Her brother was killed by Guatemala's right-wing military, but he wasn't burned to death before her eyes as she claims, writes Mr. Stoll. And a land battle that Ms. Menchu says her father waged against rich Guatemalans of European descent was actually a dispute between her father and his in-laws, charges Mr. Stoll. He believes she embellished her story to gain sympathy in the West for a Communist guerrilla movement she backed that aimed to topple Guatemala's government. The release of Mr. Stoll's book, and publication of the New York Times article, have hit the scholarly community like a bomb. Professors in a variety of disciplines have used Ms. Menchu's autobiography in their courses, written articles and books based on it, and even encouraged graduate students to make it the subject of their dissertations.
Students are always impressed and very moved by it.
Even if some events didn't happen exactly as Ms. Menchu describes, professors contend, her book is important because tens of thousands of people were killed or brutalized by Guatemalan soldiers during the country's 36-year war. Ms. Menchu, who is now 39 and runs the Rigoberta Menchu-Tum Foundation in Guatemala City, has been transformed from an unknown peasant into an international celebrity since her book was first published. She has campaigned for human rights and lectured widely in Europe and the United States, including on numerous campuses. Robin Blackburn, an editor for Verso, says the publisher has sold 150,000 copies of the autobiography and stands behind it. Ms. Menchu told her life story to an ethnologist in Paris in 1982, after she had fled Guatemala to escape the country's raging civil war.