Truth, Fact, and Fiction in the Human Rights Community: EssaysIn Response To David Stoll's Rigoberta MenchlJ and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans Rigoberta Mench6 and the Politics of Lying Daphne Patai David Stoll's exposure of misrepresentations of some key episodes and facts in Rigoberta Mencht~'s life story, as told to Elizabeth Burgos, has led to a good deal of hostility and defensiveness. What is the significance of Stoll's discov- ery? The new information in Stoll's book (even before Rigoberta Mench6 con- ceded that he is correct) has created problems both for leftist academics and for human rights advocates. In a timely coincidence, Stoll's book appeared shortly before the release (on February 25, 1999) of the long-awaited report by the Historical Clarification Commission. In this document, the Guatemalan military and paramilitary are shown to bear overwhelming responsibility for the violence that, according to the truth commission, killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans in the three-some decades of civil war in Guatemala. 1 Stoll never argued otherwise. What he did contend--in a suggestion appar- ently intolerable to many of Rigoberta's academic supporters--was that the war might have ended sooner had not Rigoberta's story been so successful in winning international support for the guerrilla cause whose spokesperson she had become, a cause that was already lost and that significantly lacked local support by Guatemala's majority Mayan population. A further issue raised by Stoll was bound to evoke antagonism among those for whom Rigoberta's tale-- and indeed her very persona--had assumed mythic status. He asked whether other indigenous voices, not sharing Rigoberta's politics, had not been effec- tively silenced by the almost universal authority and acclaim granted to her account. Stoll, in other words, used the rhetoric of silence and voice--which is the favored rhetoric of the academic left--against one of the left's own icons.: But what is there to discuss in Stoll's disclosures about Rigoberta, given the general agreement that the Guatemalan government committed gross viola- tions of human rights? When first queried on this subject by a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I said, "Of course there is a problem." When a figure such as Rigoberta is found not to have told the truth, there is a problem just as there would be if it were discovered that Anne Frank's diary had been written by her father. Such a revelation would have a major impact on the public perception of the Holocaust, inasmuch as that perception, for many people around the world, has come through a diary taken to be the authentic 78