Profile : Guatemala’s <i> Other</i> Indian Activist : * Tuyuc hasn’t won a Nobel. But she wins respect at home for her human-rights work.

Rosalina Tuyuc was a young mother of two when her husband left for work one day and never returned.

The family had fled their rural homeland and moved to the capital in search of safety. But in Guatemala in the 1980s, there wasn’t much safety for Mayan Indians, regarded by the army as pro-communist guerrilla sympathizers and decimated in military scorched-earth campaigns that wiped out entire villages.

For Tuyuc, the destruction around her became a call to action. She founded, and still heads, an increasingly high-profile organization of indigenous women whose husbands were among the tens of thousands of peasants killed or who disappeared during the brutal civil war.

While exiled Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu receives more international attention, Tuyuc slugs it out in the trenches in Guatemala, promoting the cause of indigenous rights and challenging the military at great personal risk. Within Guatemala, she has emerged as the country’s most visible Mayan Indian activist.

Today Tuyuc and her organization, known as the Guatemalan National Widows Coordinator are taking up issues, such as forced military service, that place them squarely at odds with the army and the government of President Ramiro de Leon Carpio.

“There will be no change in Guatemala as long as the hand of the military is always behind things,” Tuyuc said in a recent interview, sounding a theme that recurs through her many speeches and public demonstrations.

The solemn-faced 36-year-old, who wears her dark hair in braids or wrapped in a long ponytail down her back, sat behind a desk at the widows committee office, housed in a drafty, nondescript building that is purposely not marked with a sign or other identification.

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Last October, a list circulated with 21 names of people who were threatened with death if they did not abandon the country within 72 hours. Tuyuc headed the list. But the threat--not the first she’s received--barely got a rise out of Tuyuc.

“The threats are innumerable,” she said casually. Then she added: “It is a despicable way to try to make us feel terrorized. They are trying to get us to stop making complaints and to stop our work. They will not succeed.”

The “they” is not articulated. But the Guatemalan army makes no secret about its opinions of Tuyuc and her followers. As far as the military and the right are concerned, Tuyuc is a leftist front for the guerrillas who have been fighting a civil war with Guatemalan governments for more than 30 years.

“That is the way they try to destroy us,” Tuyuc said when asked about the labels she is given by her enemies. “First we are communists, then we are terrorists.”

She denies ties to the guerrillas, although she and they clearly share some of the same positions, especially with regard to indigenous rights.

Up to 60% of Guatemala’s nearly 10 million people are descendants of the ancient Mayas, yet deeply entrenched racism has denied Indians very much political power.

The war has claimed 100,000 lives, with some 40,000 people missing. Most of the dead and vanished are Indians.

A native speaker of Kakchiquel, one of the more than 20 Mayan dialects used in Guatemala, Tuyuc last year focused on two principal issues: forced military recruitment and the so-called Civilian Self-Defense Patrols, paramilitary organizations formed by the army to control villages and implicated over the years in serious human rights abuses.

The Guatemalan army has routinely pressed young Indian men into military service, often snatching them from their villages or rounding them up after church, at school or during festivals. White and Ladino (non-Indian) youth are rarely touched. Consequently, Tuyuc argues, military service is ultimately used to dilute the Indian culture.

“The sons of the farm owners, the sons of the middle-class, they are not forcibly pressed into service,” Tuyuc said. “Only our sons are obligated . . . It is an affront to the very culture of our people. It plants terror from one’s early youth, it prepares them for violence. They lose their cultural identity.”

Rather than call for military service to be eliminated, Tuyuc and her organization have proposed an alternative plan. Service would be voluntary, young men would be allowed to serve nearer to their homes and villages, and those who are conscientious objectors would be allowed to perform community service instead.

Tuyuc led a march on Congress last August, and Enrique Guillen Funes--one of only six indigenous Congress members--agreed to sponsor a bill incorporating the reforms Tuyuc proposed. But since then, the bill has languished.

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The army denies its recruitment policies are racist. Most of the officers corps is white or Ladino , while the vast majority of the troops are indigenous.

Tuyuc is also challenging the continued use of the self-defense patrols, whose abysmal human rights records have led to calls they be disbanded. When he was human rights ombudsman, a position he held until last June, De Leon agreed that the patrols should be eliminated; now, as president and dependent on the military, De Leon has backed away from that belief.

Given his work in human rights, the De Leon presidency raised expectations among many Guatemalans. But it “has been a fairly large disappointment,” Tuyuc said.

As with the military recruitment, Tuyuc said she is looking for a compromise on the self-defense patrols issue. Rather than eliminate the patrols immediately, she is asking that some of the more notorious ones simply be disarmed.

In many ways, Tuyuc is grappling with the same questions of direction and strategy that face the indigenous movement as a whole. Some organizations are beginning to believe they must move into the mainstream, join established political parties and adopt less radical tactics to achieve their goals. Others believe militant tactics are still necessary to be heard.

Tuyuc came under much criticism, even from supporters, when she led a takeover of the headquarters of the Organization of American States late last year. Her goal was to force the issue of the self-defense patrols, but her decision to invade a diplomatic post was controversial.

“They are the conscience of the people . . . but some of their measures are now seen as unnecessary,” said political analyst Gabriel Aguilera. “It is true that you have to be aggressive to be heard . . . but it has its limit. What good is it if you don’t achieve things?”

Tuyuc does not consider the OAS takeover a mistake, although she concedes that it did not accomplish anything very concrete.

“Maybe we did not get a meeting with the government, but at least we got the subject (of the patrols) to be discussed,” she said. “It has been a subject that has been silenced, but now it is gaining force in the community.”

Will the widows committee enter formal politics, form a party and run candidates in future elections? Tuyuc said no, for now, and denies widespread speculation that she would run for legislative office in elections that may take place later this year.

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A native of the highlands town of Chimaltenango, Tuyuc formed the widows organization in 1988, starting, she said, with about 1,000 women. Today the group counts 13,000 members.

Like many Indian children, Tuyuc began working in the homes of Ladinos when she was about six. She cared for the babies of the Ladino women, but unlike many Indian children she was able to study, learn Spanish and eventually go to school.

First Tuyuc lost her father, who was kidnaped by the army in 1982. She and her husband moved to Guatemala City in 1985 to escape the military campaigns through the countryside. In May of that year, her husband disappeared.

“I never knew anything more of him,” she said. “One day some men arrived and told me he was alive at a military base, and what I had to do was accompany them and I would see him. But because of the lies we were told all the time, I knew not to go with them. It would be the end of me. And that’s the only time I ever heard anything about him.”

Tuyuc, who had two children with her first husband, recently remarried and has a 6-month-old baby with her current husband.

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Tuyuc admires and closely follows Menchu, whose worldwide campaign for indigenous rights won her the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Pictures of Menchu are plastered all over Tuyuc’s office. It was the widows organization that championed the candidacy of Menchu for the Nobel.

“Rigoberta has been a symbol for all of us who fight in the resistance,” Tuyuc said in admiration. “She is the voice of the oppressed. The work she has done opens doors at levels we could not have achieved.”

But Menchu, who lost much of her family to the Guatemalan military, spent most of the past decade in exile. Thus it has been up to Tuyuc and activists like her to fight the battles at home.

“Rosalina is my Nobel laureate,” said Fernando Lopez, head of the human rights office of the Roman Catholic archdiocese. “The presence, the fighting spirit, the charisma that she has within Guatemala is much greater than Rigoberta’s. Rigoberta comes here for visits, Rosalina shows her face.”

Biography Name: Rosalina Tuyuc

Title: Founder and head, Guatemalan National Widows Coordinator.

Age: 36

Personal: Mayan Indian activist. Hometown, Chimaltenango, Guatemala. Began working in homes of non-Indians at about age 6, caring for babies. Father kidnaped by army in 1982; husband disappeared in 1985. Formed widows organization in 1988. Recently remarried, to Pedro Pu Gomez. Has 6-month-old plus two children from previous marriage. Receives frequent death threats.

Quote: “There will be no change in Guatemala as long as the hand of the military is always behind things.”