Nobel laureate says she's hopeful despite Guatemalan government crackdown
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Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum says she sees signs of hope in her native Guatemala despite the government’s intensifying crackdown on journalists and anti-corruption prosecutors.
State of play: President Alejandro Giammattei's government over the past couple of years has charged or jailed nearly two dozen prosecutors working on anti-corruption cases and journalists whose coverage exposed government wrongdoing, according to local media reports.
- The government has also targeted judges, several of whom have gone into exile, mostly in the U.S.
- The U.S. government in July added Attorney General Consuelo Porras to a State Department list of "corrupt and undemocratic actors.”
What she’s saying: In an interview with Axios conducted after she spoke at a summit on digital innovation in Mexico City last week, Menchú Tum said she is optimistic despite the crackdown.
- Menchú Tum cited the legal victory for a group of Mayan women sexually assaulted by members of a paramilitary group during the civil war as one reason to be encouraged. The men were each convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison this year.
- The women’s determination to push that case forward “shows Guatemala is still the cradle of many brave people,” Menchú Tum said.
- “I think it’s a blessing that we lived through an era of such violence and are still alive, and having life compels us to keep fighting against impunity, violence, femicide … to prove that violence, discrimination, racism should not and will not be forgotten,” Menchú Tum told Axios Latino.
Flashback: Menchú Tum was born in 1959, a year before Guatemala’s civil war broke out, in a remote community that is majority Mayan K'iche'.
- Her dad, mom and younger brother were murdered at separate times in the late 1970s as part of a government campaign against Indigenous peoples and anyone considered a “subversive domestic enemy.”
- She was forced to flee to Mexico in 1981 over her activism and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
More than 200,000 people — over 80% of them Mayan — were assassinated or forcibly disappeared in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996, according to a UN-backed report from a truth commission.
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