Rigoberta Menchú

Activist

• Born: January 9, 1959
• Place of Birth: Chimel, Quiche, Guatemala

GUATEMALAN SOCIAL REFORMER

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT Social reform, literature, government and politics

Early Life

Rigoberta Menchú Tum was born to Juana Tum Cotojá and Vicente Menchú in Guatemala in 1959. As a child, she reportedly worked on coffee plantations. In her controversial autobiography of 1983, she tells of how trucks took families with their animals and cooking pots to the plantations to work, often riding for twenty-four hours at a time and without breaks. It was not uncommon for drivers to leave passengers aboard a vehicle in excrement and vomit. Also, hundreds of people would sleep in an open-wall shelter after fifteen-hour workdays.

While at the plantations, Menchú’s brother Nicolás died from malnutrition, and another brother choked to death from plane-sprayed chemicals dusted on fields filled with workers. In the capital, Guatemala City, twelve-year-old Menchú worked as a servant, and her employers starved and abused her and forbade her traditional Guatemalan dress.

During the time Menchú was growing up, the government had been demanding that the people sell their land for a pittance. Soldiers attacked dissenters and destroyed homes. After her father, Vicente, tried to organize the Maya in the face of government objections, he was imprisoned and nearly tortured to death by soldiers. Vicente and his family continued their work in developing the Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC), and they went undercover in 1978.

To send a message to dissenters, soldiers captured Menchú’s brother, Patrocinio, in 1979 and tortured him day and night for sixteen days. They showed the locals Patrocinio’s wounds, then dowsed him with gasoline, set him afire, and watched him burn to death in public. Vicente encouraged pacifism, despite Patrocinio’s murder. Later, Vicente died, along with many others, during a protest at the Spanish embassy on January 31, 1980. Soldiers then kidnapped Menchú’s mother, tortured and raped her, and left her to bleed to death in the woods. She died before villagers could find her. With CUC support, Guatemalans united for a minimum wage increase (five quetzals). For fifteen days, eighty thousand strikers halted production, barricaded mountain roads against soldiers, and went into hiding. Menchú escaped to Mexico in 1981, but her work remained in Guatemala.

Life’s Work

In 1982, Menchú traveled to Europe and the United States, speaking on the atrocities in Guatemala. Her oft-debated autobiography Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983; I, Rigoberta Menchú , 1984) is a testimony to her experiences and those of her people. The book was published in Spanish not Mayan so that it would reach more readers, and was transcribed and edited by anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos from interviews conducted with Menchú. The autobiography turned Menchú into a symbol for democracy and freedom. Her government responded to the book’s popularity by banning it.

Although some critics said Menchú had participated in some violent acts over the years, the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee chose nevertheless to award her the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1992. The presentation speech indicated Menchú had brought humanity to a brutal world through her political and social work. Shoeless, Menchú accepted her award before the king of Norway, several hundred guests, and the Norwegian parliament. It was only after the presentation that the Guatemalan government allowed Guatemalans to return to their land. She led about twenty-four hundred indigenous people back into Guatemala in January of 1993.

Menchú considered the Nobel Prize a recognition of the fragmented lives of indigenous peoples. She used the prize to continue her struggle for peace and human rights, and used the $1.2 million award to begin the Vicente Menchú Foundation, later called the Rigoberta Menchú Foundation.

Not everyone rejoiced after Menchú received the Peace Prize. Some declared her autobiography was filled with fabrications and hoaxes. The editor of I, Rigoberta Menchú called the work a myth. Menchú was targeted with death threats, particularly in Guatemala, and guards were posted at her residence in Mexico City. Some argued that contrary to her autobiography, she had stopped no war and had worked little before writing her memoirs. Others discovered that Menchú had attended private boarding schools, knew Spanish, and had never worked on a plantation. Her brother, Nicolás, supposedly dead of malnutrition, was still alive, and Patrocinio had not been burned to death. Her story of a brother dying from chemical sprays seems implausible given that planes do not spray coffee fields in Guatemala. Critics called for the revocation of Menchú’s Peace Prize. The Nobel committee noted it had already awarded the prize and did so rightly. They added that details that had been surfacing after the award’s presentation were not essential details in the book, or in Menchú’s life.

In his book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), David Stoll questions Menchú’s claims that members of her family were killed. He also questions whether her father founded CUC and suggests that the land conflicts might have been between her father, Vicente, and his in-laws instead of between Vicente and the Guatemalan government. Furthermore, Stoll argues that Vicente was killed during a revolutionary action and not a peaceful demonstration. Others defended Menchú’s claims and condemned Stoll’s methods, selectivity, and conclusions, downplaying his “findings.” In particular, Victoria Sanford characterized Stoll’s argument and evidence that the 1980 Spanish embassy massacre was an act of self-immolation on the part of Menchú’s father and others as an “egregious error” and a “fallacy,” and offers evidence from the 1999 findings of a United Nations truth commission (Comisíon para el Esclarecimiento Histórico) supporting the case that the Guatemalan army had firebombed the embassy, and that this act was not only premeditated but part of a larger policy of genocide against the Maya. Some critics claimed that Stoll did not consider Menchú’s words as cultural testimony and that he had an agenda to discredit her. Menchú’s defenders emphasize that her books are compilations of “communal memory.” Stoll, however, in the preface to his book, wrote that he believed she deserved the Peace Prize but he wanted to address the inconsistencies in Menchú’s story about her early years and the experiences of her family during that time. More important, he wrote, are the details surrounding such experiences, in general, and why such atrocities happened.

Menchú responded to her critics by saying that she had another brother with the name Nicolás, and that her mother had seen the immolation. Menchú said that the scandal surrounding her autobiography had hurt her and the people of Guatemala. In 1998, Menchú published Crossing Borders and has, despite the controversy, received several honorary doctorates. She is part of the organization PeaceJam, which promotes education, inspires peace for future generations, and encourages reform.

Three years after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Menchú began to appear in public with an adopted infant, Mash Nawalja, whose name means Tomás Water Spirit. Soon after the adoption she married Angel Francisco Canil Grave, also a Guatemalan refugee who had sought safety in Mexico.

Significance

Menchú, little known even in Guatemala before her Peace Prize, received periodic death threats. In the face of these threats she did not stop advocating peace and nonviolence. She condemned the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and expressed her condolences, but she also discouraged sensationalism and urged peace and dialogue for wise judgment.

In 2007, Menchú announced the formation of an indigenous political party named Winaq, a Mayan word meaning “the wholeness of the human being.” Because Winaq did not have time to register itself as a party before the elections, held in September, Menchú ran as a presidential candidate of the Encuentro por Guatemala (Encounter for Guatemala Party). She lost the election but once again raised the issue of the place of the indigenous in Latin American politics. In 2011 she ran for president again, this time as the candidate for Frente Amplio, a left-wing coalition, but only gained 3 percent of the vote in the first round.

Menchú has worked tirelessly to bring world attention to the hardships and violence suffered by the indigenous people of Guatemala. The dictatorial government had massacred thousands of its people, especially indigenous peasants, and their struggles became international news, especially among scholars and activists. Despite criticism of her autobiography, she has remained a proponent of world peace and earned many accolades.

In January 2015 Greg Grandin reported for the Nation that according to the International Justice Monitor, three judges convicted Pedro Garcia Arrendondo, formerly the head of a National Police special investigations unit, of “homicide and crimes against humanity for his leadership of the 1980 siege of the Spanish embassy, which killed dozens of indigenous and student activists and diplomats.” Grandin states that the verdict “vindicated” Menchú and her testimonial. In 2018, Menchú was named a recipient of the Spendlove Prize.

Bibliography

Anderson, Lorena. "Guatemalan Nobelist Announced as This Year's Spendlove Prize Recipient." UC Merced, 20 Aug. 2018, news.ucmerced.edu/news/2018/guatemalan-nobelist-announced-year%E2%80%99s-spendlove-prize-recipient#:~:text=Nobel%20laureate%20Rigoberta%20Mench%C3%BA%20Tum,and%20Tolerance%20at%20UC%20Merced. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

Davis, Anita Price, and Marla Selvidge. Women Nobel Peace Prize Winners. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. Print.

Grandin, Greg. “ Rigoberta Menchú Vindicated.” Nation. Nation Company, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Edited and introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. 2d ed. New York: Verso, 2010. Print.

Menchú, Rigoberta. Crossing Borders. Translated and edited by Ann Wright. New York: Verso, 1998. Print.

Patai, Daphne. “We, Rigoberta’s Excuse-Makers.” Academic Questions 25.2 (2012): 190–208. Education Research Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

Sanford, Victoria. “The Silencing of Maya Women from Mamá Maquín to Rigoberta Menchú.” Social Justice 27.1 (2000): 128–51. SocINDEX with Full Text. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. 2d ed. Boulder: Westview, 2009. Digital file.