Nobel Winner Denounces Abuses in Guatemalan War

They met 19 years ago in war-torn Guatemala. She was an organizer of indigenous peasants and was being pursued by soldiers. He was an American writer who headed a church-based organization in Guatemala City and provided her refuge for a week.

Since then, Rigoberta Menchu, the Maya activist, has become a Nobel Peace Prize winner, an author and the head of a crusade to prosecute Guatemalan military and civilian leaders for human rights violations committed during the Central American nation’s bloody civil war.

Phil Hofer, the American who sheltered her, now heads an international studies program at the University of La Verne.

This week, he is again Menchu’s host, this time as she tours five Southern California universities to discuss her international human rights campaign for indigenous peoples.

“When I met her at the airport, it was a very emotional moment for me,” said Hofer, part of the entourage shuttling Menchu around the Los Angeles area as if she were a Hollywood celebrity.

Menchu credits Hofer, his wife, Joy, and others at the Mennonite Central Committee, a church-related health and educational organization, with providing her lifesaving shelter when most of her friends were afraid to stand up for her.

“We felt like crying when we remembered those times,” she said Wednesday of her reunion with Hofer.

Menchu’s lectures are her first in Southern California, home to more than 200,000 Guatemalan Americans, since Spain’s high court agreed last week to investigate her charges against the four generals and two civilian leaders she said are responsible for the deaths of thousands of peasants, including her own mother, father and brother, during the 35-year civil war that ended in 1996.

The Spanish court is the same judiciary panel that secured the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London last year for alleged human rights abuses. But British authorities later refused to extradite Pinochet to Spain, and he recently returned to Chile.

Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for championing the cause of human rights during the Guatemalan civil war, which killed an estimated 120,000 people. She gained acclaim--and later some controversy-- with her 1983 autobiography, “I Rigoberta Menchu,” a vivid account of the deadly campaign of repression carried out by the Guatemalan army.

Two years ago, an American anthropologist alleged that key details in Menchu’s book were fabricated. A spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee said the criticism would have no effect on the peace prize. Other American scholars have questioned Menchu’s devotion to peace, suggesting that she had ties to Guatemalan guerrillas. She has called those allegations part of a racist plot to undermine her.

But neither Menchu nor her supporters raised those issues Wednesday.

Her first public lecture of the current tour, at Occidental College in Eagle Rock on Wednesday, attracted such a large crowd--more than 250 students--that the event was moved from a small lecture hall to an auditorium. Before she uttered her first words, the students gave her a standing ovation.

Dressed in the traditional clothing of Guatemalan Indian women, Menchu said everyone who does not speak out against human rights abuses is an accomplice to those violations.

“Why did the world permit more than 200,000 deaths and disappearances in a country with only 11 million inhabitants?” she asked.

Menchu told the group that she wanted to speak to students because they may someday become lawyers, judges and business leaders who could be in a position to fight human rights abuses.

“If we ignore the truth, we harm future generations,” she said.