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<span>WORDLY WISE 3OOO® ONLINE Level 8 • PassageLesson 10 Rigoberta Menchu The four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s famous voyage was 1 commemorated in 1892 with much fanfare throughout North and South America. The five hundredth anniversary celebrations, in 1992, were muted by comparison. Instead of celebrating, many people drew attention to how thoroughly the European settlers had wreaked devastation upon the original inhabitants of the Americas. In that year, too, the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchu, a thirty-three-year-old native woman from Guatemala. She was honored for her “increasingly prominent part as an advocate of native rights.” Until Menchu was sixteen, she spoke only Quiché, one of some twenty dialects of the Guatemalan native peoples. The Quiché are the descendants of the once-proud Mayas. Mayan civilization flourished in Central America until about 900. Menchu came to prominence in 1983 with the publication in Spanish of her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu. The book gives an account of the atrocities committed by government forces from the 1960s up to the 1980s against the peasant population of Guatemala. While the country’s elite lived in heavily guarded, luxurious homes in Guatemala City, the native peoples lived in abject poverty. Natives made up more than half of the population. Their little plots of land, which provided only a meager living, could be seized without warning by wealthy landowners. To protest was to risk severe punishment by the army. An entire village could be razed and its inhabitants slaughtered. During the thirty-year conflict, an estimated one hundred thousand unarmed native peasants were killed; tens of thousands fled the turmoil in the countryside for the safety of neighboring Mexico. There they languished for many years in refugee camps. Others escaped to the mountains to wage a decades-long civil war against the army. Menchu’s own family experienced terrible losses for resisting the army’s rigid control of the country. Her father was repeatedly beaten, tortured, and jailed for organizing nonviolent protests. In 1980, he was part of a group that occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. The goal was to draw attention to the government’s flagrant abuses of human rights. During this occupation, the building was set on fire, killing those trapped inside. Later, Menchu’s sixteen-year-old brother, along with twenty others, was abducted and killed by the military. A year later her mother was abducted by army </span>
