Scholar Accuses Nobel Winner of Fakery in Ads

The Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), a conservative Los Angeles-based think tank, has placed advertisements in several university newspapers, including The Crimson, decrying professors' use of the book I, Rigoberta Menchu.

Menchu, a Quiche Mayan, won the Nobel peace Prize in 1992 after this auto-biographical work was published, which details the terrors perpetrated against her family during the Guatemalan insurrection. But since the prize was awarded, the book's authorship and the truth of its accounts have been called into question.

In January, Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll released a book called Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans that reexamines and challenges many of Menchu's claims.

After examining Guatemalan archival material and conducting interviews with survivors of the events, Stoll concluded many of the claims Menchu makes in the book were either distorted or completely fabricated.

Menchu's Nobel Prize was never revoked. She still stands by the truth of her account, blaming any problems on Elisabeth Burgos, the Venezuelan anthropologist who transcribed interviews with Menchu and actually wrote the book.

CSPC puts out news analysis publications including Front Page Magazine. The organization's ad claims that many professors still advocate Menchu's viewpoint, ignoring the question of credibility.

"Rigoberta Menchu Nobel Laureate and Marxist terrorist now exposed as an intellectual hoax," the advertisement reads. "This fraud was originally perpetrated and is still defended by your professors and by the Nobel Prize Committee."

The advertisement has run or will soon run in campus newspapers at Yale, Columbia and Brandeis universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Harvard.

The ad, adapted from an article written by CPSC member David Horowitz, takes issue with Menchu's account of the death of family members at the hands of Guatemalan government troops.

Horowitz cites Stoll's book, which concludes that the killings were in response to a previous attack by Marxist guerillas with which Menchu's family members worked.

"The Marxist doctrines responsible for this mayhem are being taught today by the same people who helped perpetrate Rigoberta's hoax," the advertisement says.

In an interview yesterday, Horowitz added that he feels the book was only accepted for its Marxist viewpoint.

"This was a book," he said, "that was embraced by the tenured left which exercises an intellectual hegemony at Harvard and on other campuses."

The goal of the ad campaign, according to CSPC's press release, is to "restore intellectual integrity to the university campus by decrying the continuing canonization of Rigoberta Menchu." Horowitz said he considers it a "wake-up call."

At Harvard, Rigoberta Menchu's book is not required by any course but is on the recommended reading list for Professor of Anthropology David H. P. Maybury-Lewis' Anthropology 184, "Ethnicity in the Americas: The Indian Question."

The teaching fellow for this course, Bret D. Gustafson, said he does not think the recognition that the book may not be entirely true will affect the class' policy.

"It is still a valuable work," he said. "One cannot read it as The Truth in capitals, but just as you can read a historical novel to get a feel for a historical era, her novel can be used in this function."

According to Gustafson, what is worrisome about Menchu's exposure is that it might put into question the credibility of other witnesses to the crises in Guatemala.

He said he doubts this, however, since an independent truth commission has just released a report showing that the majority of deaths were Mayan, and that these offenses were usually perpetrated by the Guatemalan army.

Professor of Anthropology Kay B. Warren agreed.

"The report makes a series of strong empirical cases. I think the report preempts any need for single accounts," she said.