Controversy follows Nobel Prize winner and Peltier supporter

Rigoberta Menchú walks into the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center in Kansas City, grimacing from the blustery winter day. She is a small woman with a round face; dark, unfathomable eyes; and a serious, quiet demeanor that belies the force of her convictions. Ever since she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work for human rights in her native Guatemala, Menchú has become one of the most visible international advocates for indigenous people's rights. However, along with her fame has come controversy. Questions about her accuracy in depicting her past have surfaced, spawning a heated debate in the academic world over her autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchü. Menchú was in Kansas City and Lawrence last month to speak on behalf of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. She got involved in the Peltier case because, she says, she had a moral debt to help him; although she had worked for indigenous people's dignity for many years, she hadn't had the opportunity to help him before and was ashamed.

Jennifer Harbury, a human-rights activist and one of Peltier's attorneys, doesn't believe that Menchú's credibility has been damaged by questions concerning her autobiography.

"There is no one more appropriate than Rigoberta Menchü (to speak out for Leonard Peltier)," Harbury says. "She's an international heroine, and she's a symbol of indigenous resistance to repression throughout the world. We couldn't have a stronger, more intelligent, and more absolute fighter for human rights than her, and we're very honored to have her here."

Peltier has been incarcerated at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., since 1977. He was convicted of murdering two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout between the FBI and the American Indian Movement (AIM) on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Before visiting to Kansas City and Lawrence, Menchú traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with officials from the Department of Justice and with several congressmen (whom she declined to name) about Peltier and to ask for clemency, an exhaustive investigation of the case, and immediate attention to Peltier's medical problems.

The story of Menchú's journey from Mayan Indian peasant to Nobel laureate begins in Guatemala. According to her book, she was born in 1959 as one of nine children and grew up poor and uneducated. In the mid-1960s, Guatemala experienced a brutal civil war, which became the longest conflict in Central America. During the war, Guatemala's indigenous people were persecuted by the landowning classes and the military. Menchü and her family worked on a coffee plantation under exploitative, slavelike conditions; one of her brothers died from inhaling fumes from the pesticides sprayed on the coffee trees, and another brother died of malnutrition.

Menchú's father became embroiled in a land battle and then helped start the Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC). As a result of the family's involvement in revolutionary activities, Menchú's brother was tortured and burned alive in the town square. In 1980, Menchú's father was killed when he and other protesters occupied the Spanish embassy, which was burned down by the police. Later the army kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed her mother. Menchü soon became a CUC organizer. However, because of personal safety reasons, she fled to Mexico, where she lived in exile for 12 years.

In 1982, while on a trip to Paris, the 23-year-old spent a week narrating her story to Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, a Venezuelan anthropologist who recorded the sessions. Burgos-Debray then took the 24 hours of tape and arranged the narrative in chronological order. The result was I, Rigoberta Menchú. Published in 1983, the book became a classic text on American college campuses, and in 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the New World, Menchú received the Nobel Peace Prize.

However, questions have emerged about Menchú's literary portrayal of her history. David Stoll, an anthropologist at Middlebury College in Vermont, found that some items in her book could not be substantiated and that I, Rigoberta Menchú was not "the eyewitness account it purports to be."

After investigating in Guatemala, Stoll discovered that the father's land dispute was not against the wealthy ladinos but rather against his in-laws; the brother who died of starvation did not exist; the other brother was not burned alive, because there were never any public burnings in the town square; although Menchú claims to never have gone to school, she received a middle-school education at two private boarding schools; and because she was in school during her youth, it was unlikely that she worked on a coffee plantation for an extended period of time.

Stoll published his findings in a book titled Rigoberta Menchú and The Story of All Poor Guatemalans in November 1998. The New York Times investigated his claims and corroborated his story, which was outlined in a front-page article published Dec. 15, 1998.

Since then, Menchú's credentials have been hotly debated. Some professors have said that they will continue to teach the book because it is representative of the experience of oppressed people in Guatemala. Conservatives who were upset that her book, which they viewed as Marxist, replaced traditional Western-based literature, gleefully declared Menchú's story a hoax.