Activist enters Guatemala’s presidential race

GUATEMALA CITY – Rigoberta Menchu’s spacious modern home blends seamlessly into this gated upper middle-class neighborhood on the edge of Guatemala City. But behind the walls and guards, there are chickens and rabbits and a flower-bedecked Mayan altar.

It’s an apt setting for a former peasant girl-turned-Nobel Laureate who straddles two worlds and is running for president of her deeply divided country, on a continent where Indians like herself have suffered centuries of poverty and discrimination.

Even though Menchu trails behind the three leading candidates in the Sept. 9 election, the fact that she’s running is indicative of the political rise of Indians across Latin America, highlighted by the 2005 election of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Menchu says democratic politics will open a new chapter not only in her own life but also for the 42 percent of Guatemala’s 12 million people who define themselves as Indian.

“I have the great honor of being able to open up this space,” Menchu, a matronly 48-year-old in flowing, multicolored clothes, said at the home she shares with her husband and 12-year-old son. “Things will never be the same here again.”

But it remains to be seen whether Guatemala, with its wealthy male power structure, is ready to be led by an Indian woman.

It would be a huge shock to the establishment, said Estuardo Zapeta, a Mayan intellectual and newspaper columnist. “For many it would be like the servant trying to take over the country – that’s the mentality.”

He also wondered whether politics would sully her saint-like status among Indians.

“She is a symbol of success for Indian people here, and I worry that if she is crushed by this process, that she will then become a symbol of failure,” he said.

Menchu has lived at the center of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, during which the Indian community was devastated by massacres and forced disappearances. Her father and other Indian activists occupied the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City in a protest in 1980 and were among 37 people who died when the building was set on fire, allegedly by government agents.

Her nonviolent work on behalf of oppressed Indians won her the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize.

The war ended 10 years ago, and Menchu calls her candidacy a “thermometer” measuring Guatemala’s progress in battling racism and building democracy.

But Guatemalan Indians, millions of whom live on just a few dollars a day, are politically inert compared with other Latin American countries, and the U.N. Development Program says they suffer “historically racist attitudes” so extreme that the country could become ungovernable.

Only about a dozen Indians have seats in the 158-member Congress, and none has ever been president.

Menchu herself has felt the toxic combination of racism and sexism. In 2003, after she spoke out against letting former dictator Gen. Jose Efrain Rios Montt run for president, a politician told her to “go and sell tomatoes at the market, Indian.”

She fought back, using a 2002 anti-discrimination law to prosecute the politician and four others who joined in the abuse. They were convicted and fined nearly $9,000 each.

“Guatemala has been ready to have a Mayan president for more than 200 years,” says Menchu, who promises to represent all Guatemalans.

She promises to clean up corruption and reform the military and police forces, but it’s a daunting challenge. Traffickers in Colombian cocaine have the upper hand in the drug wars, criminal gang members deported from the United States run rampant, and death squads from civil war times allegedly still lurk inside the nation’s police forces.

She vows to review Guatemala’s new trade agreement with the United States, suggesting she could cancel it if she feels it doesn’t benefit the Guatemalan majority.

But Menchu’s candidacy has revived old questions about her credibility, first raised in 1999 in a book by American anthropologist David Stoll, which claimed her autobiography, “I, Rigoberta Menchu,” changed many elements of her life or borrowed stories from others.

She remains deeply defensive about those claims, and it’s that reaction – rather than the story itself – that most bothers Stoll.

“If she really thinks she can bat down honest questions by saying the questioner is racist or an American CIA agent, that’s not going to make her a very good presidential candidate,” said Stoll, who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Menchu dismissed the debate as trivial, compared to the atrocities of war her book described, and disrespectful to the 200,000 people who died in the violence.

“If you want to debate, I ask you to go to the mass graves, go to the area where there are the remains of our dead,” she said.