Rigoberta Menchú meets the press

Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, accused of misrepresenting her life, tries to simultaneously argue that she didn't lie and that if she did, it doesn't matter.

By James Poniewozik

Feb 12, 1999 | In the 1983 book "I, Rigoberta Menchz," the eponymous author, a Mayan Quichi Indian and winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, speaks movingly of the bloody horror that befell her family over years of civil war in Guatemala. Moreover, Menchz states, "What has happened to me has happened to many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people."

A recent study suggests that the statement is more literal than it appears -- that in fact Menchz augmented her own story with that of the Indians of Guatemala generally, reporting experiences she either did not have or could not have witnessed and misrepresenting the violent history of her area of Guatemala to support her own cause as a Guatemalan guerrilla organizer.

Anthropologist David Stoll, who conducted some 120 interviews for his new book, "Rigoberta Menchz and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans," and Larry Rohter's subsequent New York Times investigation report that numerous Guatemalans say that the central land dispute in Menchz's story -- painted as an effort by wealthy landowners and the government to drive her father off his land -- was actually a long-running family feud; that Menchz, who claimed to be self-taught, in fact had a middle-school education; and that she described, movingly, witnessing the death by starvation of a brother who in fact died years before she was born.

In the ensuing controversy, conservative commentators like David Horowitz of Salon and Dinesh D'Souza dismissed Menchz as a fraud, while defenders, such as Greg Grandin and Francisco Goldman in the Nation charged that her story, if not always accurate, gets at the larger truth of the Mayans' repression by a brutal U.S.-backed government.

But Menchz herself had not directly responded to the charges since they broke late last year, except to cast doubt on the motives of her critics. (A statement from the Rigoberta Menchz Tum Foundation contended that Menchz's accusers want to restore a "paternalistic vision" and that Stoll's interviews are "of dubious seriousness," but the foundation did not address the "supposed inexactitudes.") Thursday, in New York to discuss a forthcoming United Nations Truth Commission report on Guatemala with Kofi Annan, Menchz held a press conference to address the questions.

The diminutive Menchz, dressed in colorful blue and yellow Guatemalan clothing and accompanied by several people from her foundation, faced a well-behaved group of 20 to 25 journalists, few of whom seemed inclined to press the Nobel laureate very hard. Good-humored and defiant, Menchz, speaking through an interpreter, charged that her critics had attacked her to strike at an indigenous people for daring to add "to the official story our own story." But her answers to specific questions were incomplete, puzzling or contradictory.

Next Page: What did she see and when did she see it?

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