menchú's family in Guatemala.

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Menchú acknowledged her fabrications in early 1999. 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". http://www.nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1992/tum-bio.html

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