Rigoberta Menchú Tum

It was 1981, in Guatemala.

A twenty-two-year-old woman had to leave her country for Mexico.

Her name was Rigoberta Menchú Tum.

She was born on 9 January 1959 in Chimel, a village in the department of Quiché, in Guatemala. She was K'iche' Maya.

As a child, she helped with the work on the family farm. She probably also worked on coffee plantations.

Her mother, Juana Tum, was a midwife. Her father, Vicente Menchú, defended the rights of Indigenous farmers. Rigoberta worked alongside him in the Committee for Peasant Unity.

But Guatemala was living through years of extreme violence. Several members of her family were killed by the army.

In 1979, her younger brother was killed by a military squad. In 1980, her father died in the fire at the Spanish embassy, where he had come to protest the army's abuses. That same year, her mother was killed by soldiers.

In Mexico, a Catholic group took her in. For a time she lived in a bishop's home, in Chiapas. There she met European human rights groups.

In 1982, she told her life story to Elisabeth Burgos. The book came out in 1983: I, Rigoberta Menchú. It was translated into many languages.

She insisted on one thing:

She was praised for drawing the world's attention to Guatemala.

Indigenous organizations supported her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. They wanted to highlight the wrongs of the European colonization of the Americas.

She received the prize in 1992, at thirty-three. The committee honoured her "struggle for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples."

She was then the youngest winner of the Peace Prize. She was also the first Indigenous person to receive it.

With the prize money, she created a foundation bearing her name.

She supported reconciliation. In 1996, a peace agreement was signed, through Norwegian mediation.

She became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and a UN ambassador for Indigenous peoples.

In 1999, she filed a complaint in a Spanish court over the crimes committed during Guatemala's civil war.

That same year, an anthropologist, David Stoll, challenged parts of her account. The secretary of the Nobel committee replied that the prize honoured her work, not her testimony.

In 2007, she founded the political movement Winaq. She ran for president in 2007 and in 2011. Each time she won about three percent of the vote.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum comes from the K'iche' Maya people, with their own way of living in the world. She echoes Ubuntu without being the same thing: she never spoke for herself alone, but in the name of her people.

In 1981, a young woman had to leave Quiché.

Wherever she went, she carried the voice of a whole people.