If the issue is human rights in Guatemala, then what harm is there in discrediting this fanciful pot-boiler? Only crap politics depend upon lies to shore them up. It is bad faith to complain about prizes and medals when these are precisely what is exposed in the exposure of Rigoberta Menchu's non-memoir.
BUT more to the point, Rigoberta Menchu's elevation to heroic status was in the service of a political agenda. Whose? Kofi Annan's (and by implication his sponsors the US state department). Annan named Menchu his representative in Guatemala. The international plaudits were supposed to increase Menchu's status. To what end? So that she could be used by the UN to front their Guatemalan mission.
The pretext for the mission is the stalled negotiations between the Guatemalan guerillas and the government. The UN's Guatemalan mission aims to take advantage of the stalemate to undermine the country's sovereignty to make it more pliant to US interests.
Last year the mission came up with a plan for extensive regional autonomy for scores of distinctive indigenous groups. Some of these numbered no more than a few thousand, but under the plan would have had veto over national policy.
Menchu's newly minted reputation as freedom fighter was deployed to popularise this plan. Astutely, Guatemalans sensed a scam dressed up in the language of rights to subvert their own national rights and voted the plan down.
-- Jim heartfield