An Inspiration for Peace : Champion of Guatemalan Indian struggles receives Nobel Prize

The surest sign that the Nobel Committee chose well in awarding its 1992 Peace Prize last week to Rigoberta Menchu Tum is that Guatemala’s brutal military immediately denounced the choice.

Menchu is the first indigenous American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She won it for her courageous efforts on behalf of Guatemala’s Indians. Her struggle--to secure the most basic rights for her people, including the return of their land and basic physical security--has threatened a succession of military regimes that have long waged war against their own people.

As many as 50,000 Guatemalans died as a result of political violence in the 1980s, most of them highland Indians killed by either the military or death squads. More than 120,000 people have died in the last 30 years in Central America’s longest civil war.

“I only wish my parents could have been present,” Menchu said upon learning she had won. But they, and a brother, were killed by the military more than a decade ago. Two other brothers died years before on the plantations where Menchu’s family worked, like so many other Indians, as virtual slaves.

Menchu, 33, has carried on their struggle for dignity and survival from her exile in Mexico. Since the late 1970s, she has helped to organize Indian communities in Guatemala while pressuring the military to end its counterinsurgency campaign against a small, and largely ineffective, guerrilla movement.

Notably, President Jorge Serrano, a civilian who has begun an effort to negotiate a peace agreement with Guatemala’s guerrillas, did not join the military’s denunciation of Menchu’s honor. Her Nobel Prize should inspire Serrano to work harder with her for peace in their homeland.