I, Rigoberta Beauchamp [dri]

Scott Thomas Beauchamp is but a mere piker compared to one of the Left’s greatest “fake but accurate” authors.

Rigoberta Menchú fell into the embrace of the elite Left shortly after the publication of her 1983 autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú. It was in that book that the world first learned of her valiant struggle against racism and colonial oppression. Her descriptions of one of her brothers slowly wasting away and dying of starvation and another brother burned alive by soldiers moved many readers to tears and piqued their sense of injustice.

Several years later, NY Times reporter Larry Rohter and anthropologist David Stoll reveled that much of her autobiography had been fabricated and that not only had her brother not starved to death but was in fact still very much alive. Her descriptions of her hardships toiling in the coffee fields and acting as a labor organizer while just a child were equally discredited when it was discovered that she had spent her childhood at an exclusive Catholic boarding school.

Still, even after she was exposed as a fraud, the Left still embraced her. Granted the events that she painfully wrote about were false, they should have been true. And for the Left, that is all that matters.

Earlier this week, Ms. Menchú found herself in the news again. It appears that Ms. Menchú was forced from a Cancun hotel lobby by security personnel after being mistaken for a common street beggar. She was in the hotel for a government sponsored conference that will no doubt greatly help the poor somehow, someday.

“Commentators noted the irony of up market resorts discriminating against real Maya while trying to attract tourists with fake Mayan architecture and spectacles.”

Ironic indeed.

posted by xgenghisx at 12:28 PM

| Access Comments