Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Chelsea

In fifth grade, my class read I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Published in 1983, it’s the first memoir I remember reading that had been written in my lifetime. Rigoberta writes of her experience as a young Quiché Indian in Guatemala who was exploited as a child in the fields and exposed to pesticides and horrific violence. We were lucky that we had teachers at Booker Arts Elementary in Little Rock who believed it was important that students knew about the daily injustice and horror faced in modern-day Guatemala by children, including Rigoberta.

Rigoberta’s family couldn’t afford food or other basic necessities. She watched her youngest brother die of malnutrition while the family was working for poverty wages on a coffee plantation. Motivated by her anger at his death, Rigoberta moved to Guatemala City and took a job as a maid in order to learn Spanish (and, later, other Mayan languages in addition to her native Quiché) and to understand more about her country and the world. Rigoberta believed that to be as powerful as she hoped to be for her community, she needed first to leave.

When she returned home, she learned that her father was in prison, accused of being part of a guerrilla force. She worked to free him and to help organize workers to fight for local indigenous rights, including protections and ownership of the land on which they toiled every day. After securing land ownership rights for her own community, Rigoberta advocated for indigenous rights across Guatemala. She also stood up against the gross human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan government and armed forces throughout the country’s decades-long civil war. Even after one of her brothers was tortured and killed by the Guatemalan military and her father was killed during a protest, Rigoberta refused to give up her fight for human rights and meaningful reforms for indigenous people.

“Only together can we move forward, so that there is light and hope for all women on the planet.”

—RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ TUM

Forced into exile in 1981, Rigoberta went first to Mexico, then to France, where she met Venezuelan-French anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Elisabeth convinced Rigoberta to tell the story of her life; the tape-recorded interviews between the two of them became the basis for I, Rigoberta Menchú.

When her memoir was published two years later, Rigoberta wasn’t yet twenty-five. While she had withstood immense personal loss—she would lose another brother to the regime’s violence while in exile—and had already accomplished an extraordinary amount for someone so young, she knew her work wasn’t finished. From exile, she continued to organize for indigenous rights and against the oppressive Guatemalan government. After the civil war ended in 1996, she worked to have the political and military leaders responsible for genocide against the indigenous community brought to justice; more than two hundred thousand people died over the course of the war, including many indigenous Guatemalans.

When Rigoberta’s efforts were stymied in Guatemala, she looked to Spain, where the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation filed a criminal complaint against former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt and others. Finally, in 2005, a Spanish court ruled that genocide committed abroad could be prosecuted in Spain and called for the extradition of key members of the Guatemalan government during the civil war, including Ríos Montt. That gave momentum to efforts in Guatemala. In 2012, a Guatemalan court indicted and later convicted Ríos Montt of genocide, among other crimes. While that ruling was overturned, Rigoberta and her foundation continue to work to bring Ríos Montt and others to justice.

In 1992, while the civil war was still ongoing, Rigoberta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As she was thrust onto the world stage, questions were raised about the authenticity of her autobiography. The New York Times reported that “based on nearly a decade of interviews with more than 120 people and archival research, the anthropologist, David Stoll, concludes that Ms. Menchú’s book ‘cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be’ because the Nobel laureate repeatedly describes ‘experiences she never had herself.’ ” Scholars like Stoll suggested that the younger brother who had died of starvation never existed; that, contrary to her claim on the first page of the book that she “never went to school,” she actually received a scholarship to earn the equivalent of a middle school education at a prestigious private boarding school.

The Nobel Committee dismissed the questions and said there was “no question of revoking the prize.” Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said “All autobiographies embellish to a greater or lesser extent.” He explained that the decision to award the prize to Rigoberta was based not only on her autobiography but on her advocacy for Guatemala’s indigenous people. Experts in the genre argued that her book was an example of testimonio, a method of blending personal and community history. Testimonio emerged out of common experiences between Latin America and solidarity movements in the United States. Its purpose was to help—even force—northern audiences, through storytelling, to understand a struggle they had not experienced firsthand.

At ten or eleven years old, I didn’t know any of that; all I knew was what I read. Rigoberta’s book sparked an interest in Central America that never left me. Years later, in tenth grade, after we’d moved to Washington, D.C., I wrote my major research paper that year on the United Fruit Company’s conspiracy with the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government under the guise of fighting the Cold War but really to protect United Fruit’s banana monopoly. While the events in Guatemala in 1954 are not the origin of the phrase “banana republic” (coined decades earlier by the great short story writer O. Henry), they certainly could have been. The United States’s actions in Guatemala were a particularly shameful chapter in American history (though in line with shameful behavior elsewhere at the time, from Iran to the Congo). I was proud of my dad when he apologized in 1999 on behalf of the United States for our country’s role in the brutal Guatemalan civil war that took hundreds of thousands of lives from the mid-1960s onward, a war that might not have happened had democracy not been denied by U.S.-backed forces in 1954. I still cringe every time I am in Dulles International Airport—named after Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose brother, Allen Dulles, helmed the CIA in the mid-1950s.

Even with the criticism she faced, Rigoberta didn’t retreat; she stayed in public life, returning to Guatemala to support Mayan communities and survivors of genocide and bring the perpetrators to justice. She went on to create WINAQ, the first indigenous-led political party. She ran for president of Guatemala twice, in 2007 and 2011. To this day, she continues to advocate for justice for the Mayan people in Guatemala and indigenous people everywhere.