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Essay on Rigoberta Menchu and her autobiography
Rigoberta Menchú Túm is a Guatemalan activist for human rights and for the rights of aboriginal peoples. Born in northwestern Guatemala, Menchú grew up in a underprivileged, conventional Quiché farming society in the highlands, the daughter of respected village elders. Extreme poverty and unsafe labor conditions led to the death of several of her siblings and friends while she was still a child. Menchú never attended school, and at the age of eight she began to work as a migrant agricultural laborer alongside her family on large coastal farms. Later she worked for a short time as a maid in Guatemala City. As an adult, Menchú joined several members of her family in revolutionary action against the military for committing human-rights abuses. The response of the Guatemalan military to her family’s protest and resistance was so violent that eventually Menchú’s life was in danger. In 1981, after being hunted by authorities in Guatemala, Menchú went into exile. Like thousands of other Guatemalan refugees, she stayed mostly in Mexico. Soon she began to give lectures to make the international public aware of the plight of the native peoples of Guatemala.( Dinesh D'Souza (1991)
Menchu fled into émigré in the early 1980s. When she returned in 1988 she was threatened with death, arrested, and then released. She left again, but still makes brief visits. She was in Guatemala, at a gathering of indigenous people in the western city of Quetzaltenango, when the prize was announced in October. Menchu began her activist work as a child, traveling with her father to Guatemala's Indian communities. She became a catechist, and later got involved in organizing peasants to stand up for land rights. Although she says she was never a member of Guatemala's guerrilla groups, Menchu supported her two sisters' decision to join the guerrillas after her parents' death, and her open criticism of the Guatemalan government makes her Nobel Prize controversial.....
