Eminentoes/Phoo,Menchú
Schwartz, Stephen
"Eminentoes/Phoo,Menchú" The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Guatemalan revolutionary advocate Rigoberta Menchti is a multiple score for political correctness, serving not only the obvious aims of Columbus-bashers and...
...CI...
...she supports leftist violence...
...Some media noted, delicately, in the aftermath of her award, that she denies being an actual guerrilla, "but is uncritical of the rebels...
...n an interview in Mexico last July, Menchd insisted on placing all blame for the slow progress of government-URNG peace talks on "the government's hard-line stance...
...intervention, supported by diplomatic pressure, to force the elected government to accept the militarist left URNG as an equal partner in negotia tions...
...Burgos-Debray, not surprisingly, is the ex-wife of Regis Debray, onetime Che Guevara groupie and hagiographer, and fashionable gadfly of the French Socialist government...
...Perhaps promoting violence in a distant country of which they know nothing will console them after the failure of radical ideas in their own part of the world...
...Thus, the goal of the campaign by Menchti and her supporters is to legitimize an armed extremist minority acting against a legal, civilian government by transforming that terrorist effort into a "Guatemalan civil war...
...She does not even accept nonviolence as a means of protest...
...Dinesh D'Souza, in Illiberal Education (1991), argued that vocabulary employed in I, Rigoberta Menchii is not her own but a projection of the feminist and ultra-radical views held by the transcriber BurgosDebray...
...Burgos-Debray¡ªa Venezuelan anthropologist who now directs the Institut Francais in Seville, a haven for revisionist studies of the Columbus expedition¡ªmay be responsible for the strident intrusion of such First World feminist concerns as the repudiation of marriage, a real rarity among Central American women, Indian or not...
...As the New York Times put it, Menchti has "endorsed Stephen Schwartz is author of A Strange Silence (ICS Press), an account of the election of Violeta Chamorro in 1990...
...This demand conforms exactly to the guerrillas' line: URNG spokesman Hector Nuila says that "as long as it is not acknowledged that there is conflict in Guatemala, it will be impossible to fmd a negotiated solution to the situation in that country...
...In effect, the Nobel committee has put itself on the side of the declining revolutionary left in Central America...
...In reality, she is a major figure in the campaign to impose on the elected, civilian government of Guatemala a political arrangement with the Communist guerrillas of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG...
...n a manner reminiscent of Mao, Menchti divides Guatemalan women into four classes: "working-class women, peasant women, poor ladino women, and bourgeois women...
...Is this really the outlook of a typical Guatemalan Indian...
...Menchli has been presented to the world as a human-rights activist, and the Norwegians have chosen to honor her as a symbol of "peace and reconciliation...
...insurrection . . . but says she_has never belonged to any of the country's guerrilla groups...
...Elsewhere, she embraces revolutionary sabotage, acclaiming the action of those who destroy sugar-harvesting machines: Our idea is to put into practice the methods initiated by the masses when they evolved their "people's weapons": to be able to make Molotov cocktails...
...Even C. Vann Woodward, like Regis Debray once a high priest a the left, scoffed at the idea that a transcription of an oral biography by an "unlettered woman"¡ªto use Woodward's phraseshould be received as a modern classic...
...She also called for U.N...
...I, Rigoberta Mencha is so transparent a work of propaganda for armed revolution, it is amazing that so few in the media commented on it following the award...
...T he award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Guatemalan revolutionary advocate Rigoberta Menchti is a multiple score for political correctness, serving not only the obvious aims of Columbus-bashers and unemployed Sandinista groupies, but also those of certain highly placed European meddlers in Latin American affairs...
...Excited at the possibility of imposing a leftist outcome on the political development of a small and faraway country, the Norwegians wish to keep the momentum going, by granting their token indigenous American the most powerful form of moral support available to them...
...Rather than representing peace and reconciliation, Menchti stands for continued guerrilla struggle...
...In reality, although Menclul herself is unwilling openly to declare herself a Marxist, the narrative she dictated to ghostwriter Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Menclui¡ªwhich has become an element of the politically correct canon on campuses around the English-speaking world¡ªreveals an immense pride in her contribution to "the revolution...
...Indeed, last March, Oslo was the site for the first contacts between the legal government of Guatemala and the guerrillas, according to the Mexican news agency Notimex...
...Menchies cause is not that of peace and reconciliation, but of murder and subversion, as the Nordic snobs responsible for this ridiculous award know full well...
...The same spokesman said his organization would intensify its activities to force the government and the armed forces to negotiate...
...That I, Rigoberta Menchti is a propaganda product created by Burgos-Debray for Menchti to sign is unarguable...
...Menchit, to emphasize, does not support peace...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
