For Rigoberta Menchu, the painful road to world prominence began in this impoverished and isolated tangle of mountains, cloud forest and peasant hamlets. As winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, she has become an internationally acclaimed spokeswoman for -- and symbol of -- the rights of indigenous peoples, based largely on her best-selling account of growing up here as an uneducated and oppressed member of the Quiche people.
In the autobiography ''I, Rigoberta Menchu,'' first published in Spanish in 1983 at the height of Guatemala's brutal civil war, Ms. Menchu, now 39, tells a wrenching tale of violence, destruction, misery and exploitation as moving and disturbing as a Victor Hugo novel. So powerful was the book's impact that it immediately transformed her into a celebrated and much-sought-after human rights campaigner and paved the way for her being awarded the Nobel Prize.
Key details of that story, though, are untrue, according to a new book written by an American anthropologist, ''Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans.'' Based on nearly a decade of interviews with more than 120 people and archival research, the anthropologist, David Stoll, concludes that Ms. Menchu's book ''cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be'' because the Nobel laureate repeatedly describes ''experiences she never had herself.''
Using contacts provided by Dr. Stoll and others found independently, a reporter for The New York Times conducted several interviews here in early December that contradict Ms. Menchu's account. Relatives, neighbors, friends and former classmates of Rigoberta Menchu, including an older brother and half sister and four Roman Catholic nuns who educated and sheltered her, indicated that many of the main episodes related by Ms. Menchu have either been fabricated or seriously exaggerated. This is the way they recall it:
The land dispute central to the book was a long and bitter family feud that pitted her father against his in-laws, and not a battle against wealthy landowners of European descent who manipulated Government agencies into trying to drive her father and other Indian peasants off unclaimed land that they had cleared and farmed.
A younger brother whom Ms. Menchu says she saw die of starvation never existed, while a second, whose suffering she says she and her parents were forced to watch as he was being burned alive by army troops, was killed in entirely different circumstances when the family was not present.
Contrary to Ms. Menchu's assertion in the first page of her book that ''I never went to school'' and could not speak Spanish or read or write until shortly before she dictated the text of ''I, Rigoberta Menchu,'' she in fact received the equivalent of a middle-school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Roman Catholic nuns.
Because she spent much of her youth in the boarding schools, it is extremely unlikely that she could have worked as an underground political organizer and spent up to eight months a year laboring on coffee and cotton plantations, as she describes in great detail in her book.
Racist Politics To Blame, She Says
In an interview in September, Ms. Menchu repeatedly declined to respond to the discrepancies the Stoll manuscript raises. ''I'm proud of the book,'' she said, describing it as ''part of the historical memory and patrimony of Guatemala'' and dismissing any criticism as part of a racist political agenda intended to gain attention and publicity.
''There have been 15,000 theses written about me all over the world by people who have read the book and made commentaries about it,'' she continued, referring to her autobiography, which has been translated into at least a dozen languages. ''I don't dedicate myself to checking this, and I don't deny or contradict what is said in books about me. That's not my job.''
Ms. Menchu declined repeated recent requests for comment.
Aside from one person, those interviewed in Guatemala have not read her book and were sympathetic to Ms. Menchu and the trials she and her family underwent during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. Between 1979 and 1983, Rigoberta Menchu's father, mother and two brothers all died at the hands of Government security forces, everyone here acknowledges.
''She suffered greatly, seeing her whole family dispersed by the violence,'' said Clemente Diaz Cano, a neighbor and contemporary of Ms. Menchu. ''The truth may be distinct from how she has told it, but that does not mean Rigoberta did not suffer greatly in those years.''
The exception is Alfonso Rivera, one of the few people here who has actually read Ms. Menchu's autobiography. As the clerk for the municipal government for 30 years, he kept all official records. ''The book is one lie after another, and she knows it,'' Mr. Rivera said. ''When she visited here, I asked her how she could say such things, and she could not give me a satisfactory answer.''
At the time she wrote her autobiography, which has since been added to the reading lists of universities around the world, Ms. Menchu was an anonymous exile seeking to focus international attention on the suffering of Guatemala's predominantly Indian peasantry. The success of the book led human rights advocates to treat her as the embodiment of the indigenous cause, and in 1992 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ''in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation.''
The Nobel Panel
'No Question' Of Revoking Prize