Rigoberta Menchú Tum was born on January 9, 1959, to a poor Mayan family in Chimel, a small community in the mountains of Guatemala. As a child, she helped her family with farm work either at home, in the northern highlands, or on the Pacific coast. Due to the extreme lack of food in the mountains, she often left the community with her family and went to the Pacific coast, where they worked on coffee and cotton plantations. Rigoberta and her family were not the only ones struggling to survive. With help from the United States, Guatemala’s democratically elected government was overthrown in 1954. Guatemala’s army took over, which led to over thirty years of dictatorship, war, and violence. Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were brutally killed. The Mayans were targeted, destroying 450 villages and displacing one million refugees.
During the war, Rigoberta and her family prepared Guatemalans to condemn the government. When she was still a teenager,…show more content… She worked to secure the basic rights of the Mayan people, and from 1980 to 1981, she was involved in nonviolent demonstrations in the capital. She also joined the radical 31st of January Popular Front, where she educated Indian peasants to resist large military oppression. After being forced to flee to Mexico, she organized the resistance to oppression in Guatemala and advocated for peasant Indian’s rights.
Rigoberta told her story to Elisabeth Burgos Debray, through multiple interviews in 1983. These interviews became the book I, Rigoberta Menchú, which drew attention from around the world to the horrors of the situation in Guatemala. In 1992, Rigoberta received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts towards social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation. She soon returned to Guatemala and started the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation to help indigenous survivors of the genocide pursue peace and
