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I, Rigoberta Menchú: Voice of the Maya

I, Rigoberta Menchú: Voice of the Maya

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Rigoberta Menchú was born in 1959 in Laj Chimel, a remote highland village in Guatemala's Quiché department. She was K'iche' Maya, one of the Indigenous peoples who make up 60 per cent of Guatemala's population but have been systematically dispossessed and persecuted since the Spanish conquest. In 1980, her father Vicente was killed when the Guatemalan army stormed the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City, burning it to the ground with 37 people inside. Her mother was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the army. Her teenage brother was killed. Rigoberta fled to Mexico in 1981. In Paris in 1983, she dictated her life story to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. The resulting book, 'I, Rigoberta Menchú,' was translated into more than a dozen languages and brought global attention to the genocide being carried out against Guatemala's Indigenous population. An estimated 200,000 people were killed during the Guatemalan Civil War, the majority Indigenous Maya. In 1992 — the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas — Rigoberta Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was 33. The committee said the prize recognised her 'work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.' She accepted it on behalf of 'the indigenous people of all America.'

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