Facts in the autobiography of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu have been challenged by anthropologist David Stoll. PNS Latin America editor, Mary Jo McConahay, offers a view from Guatemala, where the story began.

GUATEMALA CITY -- One cool afternoon 17 years ago, a parish priest in San Francisco called and asked me to come "meet a friend -- she has an amazing story to tell."

That night, with others, I listened to a round-faced young woman barely out of her teens, dressed in woven Indian traje, tell her story of family members murdered by a ruthless army. Rigoberta Menchu seemed shell-shocked, speaking quietly in simple Spanish, but driven to remember every word.

Later I came to realize that Menchu's accounts -- of her mother's torture, her brother's assassination -- were examples, not even the worst examples, of the Guatemalan army's efforts to cleanse the countryside of Indians who might sympathize with leftist rebels.

In the years that followed, with publication of her book "I, Rigoberta Menchu," and in church basements and living-room meetings, she came to stand for those who remained unheard, seeking attention for massacres the world was ignoring.

The war in Guatemala has been over for two years. David Stoll, an anthropologist at Middlebury College in Vermont, has written a book, "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans," in which he attacks Menchu for lying deliberately to support the guerrillas' view and judges her harshly for reporting, for instance, that her brother was burned alive when in fact he was executed by firearms.

The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and other important North American journals support Stoll. In U.S. academic circles there is debate around the difference, if any, between literal truth and the truth of testimony intended to reveal the reality of hidden lives.

Here in Guatemala, where books and readers are scarce, few have read Rigoberta's book, but the memory of the violence is fresh and the tone of the controversy is raw. Not a day goes by without news reports picking apart the consequences of Stoll's research.

Sometimes this feels healthy, part of an ongoing public argument that can only take place in a country newly unafraid to speak its various minds. How much responsibility do guerrillas bear for attracting the army to small towns? How much of the violence over land emerged from existing problems among the indigenous themselves?

Guatemalans are now going after the truth in many ways, such as the Catholic Church's Historical Memory project which has recorded hundreds of thousands of words describing the violence in more than a dozen Indian tongues. In February, a United Nations Historical Clarification Commission multi-volume report plainly called the violence "genocide" against Maya.

Menchu's story, as she told it, would fit onto any page of those reports.

I have known Stoll since he began questioning Menchu's account, listened to him exploring the material and debating its significance, often well into the night. As a reporter, I covered Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala for many years, interviewing her in 1992 when she learned she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and on other occasions.

It has always been clear to me that these two tireless workers operate on completely different planes. Stoll is wholeheartedly concerned with verifiable fact and has a bulldog yen to smash icons; Menchu's strength comes from a vision of herself as duty-bound to represent the Indian as she sees the Indian to be.

David Stoll is not a racist. He does not want to destroy the Maya spiritual and political renaissance now taking place in Guatemala. Never has he denied the brutality of the army.

But Stoll does attack a story which many find holds the truth of their own experience, and many others find uncomfortable in the extreme. So this controversy exposes the fault lines in a society far from healed after a 37-year war.

For all the contention, an aspect of solidarity arises: "To attack Menchu's prestige is to attack the prestige of all Guatemala's indigenous people, because it is she who represents them before the world," Congressman Aroldo Quej told the local press. Quej is an Indian -- and a member of the Guatemalan Republican Front, led by former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who continued the massacres begun under Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia, chief of state when Menchu's family members died.

A Maya intellectual, bitter that non-Indian guerrilla leaders led the Maya astray and failed to protect them, nevertheless refused to speak in favor of Stoll's arguments lest it seem that he, too, would be impugning Menchu. In Quetzaltenango, the nation's second-largest city, Mayor Rigoberto Queme --an anthropologist like Stoll and a Quiche Indian like Menchu -- was elected on a non-party ticket, but recently led the city government to declare support for the laureate.

"Ours is a history which is hard to see for one who has not suffered," Queme told me in his office after the vote. "Stoll wants to quit the lyricism from the movement, but we've never thought it was lyrical, just a daily life of struggle. And a life history like this one is an emotional burden that demands respect."