Strike Against Racism

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"The celebration of Columbus is for us an insult."

-- Rigoberta Menchu

NORWAY'S NOBEL COMMITTEE HAS never been reluctant to use the immense prestige of its Peace Prize to make a political point. Over the years it has found timely reason to honor such powerful figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Willy Brandt, Lech Walesa and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Few of those were more calculatedly controversial than this year's Nobel Peace laureate, Rigoberta Menchu. The award to the 33-year-old Guatemalan Indian-rights activist was announced in the week marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World.

News of the award reached Menchu in San Marcos, where she had been coordinating opposition to the quincentennial celebration. For the past two years, she has been a leading member of the campaign -- ultimately successful -- to have the U.N. designate 1993 as the International Year for Indigenous Populations. A Mayan of the Quiche group from northwestern Guatemala, she moved to Mexico in 1981, after her father, mother and a brother were killed by government security forces. "I only wish that my parents could have been present," she said last week.

Menchu was selected for the $1.2 million prize, the committee said, "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation." Amid the "large-scale repression of Indian peoples" in Guatemala, she plays a "prominent part as an advocate of native rights." Francis Sejersted, the chairman, said the committee was "aware that this is a somewhat controversial prize." The fact that it came during the quincentennial "was not a coincidence," he said, "but it was not the only factor."

Menchu says she will use the prize money to set up a foundation in her father's name to defend the rights of indigenous people. "The only thing I wish for is freedom for Indians wherever they are," she says. "As the end of the 20th century approaches, we hope that our continent will be pluralistic."

Born in poverty, uneducated, Menchu became a farm laborer as a small child, tending corn and beans on her parents' tiny plot and traveling with them to the south to work on coffee, cotton and sugar plantations. She did not even learn to speak Spanish until she was 20. But the world learned her story with the 1983 publication of her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu, which eventually appeared in 11 languages. It tells of Quiche life in the mountains and the domination of the Indians, who make up 60% of the population, by the minority Ladinos, mostly the descendants of the European colonists. Her book recounts, in horrifying detail, the torture and death of family members.

Her father, Vicente, was one of the early underground organizers of an agrarian trade union called the Peasant Unity Committee. His 16-year-old son was seized by security troops, flayed and publicly burned. In January 1980, when Vicente and some of his comrades occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to their grievances, police stormed the building. The embassy caught fire, and the demonstrators burned to death.