SOURCE: Canby, Peter. “The Truth about Rigoberta Menchú.” New York Review of Books 46, no. 6 (8 April 1999): 28–33.

In the following essay, Canby summarizes Stoll's criticisms against Menchú and I, Rigoberta Menchú, and discusses the details surrounding the autobiography's editorial development.

1.

In 1983, Editions Gallimard in Paris brought out the original French edition of a book published the following year in English as I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. I, Rigoberta is the first-person story of Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a young Maya Indian woman whose family and village had been virtually destroyed by the violence then sweeping Guatemala. The book was soon translated into twelve languages and has since sold more than half a million copies.

Guatemala is a country of eleven million people that had been in a state of intermittent civil war since 1954, when the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown by a right-wing military coup. During...