If we couldn't use our escape route or any other of our security measures, we should at least have our weapons ready—the weapons of the people: machetes, stones, hot water, chile, salt. We found a use for all these things. We knew how to throw stones, we knew how to throw salt in someone's face—how to do it effectively... We've often used lime. Lime is very fine and you have to aim it in a certain way for it to go in someone's eyes. We learned to do it through practice; we practiced taking aim and watching where the enemy is. You can blind a policeman by throwing lime in his face. And with stones, for instance, you have to throw it at the enemy's head, at his face. If you throw it at his back, it will be effective but not as much as at other parts of the body.
[Ed.: Note that Menchu did not win the literature prize.
In 1998 anthropologist Clifford Stoll found that while there had been
much brutal violence in Guatemala, many of Menchu's autobiographical
accounts were fabricated to suit the ideology of the revolutionary
leftist group she later joined. Her brother Nicolas, whom she
described as having died of malnutrition, was actually still alive and
running a moderately prosperous homestead in a Guatemalan village. She
also fabricated her account of how a second brother was burned alive
by army troops as her parents were forced to watch. Scenes of her
impoverished family being forced off their land by ruthless oligarchs
turned out to have their basis in a simple land dispute that pitted
Rigoberta's father against his in-laws. Though described as poor and
oppressed, her father actually held title to 6,800 acres of land. And
though she describes herself as having been illiterate and monolingual
as a child because her father refused to send her to school, she
attended two elite Catholic boarding schools, whose nuns say she knew
Spanish as well as Mayan.
The Nobel committee said that it would not rescind the prize even though her only credential for winning was her life story, as narrated in her autobiography. Many academics insisted they would continue to include the popular multicultural book in their courses. Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish department at Wellesley College, said, "Whether her book is true or not, I don't care." Joanne Rappaport, president of the Society of Latin American Anthropology, told a reporter that questions over the book's authenticity were "an attempt to discredit one of the only spokespersons of Guatemala's indigenous movement." John Peeler, political science professor at Bucknell University, says that "the Latin American tradition of the testimonial has never been bound by the strict rules of veracity that we have taken for granted in autobiography."]
