In the following essay, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla examines Rigoberta Menchú's autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchú), the charges made by author David Stoll that the autobiography is not authentic, and Stoller's assertion that Menchú's actions functioned to prolong the war.

Long before David Stoll's book appeared and the New York Times journalist Larry Rohter (1998) gleefully proclaimed it a definitive expose of Guatemala's only Nobel Prize winner since Miguel Angel Asturias (and the only indigenous female, let alone Guatemalan, to become an international icon), there were articles and interviews purporting to summarize Stoll's argument and his motives for advancing it. From exposure to a few of these I formed my first impressions of his project and was willing to give his motives for devoting ten years of his life to it the benefit of the doubt.

I seriously questioned the timing of a book that...