By Ana María Zabala
The grandaugther of mayans
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a Quiché Mayan woman who has dedicated her life to activism to defend peace, social justice and the rights of indigenous peoples. In an interview with Austrian artist André Heller, she states that she ” asserts herself as the granddaughter of the Mayans, the Mayans who fought for science to be a science for life and profound homage to Mother Earth, oxygen and water.” She was born in the Laj Chimel community that lies at the edge of a cloud forest on January 9, 1959 in the department of Quiché in Guatemala.
From a very young age, Rigoberta experienced the conditions of poverty and hunger to which the colonial and capitalist order subjects many indigenous peoples, not only in Guatemala, but throughout the Americas and other continents. As she recounts in her testimonial account edited by Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos and published in the 1980s, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (My name is Rigoberta Menchú and this is how my conscience was born), she began working as a child. Like many other indigenous families, oppressive conditions forced her family to leave their land in the mountains for months at a time to work on big farms and make little money in the lowlands of the country where exploitative conditions created an inescapable cycle of poverty.
Mayan peoples: the internal enemy of Guatemala’s military government
Rigoberta was born into a close-knit family where they “did many things for the life” of the community and nature that surrounded them. She was also born in a country at war. Menchú was two years old when the internal armed conflict began in Guatemala (1960 – 1996) between the government and a guerrilla demanding social justice and better living conditions (CNDH Mexico, 2018).The Guatemalan military government repressed this popular organization with violence and in the 1980s, its strategies of terror were directed against the indigenous Mayan peoples, whom it called an “internal enemy” in the framework of the Cold War (López Bracamonte, 2021).
This violence burned her father Vicente alive when she was 21, the army kidnapped, tortured and murdered her mother Juana, burned her brother Petrocinio and shot her brother Victor. At the age of 18 she became a member of the Comité Unidad Campesina, an organization of indigenous Guatemalan peasants formed after the 1976 earthquake to organize rural workers. The Committee, led by Rigoberta’s father, fought for the withdrawal of the army in the Uspatán region where it was committing massacres against the indigenous population. Receiving no response from the government, the CUC took over the Spanish Embassy on January 31, 19801 where the police raid caused a fire that killed CUC members, among them Vicente Menchú, and several Spanish diplomats.
Nobel Peace Prize winner in exile
The army’s persecution2 of the people suspected of participating in armed groups forced Rigoberta to go into exile in Mexico at 22 years old. There, she learned Spanish because there was no school in her community. She also dedicated herself to denouncing the oppression of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples by the military and Ladino government.
In fact, she participated in the United Nations for many years fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples. She contributed to the elaboration of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ratified in 2007. She was an ambassador for the UN International Year of Indigenous Peoples and is part of the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Rigoberta is also a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.
In 1992, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Rigoberta at the age of 33, making her the first indigenous woman, and the youngest person, to receive it. With the money she started the Vicente Menchú Foundation, whose mission is to contribute to the recovery and enrichment of human values for the construction of an ethic of world peace, based on the ethnic, political and cultural diversity of the peoples of the world.
A incessant struggle
In the interview with Heller, Rigoberta affirms: “my success is not personal, it is the collective memory of all the people who coincide with me”. According to Menchú, there have been more than 70 popular consultations where 90% of the peasant population consulted says no to mining but the state does not recognize this and allows mining extraction despite the fact that it does not even leave 1% of the profits to the Guatemalan state.
In this 2018 interview, Menchú shared that while the Mayan people have waged a tireless struggle against inequality and discrimination, they continue to experience it in a brutal way. She states that in Guatemala, the denial of the Mayan people is very strong even though, as she points out, it is not the Mayan people who are responsible for the country’s setbacks because most of those accused of corruption are rich ladinos. “For us the land is our mother, it is our source of life,” Menchú says of the Mayan people.
Currently, she is a member and co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize Women’s Initiative and a founding member of the Political Association of Mayan Women. In 2017, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Rigoberta, the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Interdisciplinary Chairs were created at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the San Carlos University in Guatemala, and the César Vallejo University in Peru. Menchú is an Extraordinary Researcher at UNAM, where she did research on the contemporary art of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, who number 32 million people from Mexico to Costa Rica. Menchú has spent many years dreaming of a Mayan University that could share their ancestral knowledge with the world.
Notes
- On January 31st, 1980, farmers, workers, students, catechists and indigenous people occupied the premises of the Spanish Embassy to denounce the massacres made by the army in the armed conflict of Guatemala, especially in the Quiché department. The takeover had the objective of calling the international community’s attention in the midst of the silence of Guatemalan media and the government facing these human rights violations against indigenous and rural populations. The Comando Seis of National Police set fire to the embassy. 37 people were burned to death and only three managed to escape: ambassador Máximo Cajal, lawyer Mariano Aguirre Godoy and mayan farmer Gregorio Yujá Xoná, who was kidnapped that same night in the hospital and murdered afterwards.
- According to estimates by the Commission for Historical Clarification (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico), more than 200,000 people were killed and other 45,000 were disappeared in Guatemala’s armed conflict. According to data from the Commission, 93% of assassinations were perpetrated by the army, financed by the United States who trained members of the Guatemalan army in the School of the Americas (Lima, 2020).
References
Menchú Tum, R. (2018). André Heller entrevista a Rigoberta Menchú / Entrevistada por André Heller. ARTE.tv. Retrieved from: https://www.arte.tv/es/videos/073049-022-A/andre-heller-entrevista-a-rigoberta-menchu/
CNDH México. (2018) Rigoberta Menchú, activista de los derechos humanos de Guatemala y ganadora del Premio Nobel de la Paz. Retrieved from: https://www.cndh.org.mx/index.php/noticia/rigoberta-menchu-activista-de-los-derechos-humanos-de-guatemala-y-ganadora-del-premio-nobel#_ftn1
López Bracamonte, F. M. (2021). Conflicto armado en Guatemala: reconstrucción histórica y memoria colectiva del pueblo maya chuj. Historia Y Memoria, (22), 323–357. https://doi.org/10.19053/20275137.n22.2021.10791
Lima, Lioman. (2020) Masacre de Dos Erres: así fue la mayor matanza de la guerra civil en Guatemala por la que EE.UU. deportó a un exmilitar después de 20 años. BBC News Mundo. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-51731353
