I… Rigoberta Menchu
Authors: Menchu Rigoberta 
Published: October 2007

An Indian woman in Guatemala has described the experience of her race; we print an extract from her book.

I… Rigoberta Menchu is the testimony of a young Guatemalan Indian woman's struggle against the exploitation and repression of her race. It gives a picture of a whole way of life that has been silenced for centuries. Since the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century the Indian groups in Guatemala, who make up between 65% and 75% of the population, have not only been denied a share in power and in the decisions affecting their lives and future, but also seen their culture despised when it was not openly attacked, and had the language of their conquerors imposed on their 22 native languages.

As a result, the Indians have been forced into the remote corners of the country; but they have also sought to protect the secrets of their traditions and customs from the outside world. In her book, Rigoberta accepts the challenge of informing the outside world, confident that the Indian culture is both valuable and strong.

In 1984, the approximately four million descendants of the Mayan Indians are still facing the systematic destruction of their communities. Over the past five years, more than 300 villages have been destroyed, and as many as 15,000 Indians killed in massacres carried out by the army in the name of an anti-guerrilla war.

In the mid-seventies, mineral and oil deposits were found in the northern highlands of Guatemala, where the Indians had previously been protected by the fact that the lands were regarded as unproductive. Now it is being hailed as the ‘new frontier’, the key to Guatemala's economic future. Successive military regimes have imposed colonisation schemes to drive the Indians off the land. Where they have resisted, open terror has been used against them.

Such unrelenting pressure on Indian lands is one of the factors that has led many Indians to begin in recent years to sympathise with Guatemala's armed opposition groups. Another may be the realisation, by 1980, that peaceful forms of protest against landowners and exploitation did not work. In May 1978, a peaceful demonstration by Kekchi Indians in Panzós, Alta Verapaz, was fired on by soldiers with a toll of 100 dead. This, and the Spanish Embassy massacre of 31 January 1980, when 39 people including Rigoberta's father and 22 other Indians were killed by security forces during a peaceful occupation of the building, seems to have been a turning point for Indian involvement in active opposition to the military government, adding a new political consciousness to the desire for survival. The military response has been escalating repression, seemingly deciding that ‘by definition, all Indians are guerrillas and must be killed’ (“Survival International, Witness to Genocide, 1983 p 13).

Rigoberta's book gives a first-hand account of these atrocities, in which she has lost her mother, father, and one of her brothers. It also traces her growing realisation that the Indians' linguistic isolation and lack of familiarity with the practices of the dominant ladino (mixed race) culture in Guatemala compound her people's humiliation. Time and again she witnesses the impotence brought on by their inability to communicate in this oppressive world: ladino lawyers and interpreters pretend to help the Indians in the law courts but really deceive them, the Land Transformation Institute tricks them into signing papers they don't understand which leads them to forfeit their lands to the big landowners. They are tricked out of money in the markets, bullied in domestic service in the towns, exploited in near slave conditions on the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations of the coast.

Rigoberta's anger is fuelled by her growing awareness of the precarious nature of the Indians' lives. If they do not die from malnutrition as children, they die as young adults from overwork and disease, or suffer harassment, torture and death at the hands of the enemy.

Rigoberta takes a decisive step when she decides she must learn Spanish: ‘They've always said: poor Indians, they can't speak, so we must speak for them. I told myself, I must learn to speak Spanish so that we don't need intermediaries.’ Her intention is not to assimilate the ladino culture but to fight it. She is not advocating a racial struggle but recognition for her people and their basic rights: enough land to grow food on, the acceptance of their culture as different and valid, and the freedom to promote literacy and the oral traditions of Guatemala not only in Spanish but also in Quiché, Cakchiquel. Mam and any other of the 22 native languages.