Rigoberta Menchu - 1992 Nobel Peace laureate - Interview

Progressive, The, Jan, 1993 by Mary Jo McConahay

Rigoberta Menchu received the Nobel Peace Prize in December, at age thirty-three, for promoting the rights of indigenous peoples. A Quiche Maya Indian from Chimel, Guatemala, she grew up watching her people brutalized by the Guatemalan military during that country's civil war, the longest-running leftist insurgency in the Americas. In her 1983 book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, she describes her life in poverty, her work as a catechist, and her growing understanding of injustice and resistance as she watched family members die: her sixteen-year-old brother flayed and executed with other suspected "subversives" in the plaza of a small town, her mother raped and tortured for days by soldiers, her Catholic activist father immolated with other protesting campesinos while occupying the Spanish embassy.

Menchu fled into exile 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. Guatemala's foreign minister, zalo Menendez Park, issued a statement saying that Menchu has "endangered Guatemala" and that she should not have won the prize. Chief military spokesman Captain Julio Yon Rivera reacted to news of Menchu's prize by saying "she has only defamed the fatherland."

Today, Menchu is working with her father's group, the Committee of Peasant Unity, to focus international attention on the Guatemalan military's human-rights abuses. During her exile, she became an advocate for indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

Menchu's Nobel Prize comes at a delicate moment inside her own country. Two-year-old peace talks in the thirty-three-year-old war feel moribund. The mass killings of the early 1980s appear to be over, but human-rights violations--an average of two "extrajudicial executions" or forced disappearances every day--continue to be logged by monitors. The war is still percolating in the countryside, which "justifies" the killing of academics and unionists, as one diplomat explained, because "as long as there is a war, activism is subversion, so that there's no possibility for change."

Yet in recent months, cautious anticipation has been in the air. Promise comes with challenges to the justice system, the extraordinary accords bringing peace to El Salvador next door, wider freedom of the press, and not least, Menchu's prize itself, which animates and creates a space--even if just for a moment--where debate begins to flower as if death squads and thought police never existed.

We meet in Guatemala City at the headquarters building of the National Committee of Widows of the Violence, but can't find an empty room because so many well-wishers have arrived. The visitors--men, women, and children--are dressed in the woven designs of their home villages. In a quiet celebratory mood, they chat, sleep, or eat, occupying every spare inch of floor space. Finally, we find a corner where chairs have been placed on the flat roof.

Rigoberta Menchu wears a typical skirt, called a corte, an embroidered blouse, her hair plaited with bright blue ribbon. Somebody brings a beer, which she sips gratefully in the heat. Beyond her is the crooked skyline of the fast-growing capital, centuries-old church domes among tall new buildings, and Pacaya volcano, sending up a plume of white smoke in the blue distance.

Q: What will you do better, or differently, with the Nobel Peace Prize?

Rigoberta Menchu: I have aspirations that will never be fulfilled if they are only mine. The widows of those who died in the violence, the displaced, the popular movements in general, and the refugees have begun to open spaces, to undertake initiatives that would not be possible if they were mine alone.

Q: In your book you said that the "just war" was the only path open to you. Now what do you feel is the place of violence and arms?

Menchu: I always go to antecedents. Of what I know of conflicts the world over, but especially in Central America, no war has surged forth all by itself Internal conflicts erupt from very deep causes. It is important to work so that armed conflict never exists. But armed internal conflict is the culmination of processes that incubate over long years of history. That is what happened here in Guatemala. If the origins of conflict are not resolved, parties may sign a peace accord, but how much time will that accord last?

The conflict in Guatemala is a very delicate thing, because if it is declared over without results for civil society, without inaugurating real mainstays of peace, it could erupt strongly again. And it may not necessarily be the kind of fight that exists now, but much more sophisticated, much more complicated. And it could include the participation of the indigenous. I am afraid of the conflicts.