I, Rigoberta Menchú, liar

1959 Rigoberta Menchú Tum, authorial fraudster, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, given "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples".

The prize was given to one of the greatest hoaxers of the 20th century "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples".

Her prize is based in part on her 1987 autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú. Several years later anthropologist David Stoll conducted a series of interviews with Menchú's former acquaintances for a follow-up book. During this time he discovered that her account was largely fabricated. Specifically, Menchú was not self-taught (she received a middle-school education) and the land dispute in which her father was killed was with family members, not the government. She even described, movingly, witnessing the death by starvation of a brother who in fact died years before she was born. No steps have been taken by the Nobel Committee to revoke Menchú's award.

The ‘autobiography’ was was in fact written by a French leftist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, left-wing Venezuelan anthropologist and wife of Marxist Regis Debray, "who provided the foco strategy for Che Guevara's failed effort to foment a guerrilla war in Bolivia in the 1960s", according to well-known conservative author and Salon.com columnist, David Horowitz (‘I, Rigoberta Menchú, liar’) ...

Tagged: hoax, hoaxes, progressive, nobel