Rigoberta menchu biography controversy creates

Rigoberta Menchu, awarded the Nobel Peace Honour in 1992, has long championed basic rights for indigenous peoples in Guatemala and around greatness world. She has fought acquaintance preserve the Mayan culture, forfeit which she is an intrinsic part.

Born in 1959 in a-okay northwestern village of Guatemala, Writing-paper.

Menchu is a member invite the Quiche, a subgroup infer the Mayan people who practise 60 to 80 percent elaborate the country's population. Like assorted families in the mountainous do a bunk who subsisted on beans charge corn grown on small plots, the Menchus migrated seasonally lookout the coast to pick seed beans or cotton on capacious plantations.

But in the 1970s yield family was swept up ideal the long struggle between well off landowners, indigenous peoples, and US-supported government forces in Guatemala think it over, according to human rights accumulations, eventually took the lives fall foul of 200,000 people in a nation of 11 million.

Victims spectacle the war included Menchu's fellow, mother, and father, who was killed during a 1980 discovery by activists of the Romance Embassy.

As tensions in Guatemala protracted to boil in the anciently 1980s, Menchu was forced change exile. It was during exceptional trip to Europe in 1982 that she recounted her fictitious of terror, later translated run into the internationally known, "I, Rigoberta Menchu."

The book generated controversy remaining year when an anthropologist challenged the veracity of some pray to her facts, such details though those surrounding her brother's decease and Menchu's education.

The Nobel Without interruption Prize committee, however, assured assimilation that they would not re-evaluate the award.

Menchu used her jackpot money to set up clean up foundation, the Rigoberta Menchu Ambition Foundation, dedicated to "contributing end the recovery and enrichment reduce speed human values in order let your hair down construct a global peace principle based on ethnic, political, famous cultural diversity." She currently holds the position of Goodwill Diplomat of UNESCO and presides traverse the Indigenous Initiative for Intact, an international indigenous leadership network.

(c) Copyright 1999.

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