Question: \section{Passage $\mathrm{V}$}
The Nobel Peace Prize has often engendered controversy. The Red Cross, yes, but Henry Kissinger? Mother Teresa, perhaps, but Yasser Arafat? Surprisingly, a loud and ongoing controversy surrounds a choice that at first look seems most benign-that of the Guatemalan freedom fighter, Rigoberta Menchú Tum.
Rigoberta Menchú was born in 1959 to a poor Mayan family in Guatemala. At the time of her birth, General Ydígoras Fuentes had just seized power, following the assassination of Colonel Castillo Armas. The year she turned one, there was a failed coup by a military group, many of whom fled to the countryside and would return to lead the rebellion that would wax and wane for the next 36 years.
Guatemala was divided into factions for that entire period, as military governments controlled the nation and guerilla groups controlled the countryside. At the same time, right-wing vigilantes led a campaign of torture and assassination, eliminating students and peasants they deemed to be allied with the guerillas.
In the countryside where Rigoberta lived, the battles were largely over control of farmland. Rigoberta's father was taken into custody and tortured when the army believed he had assisted in the assassination of a plantation owner. Following a rout of the guerillas by the army, the guerillas regrouped and began to take their fight to the capital, beginning a long series of assassinations of government figures.
Rigoberta, her father, and some of her siblings joined the Committee of the Peasant Union (CUC). In rapid succession, Rigoberta lost her brother, father, and mother to the army's own assassination squads. Rigoberta, though only in her early 20s, became a key figure in the resistance, traveling from village to village to educate the Mayan peasants in overcoming oppression, and leading demonstrations in Guatemala City.
Soon Rigoberta was herself a target. She fled to Mexico and continued her life as an organizer, concentrating her focus on peasants' rights. She participated in the founding of the United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG). This period was the most violent of the entire Guatemalan civil war. Under the new president, General Efrain Ríos Montt, massacres of civilians became an everyday occurrence.  The controversy is all about the book. It began when anthropologist David Stoll began independent research on the same era about which Rigoberta dictated and discovered discrepancies in her recall of events. Massacres she described were not remembered by the locals; one of her brothers died by shooting rather than by fire, dates were incorrect, and so on. Stoll's discoveries were enough to roil up conservative historians and columnists, who declared Rigoberta's book the grossest propaganda and her career, therefore, unworthy of the Nobel Prize. Not surprisingly, this brought forth charges of racism, sexism, and cultural ignorance from the other side.
The Nobel Committee maintained a stiff upper lip throughout the political backand-forth and still insists that Rigoberta's prize had to do with her documented good works and not with her personal recorded history. Rigoberta's book is still widely taught, and her place in the history of Central American peasant revolutions seems assured.
If David Stoll is to be believed, Rigoberta's autobiography seems to be an example of:

Options:
A. "truthiness," the quality of preferring facts one wishes were true to those that are true
B. "epic," a narrative unified by a legendary hero who reflects the aspirations of a nation or race
C. "folktale," a story of cumulative authorship from the oral tradition
D. "manifesto," a credo or position paper in which the leader of a political movement sets forth tenets and beliefs
Answer: David Stoll objects to what he considers Rigoberta's misleading the public on matters of fact. That would not mean that her work was an epic (choice B) or a folktale (choice C) because those are specific genres of literature that do not fit his accusations. Nor would he call her work a manifesto (choice D) because he does not accept her as a leader. He might, however, use the trendy word truthiness to describe what he feels to be a bending of the truth. Answers and Explanations MCAT The correct answer is A.