Word: guatemala
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Marcos, where she had been coordinating opposition to the quincentennial celebration. For the past two years, she has been a leading member of the campaign -- ultimately successful -- to have the U.N. designate 1993 as the International Year for Indigenous Populations. A Mayan of the Quiche group from northwestern Guatemala, she moved to Mexico in 1981, after her father, mother and a brother were killed by government security forces. "I only wish that my parents could have been present," she said last week...
Menchu was selected for the $1.2 million prize, the committee said, "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation." Amid the "large-scale repression of Indian peoples" in Guatemala, she plays a "prominent part as an advocate of native rights." Francis Sejersted, the chairman, said the committee was "aware that this is a somewhat controversial prize." The fact that it came during the quincentennial "was not a coincidence," he said, "but it was not the only factor...
...father, Vicente, was one of the early underground organizers of an agrarian trade union called the Peasant Unity Committee. His 16-year-old son was seized by security troops, flayed and publicly burned. In January 1980, when Vicente and some of his comrades occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to their grievances, police stormed the building. The embassy caught fire, and the demonstrators burned to death...
...under a tree to die of her wounds. Menchu tried to live in hiding but soon had to flee the country; two of her sisters went to the mountains to join guerrilla forces there. More than 120,000 people have been killed in the 30-year rebellion against Guatemala's successive repressive governments. Security forces are blamed for as many as 50,000 deaths, mostly highland Indians, during the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1980s...
Taken off the streets of Guatemala City or removed from abusive families, the children are usually not legally adoptable and remain in the orphanage until they reach...