Word: menchu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Born in poverty, uneducated, Menchu became a farm laborer as a small child, tending corn and beans on her parents' tiny plot and traveling with them to the south to work on coffee, cotton and sugar plantations. She did not even learn to speak Spanish until she was 20. But the world learned her story with the 1983 publication of her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu, which eventually appeared in 11 languages. It tells of Quiche life in the mountains and the domination of the Indians, who make up 60% of the population, by the minority Ladinos, mostly the descendants...
...weeks later, soldiers dragged Menchu's mother away, held her captive and raped her repeatedly. After torturing her, they left her under a tree to die of her wounds. Menchu tried to live in hiding but soon had to flee the country; two of her sisters went to the mountains to join guerrilla forces there. More than 120,000 people have been killed in the 30-year rebellion against Guatemala's successive repressive governments. Security forces are blamed for as many as 50,000 deaths, mostly highland Indians, during the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1980s...
...Menchu has supported united front organizations in Guatemala as well as her father's Peasant Unity Committee but has neither backed nor denounced the rebels and their use of violence. Before the prize was announced, a military - spokesman argued that giving it to her "would be a political victory for the guerrillas." On the contrary, wrote columnist Alfonso Portillo in the daily Siglo 21, "she makes those who are guided by hate, racism, selfishness and stupidity tremble...
...recent report from the Roman Catholic human-rights office charges that the government "continues to demonstrate the political tradition of terror." Activists in civil rights and grass-roots organizations are still receiving death threats, and in the first six months of this year there were 253 political assassinations. Menchu was only visiting the country last week. She now must decide whether to try to live there...
Rigoberta Menchu, 33, Guatemalan Indian-rights activist whose family was killed in her country's bloody civil war; from Mexico, where she fled in 1981, Menchu has fought against persecution by rightist forces of tens of thousands of Indians. She "stands out as a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation across ethnic, cultural and social dividing lines," said the citation. (See related story on page...