RIGOBERTA MENCHU’S MAYAN VISION : REVERED FOR THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF HER NOBEL PRIZE BUT ATTACKED FOR HER CONTINUING LIFE IN EXILE, THE GUATEMALAN LEADER FOCUSES ON BRINGING A ‘NEW DAWN’ TO THE WORLD’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

A society of Indian holy men meets regularly in a Guatemala City apartment to study the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old timekeeping system that is at the center of their religion. In recent years, their reading of the calendar has told them that an ancient prophecy is about to come true: “The time of darkness” is coming to an end. The Mayan people, exploited for five centuries, second-class citizens in their own land, will soon enter an age of “clarity and brightness.” A new dawn is approaching. El nuevo amanecer.

Slowly, inevitably, the priests say, the prophecy is coming true. Ask them for proof and they will tell you about the new organizations that fight for Indian rights and the increasing number of Mayan men and women graduating from Guatemala’s universities. They will mention the growing ethnic pride among Mayan youth, the girls who are not afraid to wear their traditional garments at school despite the taunts of the ladinos, the European-descended minority that has ruled Guatemala since 1524.

But the most dramatic example of the new dawn’s arrival, the priests say, can be found in the life story of a 35-year-old Quiche Mayan woman, a former house servant and farm worker named Rigoberto Menchu. Illiterate until the age of 20, she is now Guatemala’s most-famous citizen, a woman who regularly meets with heads of state and who is recognized as an international leader in the movement for indigenous peoples’ rights. In 1992, just days after the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, she became the first indigenous leader ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Rigoberta winning the Nobel Prize is just the first step, the first sign that the Mayan people must burst into history once again,” says Juan Leon, leader of Majawil K’ij (“New Dawn” in the Mam Mayan language), a coalition of Mayan cultural and political organizations. “One day, the Mayan people will govern Guatemala. I don’t know when it will happen, but that is our hope. That is the new dawn we speak of.”

Like the Mayan priests whose counsel she occasionally seeks, Menchu also believes in a Mayan “new dawn.” She describes it while sitting for an interview in a Guatemala City office. A short woman with a round face that often breaks into a grin, she is dressed, as always, in the traditional clothing of Guatemalan Indian women--the huipil (an embroidered blouse) and corte (a multicolored skirt made from handwoven cloth).

“The priests say the new dawn will be like the rain that fertilizes the soil before we begin to plant our corn,” Menchu says. “It will renew the natural cycle of life. The Mayan people will once again flourish. I believe in this very strongly. The holy men say we are entering a period of clarity. We are rediscovering our Mayan values.”

Since winning the Nobel Prize, Menchu has worked to spread this vision far beyond the reach of the Mayans. In October, she convened the second Summit of Indigenous Peoples, a conference that assembled leaders of native tribes and ethnic groups from five continents. In a speech opening the conference, she told the delegates to persevere in their struggle to force the international community to recognize their rights: Menchu wants the United Nations to adopt a global charter to protect the lands and cultural practices of all indigenous peoples.

“Our struggle is for peace, harmony and mutual respect between peoples and cultures,” Menchu said, looking out at an audience that included Maoris from New Zealand, Inuits from the Arctic Circle, Samis from Scandinavia and Amazon Indians from Brazil and Peru. “But we cannot accept a peace that forces indigenous peoples to renounce their languages, their cultures, their rights, (that forces them) to assimilate into non-indigenous society. We say no to the peace that keeps us on our knees, no to the peace that keeps us in chains, no to the false peace that denies the values and contributions of our peoples.”

It was the kind of speech--proud, angry and defiant--that has made Menchu famous. These qualities have also made her one of the most controversial figures in Central American politics. Although she is widely praised abroad as an eloquent spokeswoman, at home she is often the object of scorn and abuse. Most of the Guatemalan media and politicians attack her as a left-wing militant and an underground supporter of the Marxist guerrillas who have waged a 30-year war against the government. Rather than giving her the Nobel Peace Prize, it seems they should have given her the “Nobel War Prize,” the editors of the influential Guatemala City daily Siglo Veintiuno wrote last year.

Menchu has been criticized for, among other things, the hard-line stance she has taken during the country’s continuing political instability. Although she is not the center of a cohesive political movement, or the leader of any political organization, Menchu has given voice in the international arena to the aspirations of a long-silenced sector of Guatemalan society--not just the Mayans, but also poor ladinos and others who call for sweeping social reform and a quick end to military domination of the government. She has called for a purge of the executive branch and army and has attacked recently installed President Ramiro de Leon Carpio, who supports a more gradual reform of the government.

But most of all, Menchu’s defiant Mayan pride doesn’t sit well with the elite of a country where Indians are a de facto lower caste, an army of dark-skinned servants and impoverished peasants. Since she received the Nobel Prize, an unease has spread through ladino Guatemala. Some ladinos fear that Menchu’s rise to prominence is an inkling of Guatemala’s future, a country turned upside-down where Mayans, who make up 60% to 70% of the population, rule over whites. Many Guatemalans are asking themselves: What do the Mayans want?

A new nationalism has emerged among some members of the small minority of educated and middle-class Mayans. There is talk of one day re-establishing “Mayan law,” erasing the borders and unifying the Mayan people scattered across Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and southern Mexico. This growing Mayan militancy found a violent expression this month when Indians in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas launched a guerrilla war, capturing several towns. Rebels from the “Zapatista National Liberation Army” said they were acting to preserve their language and way of life.

In Guatemala, the new Mayan pride shows its face even at the public market, the place where ladinos and Mayans most often come into contact with one another--Indian peasants bring baskets of produce from the countryside to sell to ladino city dwellers. “Ever since Rigoberta won the Nobel Prize, these Indians have become unbearable,” says a middle-class Guatemala City resident. “You go to the market and you try to barter with them and they get angry with you. They say, ‘I won’t go any lower. Take it or leave it.’ They have too much pride now. You call them indito (little Indian), and they get mad. They weren’t like that before.”

*

MENCHU ROSE TO INTERNATIONAL PROMINENCE AFTER THE PUBLICATION of her 1983 autobiography, “I . . . Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.” Interviewed by Venezuelan anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, Menchu tells of her humble origins in a small village in the highlands of El Quiche. Desperately poor, members of her family are forced to migrate every year to coastal cotton plantations, where they work in slavelike conditions. She herself begins picking coffee when she is 8. The book reaches a climax as Menchu grows into womanhood and members of her family become founders of the Committee for Peasant Unity. The organization grows quickly but encounters violent opposition from wealthy landowners and the army. Translated into a dozen languages, the book is considered a key text in the study of Third World women. It transformed Menchu from a little-known exiled Mayan activist into an international figure. It has also become a favorite punching bag for conservative critics in the United States. In his book “Illiberal Education,” Dinesh D’Souza sees Menchu’s book as a Marxist-feminist tract epitomizing the ultra-radical views held by Burgos-Debray. Others cite it as proof of Menchu’s support for armed insurrection. They point to a key passage in which Menchu learns her village is about to come under attack by the army. (Army officials have admitted destroying about 440 highland villages during a scorched-earth campaign in the early 1980s). Rather than run away or passively resist the invasion, the villagers opt for armed self-defense.

“We knew how to throw stones, we knew how to throw salt in someone’s face--how to do it effectively,” Menchu writes. “We’ve often used lime. Lime is very fine and . . . we practiced taking aim and watching where the enemy is. You can blind a policeman by throwing lime in his face.” Stephen Schwartz, author of a book on Nicaraguan Violeta Barrios de Chamorro’s 1990 election, cited such passages as proof that Menchu was not deserving of the peace prize. “Menchu, to emphasize, does not support peace; she supports leftist violence,” Schwartz wrote in the American Spectator magazine. “She does not even accept nonviolence as a means of protest. . . . Menchu’s cause is not that of peace and reconciliation, but of murder and subversion.” Schwartz and others also charge that, even as a Nobel winner, Menchu has worked to support Guatemala’s Marxist guerrillas in their peace negotiations with the government. (Guatemala’s guerrilla insurgency is the last remaining one in Central America.) During the past year, Menchu has blamed government intransigence for breakdowns in the talks.

William Ratliff, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, says her actions before winning the prize lacked “moral authority.” He questions, for example, how she can be seen as a symbol for the rights of Indian people when she supported the Sandinista government’s repression of Miskito Indians during the 1980s. “I have no doubt she has ties to the guerrillas,” he adds. “Throwing lime in policemen’s eyes, that’s not exactly the kind of thing one expects from a peace laureate.”

Even though one of her sisters joined the guerrilla movement, Menchu maintains that she has no contact with the Marxist rebels. Still, she does not hide the fact that she is uncomfortable with the role of peaceful mediator. When more than 2,000 refugees--nearly all of them Mayan Indians--returned to Guatemala from Mexico last January, Menchu chose to ignore the advice of those who told her to avoid the event. The Guatemalan army had opposed the return, saying the refugees were active supporters of the guerrilla movement.

“A lot of people said that this wasn’t my role, to be wasting my time on these things,” she says. “But I said no. The popular movement gave me life. The struggle gave me life. The people gave me life. So I owe them something in return, even if I am wasting the Nobel Prize.”

*

IN A RECENT COMMUNIQUE, THE CLANDESTINE “ROMEO LORENZANA ANTI-Communist Movement” called her a “guerrilla” and declared “an open war on this group of communist traitors to the fatherland.” She does not take such threats lightly. Her father, Vicente Menchu, was killed during a 1980 peaceful takeover of the Spanish Embassy, when the Guatemalan army stormed and set fire to the compound. That same year, her mother was kidnaped, raped and tortured for days before being tied to a tree and left to die. Her 16-year-old brother was tortured and burned alive in a Mayan village in 1979, as soldiers forced villagers to watch. In all, an estimated 120,000 people have been killed since the 1970s in Guatemala’s political violence. According to Amnesty International and other human-rights groups, the military has been responsible for the majority of these killings. Only a handful of low-ranking army officers have been prosecuted in connection with these deaths. Menchu has lived in a self-imposed exile in Mexico since 1981, and when she visits her homeland, she travels in a gray, armor-plated Jeep Cherokee with green-tinted, bulletproof glass. The Jeep offers a measure of protection against roadside ambushes. “So many people have died here,” Menchu says from the front of her Jeep during a recent six-day visit to Guatemala, “many unknown people, great men and people whom history erases. As long as impunity exists (for the killers), those people will stay buried and forgotten.”

But the threat of violence has diminished somewhat since de Leon took power, and Menchu seems relaxed as her Jeep winds through the potholed streets of Guatemala City. She pulls out a compact and applies a few dabs of makeup. Her small entourage is headed for a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city, to visit 250 Mayans displaced by the army’s counterinsurgency campaign. Outside, it is a typical day in the country known as “the land of eternal spring”--tropical clouds, verdant hills and volcanoes are fanned across the crystal-blue horizon.

When the Jeep pulls into the dusty plot of land, the refugees set off firecrackers in celebration. She steps out and is almost immediately surrounded by children. To honor Menchu, the refugees have decorated their wood-scrap and dirt-floor shelters with flowers and colorful paper streamers.

Girls in their indigenous dresses circle Menchu and begin to dance. For a moment, she joins in, playfully teasing the girls, saying they should dance a little faster, with more energy, con mas ganas . Old women move forward to touch her, approaching her with deep reverence, whispering words to her in Quiche, one of 22 Mayan languages. A man places his newborn son in her arms and asks her to be the child’s godmother, a comadre . Poems are presented in her honor.

“Rigoberta, I will tell you how they treat me in school,” reads a 10-year-old girl. “They call me india because I can’t speak Spanish well. They forbid me to wear my traje tipico (traditional Mayan clothes). When I play with the other children, they don’t treat me the same as everyone else. There is discrimination against me. But inside of me, there is a hope.” Such emotional outpourings are not uncommon. When Menchu won the Nobel, 20,000 Guatemalans marched in the capital in celebration, many of them poor Mayans who left their work as housekeepers and street vendors to be there.

“The poor and the illiterate in Guatemala have never had a leader they could recognize as their own,” says Demetrio Cojti, a Cakchiquel Indian who left his village to earn a doctorate in Belgium and is now a UNICEF official in Guatemala City. “Rigoberta fills that vacuum with her charisma and all the things she symbolizes. It’s the joy of their lives.” Among other things, Menchu symbolizes to her fellow Mayans the attainment of respect and success in the non-indigenous world. Like many of them, Menchu once spoke only Quiche, but now she speaks fluent Spanish. Once, she was illiterate, but now she is a distinguished author. Most Mayans can only dream of such achievements: Cojti points out that despite recent advances, Mayans still make up only 25% of Guatemala’s elementary school students, and 1% of college graduates.

It is understandable, then, that when Menchu takes the microphone at the refugee camp to address the crowd, the first thing she tells them is to start a school. “We might have financial limitations, we might be poor, but we can hope for education,” she says, “and we can dream that tomorrow these children will have a chance to build their own nation.”

Just before she is to leave, the refugees gather in a circle while four Mayan priests perform a ceremony. They arrange pine needles and flowers in a circle and burn incense. Menchu joins the refugees in kneeling to pray to the four corners of the earth. The priests call on the spirits of their ancestors to aid them in the fight against Xibalba, the Mayan underworld. Unlike the Christian hell, Xibalba exists on earth--army soldiers, police officers and informers all work for the underworld, the priests say. “It’s like a government,” a priest explains.

When the ceremony is complete, Menchu climbs into the armor-plated Jeep that protects her against Xibalba and drives away.

*

MENCHU ONCE AGAIN FOUND HER ACTIONS AT THE CENTER OF DEBATE during a failed government coup in May and June, when then-President Jorge Serrano dissolved Congress and suspended constitutional guarantees, including the right to assembly. As luck would have it, Menchu was making a rare visit to Guatemala at the time, hosting the first Summit of Indigenous Peoples. More than 200 delegates had gathered in the town of Chimaltenango, roughly 40 miles west of Guatemala City. With martial law suddenly in force and the potential for violence rapidly escalating, canceling the summit and sending the delegates home seemed the prudent thing to do. But Menchu announced that the summit would go on as an act of “civil disobedience” against the coup.

“It would have been the most terrible thing in the history of indigenous peoples if we had legitimized the coup by dissolving our summit,” she explained at the time. “I said that anyone who left the summit would never again be recognized as a delegate. A lot of people said this was an intransigent thing to do, that I was putting people’s lives in danger. But these were very hard political decisions.”

As the delegates withdrew into closed session, Menchu drove to Guatemala City and helped direct a growing movement against the coup. After attending a Mass for peace, she led 1,000 people on a march from the 18th-Century cathedral to the ornate, lime-green Palacio Nacional, the seat of national government. With two dozen stunned soldiers and the international press corps watching, she delivered a letter to the president demanding the restoration of civil liberties by slipping it under the closed gates when the guards refused to accept it.

Faced with growing defiance of his martial law decrees, Serrano resigned and fled the country. Then, in one of those strange turn of events that are so common in Central American politics, Congress named Ramiro de Leon Carpio, the nation’s progressive human-rights prosecutor, as the new president. Just days earlier, Serrano had ordered de Leon’s arrest, and the president-to-be had eluded police by climbing to the roof of his house and jumping into a neighbor’s back yard.

De Leon promised to strengthen democracy and enact some badly needed reforms, including an end to rampant corruption in Congress. But Menchu demanded more. She called for the immediate resignation of the entire Congress, which she labeled as corrupt, and the formation of an assembly to draft a new constitution. At one point during the crisis, she called for a general strike to force Serrano from power--but few workers heeded the call.

To her detractors, it seemed that Menchu was trying to start a popular insurrection. “We believe Rigoberta’s actions showed little concern for the reality of the situation,” wrote the editors at the daily Siglo Veintiuno. They accused her of “political immaturity” and said she viewed the crisis as “an opportunity for a revolution that would ruin our political system.”

Before the coup, Menchu never claimed to lead anyone, just to speak for her people. And when the coup gave her an opportunity to play a role in Guatemalan politics, Menchu did what she had always done--she used her influential voice in the public forums available to her. Without any organized constituency in Guatemala, she could act only as an individual, “a moral witness” to the process.

The same tactics had worked well for her in the international stage, where, by recounting her compelling life story again and again, she helped ostracize a series of military regimes. In the process, she also won a Nobel Prize. But after a decade in exile, could she still be an effective leader in Guatemala?

When asked this question, Nineth Montenegro, leader of Guatemala’s most tenacious human-rights organization, the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo, buries her head in her hands. She is about to say something critical about a natural ally, something she’d rather not do. Clearly, Montenegro says, Menchu’s work abroad has helped the human-rights movement. But remaining in exile--even when most other exiles have already returned--has stolen much of her thunder in Guatemala. “Those of us who have stayed here (in Guatemala) have a certain moral authority” in the movement, Montenegro says. “We’ve stayed here despite all the killings. If we had gone into exile, we would have lost that authority. That can’t be denied.”

Still, Menchu’s statements during the coup affirmed the desire of many Guatemalans for profound change. For years, presidents have come and gone in Guatemala without any reform in the secretive structures of power (especially in the military) that have given birth to so much terror and repression. Without a purge of army officers linked to death squads, for example, de Leon’s appointment as president might be little more than a new, democratic facade for the same murderous regime.

To a certain degree, Menchu’s position has been borne out during the past few months. De Leon has proven to be a less-than-effective leader, apparently unwilling to challenge the military leadership he routinely criticized while he was human-rights prosecutor. He dramatically reversed an earlier position by enthusiastically supporting the army’s Civilian Self-Defense Patrols, which have been accused by international groups, including the Organization of American States, of gross human-rights violations.

Not surprisingly, Menchu has grown increasingly critical of the president. When de Leon presented a new peace plan in October, Menchu said it was designed to force the guerrilla movement away from the negotiating table and insinuated that he was being manipulated by the military. She called a news conference in Mexico to announce that she was “withdrawing my vote of confidence” for him.

A week later in Washington, D.C., Menchu renewed her attacks on de Leon. For her critics back home, it was just another example of Menchu using her access to the media outside Guatemala to prejudice international opinion against the country’s struggling democracy. “I think the people of Guatemala would be more pleased with her if she would help us, with her influence and leadership, to build peace,” says presidential press secretary Felix Loarca. “When she says, for example, that she is withdrawing her vote of confidence for the president, I don’t think that’s the right way. Instead of having these confrontations that never lead to anything constructive, we beg her to use her influence to help us.”

Still, Loarca says neither he nor the president bear Menchu any ill will. “I myself asked her once if she would do me the honor of autographing her book for me,” he says with a smile. Like Loarca, many Guatemalans feel ambivalent toward Menchu. Loarca might be distressed by Menchu’s political posturing, but she is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner. And in a poor country permeated by a collective sense of low self-esteem, such triumphs mean a great deal.

*

TO DEDICATE HERSELF to the revolution, Menchulong ago renounced marriage and motherhood, parting company with a fiance with “much sadness and a heavy heart.” In private, she can speak harshly of her opponents, using mild swear words like cabron , bastard. She is known for her toughness, yet she wept openly when it was announced that she had won the Nobel Prize, remembering the deaths of her family members. And she is not above a little self-effacing humor. When her Jeep develops a flat tire on a bumpy Guatemala City road, she jokes about her being fat. “Well, no wonder the tire popped,” she says, standing on the flattened tire her driver has just removed. “Look, it can’t even hold my weight.” Everyone laughs.

There is a feeling among some ladino commentators that, as a self-educated Mayan woman, Menchu doesn’t possess the intellectual capacity to be a power player in Guatemalan politics. So tainted is the racial atmosphere in Guatemala that people have few qualms about expressing such thoughts publicly. Consider the published comments of Carlos Manuel Pellecer, a columnist for the country’s largest daily, La Prensa Libre. He called Menchu “an ingenuous and poorly counseled muchacha. “ Muchacha (girl) is what Guatemalans call their servants. The Nobel Prize, Pellecer said, “is obviously too grand for her.”

In private, the racial hostility can be expressed more brazenly. Menchu’s growing notoriety has led to an endless stream of Rigoberta jokes, many of which cast her in the role of country bumpkin: A simple peasant thrust into a high-class society she does not understand. One joke reminds Guatemalans that even in death, she will always be a member of the servant class: “Rigoberta died and went to heaven,” the story goes. “But she showed up at the pearly gates wearing her huipil and her corte. So St. Peter takes one look at her and says: ‘Hey, Jesus, the tortillas are here!’ ”

Menchu has endured such racist jokes and comments all her life. She speaks with quiet, restrained anger as she remembers what people said when she first spoke on Guatemalan television in 1988, when she returned openly to the country for the first time since going into exile. Having been arrested, thrown in jail, and then released from custody, she denounced the authorities, breezing through her interviews in erudite and eloquent Spanish. Many Guatemalans were amazed.

“People said, ‘Rigoberta Menchu speaks better than a ladino, “‘ Menchu remembers. “ ‘Her Spanish is perfect. It’s incredible that she’s so intelligent.’ As if intelligence belonged to only one sector of the population. There were aberrant assertions that I must have been trained to speak by East German (Communists) agents because I couldn’t have learned all this on my own.”

*

EVEN AS SHE WAS BEING DISPARAGED at home, her recognition was growing abroad. In the weeks before the Nobel committee announced the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, Indian activists all over the world were busy organizing protests to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. It appeared that the committee would acknowledge the quincentenary by awarding the prize to an indigenous leader. Still, the ideal candidate was not immediately obvious. There was no Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. whose moral and personal authority granted them unquestioned leadership of the movement.

Menchu, who had been struggling for more than a decade to pressure the international community to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples, “was one of a number of people who might have been chosen,” says Howard R. Berman, professor of international law at the California Western School of Law in San Diego. “The movement is very diverse and there’s not one central leader.” But, Berman adds, “Rigoberta was an excellent choice. She’s very highly regarded and a person of great integrity.”

Indigenous activists agree that the prize has granted new visibility and legitimacy to their struggle. Since accepting the $1.2-million award, Menchu has found herself thrust into a new role as the leading spokeswoman for the international movement. With more moral than financial support from the U.N. bureaucracy (Menchu complains that the U.N. provided her with a measly $47,000), she used her one-year goodwill ambassadorship to convene two international summits. At Menchu’s invitation, and with part of her Nobel award paying some of the costs, more than 100 leaders from five continents attended.

The delegates agreed to ask the U.N. to declare the period between 1994 and 2004 the international decade of indigenous peoples, and last December, the U.N. General Assembly approved the decade, which will begin this Dec. 10.

Under Menchu’s leadership, the summit delegates also developed a plan to push the U.N. to approve the draft declaration on indigenous peoples’ rights. The declaration must still work its way through a labyrinth of U.N. committees before being presented to the General Assembly for final consideration. The document declares that indigenous peoples have the right to protect their lands, cultural practices and natural resources. Although the declaration would not have the force of international law, it could be the first step toward the adoption of an international convention on indigenous peoples’ rights, similar to the Geneva Convention on the protection of prisoners and medical personnel in wartime.

“She was supposed to take the position as goodwill ambassador and pose for posters and show up for tea in Vienna and Geneva,” says Mililani B. Trask, a summit delegate representing the indigenous peoples of Hawaii. “She’s gone way beyond anything they (the U.N.) ever expected. They wanted her to be a symbol but she had the integrity to not do that.”

*

MAYAN CALENDAR PRIESTS have kept a continuous count of the days over a period of 25 centuries. On the day that Quiche priest Nicolas Lucas is interviewed, the Mayan calendar reads “12 Ix” (pronounced eesh ). The coming of the “new dawn,” Lucas says, was foretold by Mayan priests three years before the arrival of the first European, conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who defeated the army of Quiche warriors led by Tecun Uman. The priests predicted a long period of darkness would follow the conquest. But one day the sun would return.

“The new dawn is about to rescue our culture,” Lucas says. “Our ancestors said the moment would arrive in which their children and grandchildren would wake up again and see this light. We’ve been lost for 500 years but it’s not possible to continue the same way. We have to take action.” But asked why the Mayan calendar says the new dawn is coming now , Lucas is a little less forthcoming. He says he has been studying the calendar for 30 years and “to explain all that, I would need a year. Maybe two.”

Most Mayans don’t need to have mastered the complexities of their calendar to know change is long overdue. Since founding the “New Dawn” coalition in 1991, Juan Leon has seen a remarkable growth in Mayan political and cultural organizations.

But he believes that the day of Mayan dominance is still a long way off. Nor is it the goal of his movement. “Some people think what we want to do is to throw all the ladinos out of Guatemala and send them back to Spain,” Leon says. “That’s not our intention.” The Mayans, he says, only want to live in a country where ladinos and Mayans treat each other with respect.

Menchu expressed similar thoughts in her speech in Oslo when she accepted the Nobel Prize: “Combining all the shades of ladinos , Africans and indigenous peoples that make up the ethnic mosaic of Guatemala, we should interlace a variety of colors, making them shine, weaving as our artisans do.” The result, Menchu believes, will be a huipil, an intricate, rainbow-colored garment that will be Guatemala’s gift to humanity.