Rigoberta is an incredible woman, but she is not a saint. It's unfair to expect her to be. Not every word, not every fact in her book has to be true for it to be an important piece of work. After the controversy over the book broke, the Nobel prize committee released a statement that her prize was not based simply on the book, but on her entire body of work.

Also, it is important to be aware that the main source of the controversy, which was a critique written by an anthropologist named David Stoll, never intended to deny her work's importance, or the existence of the genocide committed against Guatemalan indigenous groups. It was interpreted that way by a faction of Latinamericanists, but Stoll has always insisted that he respects the book and the work, he simply wished to apply the same level of critique to Rigoberta's account that would be applied to any other.

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