Excerpts from
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

http://www.worldtrek.org/odyssey/latinamerica/rigoberta/rigoberta_story.html

http://www.ibw.com.ni/~lsanchez/rigobertax.html

Excerpts from Chapter 6: AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ARGRICULTURAL WORKER
(Time: Late 1970's)

I worked from when I was very small, but I didn't earn anything. I was really helping my mother because she always had to carry a baby, my little brother, on her back as she picked coffee. It made me very sad to see my mother's face covered in sweat as she tried to finish her work load, and I wanted to help her. But my work wasn't paid, it just contributed to my mother's work. I either picked coffee with her or looked after my little brother, so she could work faster. My brother was two at the time: Indian women prefer to breastfeed their babies rather than give them food because, when the child eats and the mother eats, that's duplicating the food needed. So my brother was still feeding at the breast and my mother had to spend time feeding him and everything.

I remember that, at that time, my mother's work was making food for forty workers. She ground maize, made tortillas, put the nixtamal on the fire and cooked beans for the workers' food. That's a difficult job in the finca. All the dough made in the morning has to be finished the same morning because it goes bad. My mother had to make the number of tortillas the workers would eat. She was very appreciated by the workers because the food she gave them was fresh. The food we ate was cooked by another woman who sometimes gave us things that had gone bad, or tortillas which were tough and beans which jumped when you tried to pick them up. In the finca the women who do the cooking don't know which people they will cook for. The overseer comes and says, 'This is your group.., this is what you give them to eat, these are the people you feed, you feed them at such and such a time.., so get to work.' So different women fed us. My mother liked to give the workers the food they deserved, even if it meant she didn't sleep all night. They came back tired from the fields and she wanted to see that they ate well, even though her own family were eating badly somewhere else.

I was five when she was doing this work and I looked after my little brother. I wasn't earning yet. I used to watch my mother, who often had the food ready at three o'clock in the morning for the workers who started work early, and at eleven she had the food for the midday meal ready. At seven in the evening she had to run around again making food for her group. In between times, she worked picking coffee to supplement what she earned. Watching her made me feel useless and weak because I couldn't do anything to help her except look after my brother. That's when my consciousness was born. It's true. My mother didn't like the idea of me working, of earning my own money, but I did. I wanted to work, more than anything to help her, both economically and physically. The thing was that my mother was very brave and stood up to everything well, but there were times when one of my brothers or sisters was ill- if it wasn't one of them it was another- and everything she earned went on medicine for them. This made me very sad as well. It was that time, I remember, that when we went back to the Altiplano after five months in the finca, I was ill and it looked as if I'd die. I was six and my mother was distressed because I nearly died. The change of climate was too abrupt for me. After that, though, I made a big effort not to get ill again and, although my head ached a lot, I didn't say so.

When I turned eight, I started to earn money on the finca. I set myself the task of picking 35 pounds of coffee a day. In those days, I was paid 20 centavos for that amount. If I picked the 35 pounds, I earned 20 centavos a day, but if I didn't, I had to go on earning those same 20 centavos the next day. So I set myself this task and I remember that my brothers and sisters finished work at about seven or eight in the evening and sometimes offered to help me, but I said; 'No, I have to learn because if I don't learn myself, who's going to teach me.' I had to finish my workload myself. Sometimes I picked me. I remember very well never wasting a single moment, mainly out of love for my parents and so that they could save a little of their money, although they couldn't really save any because they had to tighten their belts so much anyway.

It was during this period, when I was eight, that I fell ill. I'd been in the finca barely three months when I became ill and we had to go back home. It was in March, the time when we had to go back to the Altiplano anyway to sow our maize. So we went back and that's when I began working with my parents in the fields as well. It was another life, life in the fields- we were much happier. Although things were hard there too, because it rains a lot in the mountains and we were always wet. Our house was very draughty, we were never out of the wind, and the animals came into the house whenever they wanted. It meant we were never comfortable, and we were never warm because we didn't have clothes.

We went down to the finca again. It was round about May. My father went to cut cane on another plantation, one of my brothers went to pick cotton, and the rest of us stayed on the coffee plantation. When my father worked nearby, he used to come back and stay, but when we worked on another finca, we wouldn't see him until the end of the month. It was like that most of the time, with my father cutting, sowing or cleaning cane somewhere else. My father usually worked in sugar and the rest of us in coffee. So we were in different fincas. Sometimes we saw each other every month and sometimes every three months....

Excerps from Chapter 7: DEATH OF HER LITTLE BROTHER IN THE FINCA...

We'd been in the finca for fifteen days, when one of my brothers died from malnutrition. My mother had to miss some days' work to bury him. Two of my brothers died in the finca. The first, he was the eldest, was called Felipe. I never knew him. He died when my mother started working. They'd sprayed the coffee with pesticide by plane while we were working, as they usually did, and my brother couldn't stand the fumes and died of intoxication. The second one, I did see die. His name was Nicolas. He died when I was eight. He was the youngest of all of us, the one my mother used to carry about. He was two then. When my little brother started crying, crying, crying, my mother didn't know what to do with him because his belly was swollen by malnutrition too. His belly was enormous and my mother didn't know what to do about it. The time came when my mother couldn't spend any more time with him or they'd take her job away from her. My brother had been ill from the day we arrived in the finca, very ill. My mother kept on working and so did we. He lasted fifteen days and then went into his death throes, and we didn't know what to do. Our neighbors from our village had gone to different fincas, there were only two with us. We weren't all together. We didn't know what to do because in our group we were with people from other communities who spoke different languages. We couldn't talk to them. We couldn't speak Spanish either. We couldn't understand each other and we needed help. Who was there to turn to? There was no-one we could count on, least of all the overseer, he might even throw us out of the finca. We couldn't count on the owner, we didn't even know who he was since he always did everything through intermediaries: the overseers, the contracting agents etc. So that's how it was. When my mother needed help to bury my brother, we couldn't talk to anyone, we couldn't communicate, and she was desolate at the sight of my brother's body. I remember only being able to communicate with the others through signs. Most of them have had the same experiences; every day they're stuck in situations in which they can't call on help from outside and have to help each other. But it was very difficult. I remember also wanting to make friends with the children who lived in our shed with us- we were three hundred ... four hundred people working in the finca-but we couldn't get to know each other....

It was difficult to get to know each other anyway, but our work made it even more difficult because we had to get up at three in the morning and start work straight away. It's worst when we're picking cotton because it isn't the weight that counts, it's the quantity. In the early morning it's nice and cool but by midday it's like being in an oven; it's very, very hot. That's why they make us start work so early. We stop work at midday to eat but go on working straightaway afterwards until night-time. So, we didn't have much time to get to know any of the others, in spite of our all being one people....

The little boy died early in the morning. We didn't know what to do. Our two neighbors were anxious to help my mother but they didn't know what to do either- not how to bury him or anything. Then the caporal told my mother she could bury my brother in the finca but she had to pay a tax to keep him buried there. My mother said: 'I have no money at all.' He told her: 'Yes, and you already owe a lot of money for medicine and other things, so take his body and leave.' We didn't know what to do. It was impossible to take his body back to the Altiplano. It was already starting to smell because of the humidity, the heat, on the coast. None of the people living in our galera wanted my brother's body to stay there, of course, because it was upsetting. So my mother decided that, even if she had to work for a month without earning, she would pay the tax to the landowner, or the overseer, to bury my brother in the finca. Out of real kindness and a desire to help one of the men brought a little box, a bit like a suitcase. We put my brother in it and took him to be buried. We lost practically a whole day's work over mourning my brother. We were all so very sad for him. That night the overseer told us: 'Leave here tomorrow.' 'Why?' asked my mother. 'Because you missed a day's work. You' re to leave at once and you won't get any pay. So tomorrow I don't want to see you round here.' It was terrible for my mother, she didn't know what to do. She didn't know how to find my father because he was working somewhere else. When they throw people out of the finca, they don't take them back home as they usually do. Usually when the time comes to go back to the Altiplano, the same contracting agents take us back to our village, so we don't have to worry about how we' re getting back, or about any transport, or even where we are. We didn't know our whereabouts, we didn't know where we were or anything. My mother didn't even know the name of the town we were in. But we knew we had to leave so my mother began getting our things together. So our neighbors said: 'We'll go with you even though it means losing everything we worked for too.' One of them lent my mother some money to pay for the burial since she'd been in the [inca for about four months and had saved a little money. The fifteen days we had worked we weren't paid. Not only my mother and I; but my brother had worked fifteen days and wasn't paid either. The overseer said: 'No, it's because you owe a lot to the pharmacy. So, go on, out of here. I don't want to see you around here again.' But my mother knew that she hadn't been able to buy medicine for her son and that's why he'd died. The trouble is that we couldn't speak Spanish and the overseer spoke our language because he came from our region. He threw us out and said he didn't want to see us round there again. The boss's orders. So we had to leave.

We arrived back at our house in the Altiplano. My mother was very sad, so was my brother who was with us. My father didn't know his son had died, nor did my other brothers and sisters because they were working on other fincas. Fifteen days later, they all arrived home to be greeted by the news that the little boy had died and that we owed a lot of money. My father and my brothers and sisters had been earning in the other fincas and had enough money to settle up with our neighbour. The neighbour also gave what he felt he should to the dead child. That's how they helped us- the community, everyone- once we'd got home.

From that moment, I was both angry with life and afraid of it, because I told myself: 'This is the life I will lead too; having many children, and having them die.' It's not easy for a mother to watch her child die, and have nothing to cure him with or help him live. Those fifteen days working in the finca was one of my earliest experiences and I remember it with enormous hatred. That hatred has stayed with me until today....

When I was ten, they raised my pay because by then I was picking forty pounds of coffee. For picking cotton I still got very little because it was a lot in quantity but not in weight. There's an office in every finca where all the work you deliver is taken. It's weighed and noted down for their accounts. Towards the end, my brothers (who are not stupid) managed to figure out the ways in which they fiddled the amounts weighed. They have tricks to make it weigh less, when the real amount is much more. That happens everywhere. It's a special trick of the men in charge of weighing the workers loads; that's when they steal many pounds of coffee. They put large amounts on one side so that they can deliver more and get paid more. It's part of a long process which starts the moment the agents contract the workers in their villages and load them into the lorries like animals. It's one long process of robbing them of their pay. They' re charged for absolutely everything, even for the loading of the lorry. Then, in the finca, the overseers steal from the workers from the very first day. The cantina steals from them too. It continues until the last day. It's so bad that we have had the bad experience of getting home again without a centavo. Coffee is measured by the workload set but cotton is measured by a different method. If you pick 65 pounds of cotton per day, you' re paid according to the weight. But with coffee, you have to pick a quintal per day and if you don't it's added on and the next day you have to finish that quintal before starting another one. In my case, when I started work I had to do a third of what an adult's task would be. That was 35 pounds. But some days I could only do 28 pounds so the next day I had to carry on with the same one. This way you fall further and further behind until you have to spend two days just making up the amount you're missing. With cotton, the situation is different but it's very difficult too. The worst work is when it's second 'hand'. First 'hand' is when the flowers are nicely grouped together, but second hand is when you have to pick between the branches the cotton which has been left behind the first time. That's much harder work but the pay is the same.

Excerps from Chapter 14: A MAID IN THE CAPITAL

...So we reached the capital. I remember that my clothes were worn out because I'd been working in the finca: my corte was really dirty and my huipil very old. I had a little perraje, the only one I owned. I didn't have any shoes. I didn't even know what wearing shoes was like. The master's wife was at home. There was another servant girl to do the cooking and I would have to do all the cleaning in the house. The other servant was also Indian, but she'd changed her clothes. She wore ladino clothes and already spoke Spanish. I didn't know any; I arrived and didn't know what to say. I couldn't speak Spanish but I understood a little because of the finca overseers who used to give us orders, bully us and hand out the work. Many of them are Indians but they won't use Indian languages because they feel different from the laborers. So I understood Spanish although I couldn't speak it. The mistress called the other servant: 'Take this girl to the room in the back.' The girl came, looked at me with indifference and told me to follow her. She took me to the other room. It was a room with a pile of boxes in the corner and plastic bags where they kept the rubbish. It had a little bed. They took it down for me and put a little mat on it, with another blanket, and left me there. I had nothing to cover myself with.

The first night, I remember, I didn't know what to do. That was when I felt what my sister had felt although, of course, my sister had been with another family. Then later the mistress called me. The food they gave me was a few beans with some very hard tortillas. There was a dog in the house, a pretty, white, fat dog. When I saw the maid bring out the dog's food- bits of meat, rice, things that the family ate - and they gave me a few beans and hard tortillas, that hurt me very much. The dog had a good meal and I didn't deserve as good a meal as the dog. Anyway, I ate it, I was used to it. I didn't mind not having the dog's food because at home I only ate tortillas with chile or with salt or water. But I felt rejected. I was lower than the animals in the house. The girl came later and told me to go to sleep because I had to work in the morning and they got up at seven or eight. I was in bed awake from three o'clock. I didn't mind about the bed either because at home I slept on a mat on the floor and we sometimes didn't even have anything to cover ourselves with. But I had a look at the other girl's bed and it was quite comfortable because she wore ladino clothes and spoke Spanish. Later on, however, we got to know each other well. She used to eat the masters' leftovers; what they left in the dish. They'd eat first and she'd get what was left. If there wasn't any left, she'd also get some stale beans and tortillas or some leftovers from the fridge. She ate that and later on when we knew each other she'd give me some.

...At seven, the girl got up and came and told me: 'Come here and wash the dishes.' I went in my same clothes and the mistress came in and said; 'How filthy! get that girl out of here! How can you let her touch the dishes, can't you see how dirty she is?' The girl told me to leave the dishes, but she was upset too. 'Here's the broom, go and sweep up,' the mistress said. I went out to sweep the yard. 'Water the plants,' she said, 'that's your job. And then come here and do the washing. Here are the clothes, but mind you wash them properly or I'll throw you out'....

So I did what the lady told me to do and afterwards, about 11 o'clock when they finished eating, they called me. 'Have you eaten?' 'No.' 'Give her some food.' So they gave me what was left of their food. I was famished. At home we don't eat as much as we should, of course, but at least we' re used to eating tortillas regularly, even if it's only with salt. I was really worried. At about half past eleven, she called me again and took me into a room. She said: 'I'm going to give you two month's pay in advance and you must buy yourself a huipil, a new corte, and a pair of shoes, because you put me to shame. My friends are coming and you' re here like that. What would that look like to my friends? They are important people so you'll have to change your ways. I'll buy you these things but you stay here because I'm ashamed to be seen with you in the market. Here's your two months pay.' Well, I didn't know what to say because I didn't know enough Spanish to protest or say what I thought. But in my mind I insulted her. I thought, if only I could send this woman to the mountains and let her do the work my mother does. I don't think she'd even be capable of it. I didn't think much of her at all.

...I learned to dust, wash and iron very quickly. I found ironing the hardest because I'd never used an iron before. I remember how the washing and ironing used to pile up. The landowner had three children and they changed their clothes several times a day. All the clothes they left lying around had to be washed again, and ironed again, and then hung up in the right place. The mistress used to watch me all the time and was very nasty to me. She treated me like.. I don't know what.., not like a dog because she treated the dog well. She used to hug the dog. So I thought: 'She doesn't even compare me with the dog.' They had a garden and I sowed some plants. I used to do this at home so I got on really well with that. That's what I saw every day. The time came when I was working really well. I did all my jobs in a trice. I didn't find it difficult. I had to work for the two months that the mistress spent on my clothes without earning a centavo....

The sons of the house treated us very badly. One must have been about twenty-two, the next about fifteen, and the youngest about twelve. They were petty bourgeois youths who couldn't even pick a duster up, or clear anything away. They liked throwing their dishes in our faces. That was our job. They threw things at us, they shouted at us all the time, and treated us very badly. When the mistress came home- and goodness knows what she did all day- she'd do nothing but complain. 'There's dust on my bed, there's dust here too, you didn't shake this properly.., the plants ... the books ... '. All she did every day was complain. She just inspected everything and slept. Then at night she'd say, 'Bring me my meal, I'm tired.' And the other girl, who she said was much cleaner, took her her meal in bed, with hot water to wash her hands. She took everything to her. In the morning, the father and the sons all shouted from their beds for us to fetch their slippers and all the other things they needed. At breakfast, if any of their favorite food was missing, they'd make a terrible fuss. And they had talks about our wages: 'What a waste of money, these girls can't do anything.' The mistress was like a parrot. The other maid relied on me a lot. She realized that I wasn't hostile to her but always helped her with lots of things.

There were times when we'd really had enough. One day the other maid and I agreed we'd start being difficult. She said; 'If the mistress complains, let her complain.' And we stopped doing certain things just to annoy her. So she got up and shouted at us, but the more she shouted the more stubborn we became and she saw that that wasn't any use. The other maid said: 'Come on, let's leave and find another job.' But I was worried because I couldn't just decide like that; l didn't know the city and if I counted on her, she might take me somewhere worse. What was I to do ? Soon I realized that the mistress spurned this girl because she wouldn't become the boys' lover. She told me later: 'That old bag wants me to initiate her sons. She says boys have to learn how to do the sexual act and if they don't learn when they're young, it's harder for them when they're older. So she put in my contract that she'd pay me a bit more if I taught her sons.' That was the condition she'd imposed, and that was why she was so hard on the girl: because she'd refused. Perhaps she nursed the hope that one day I'd be clean - she always said I was dirty - so that one day I'd be all right to teach her sons. That's what she hoped, that lady. She mistreated me and rejected me, but she didn't actually throw me out.

I remember that after I'd been in that rich man's house for two months, my father came to visit me. I'd been praying to God that my father wouldn't come, because I knew that if he did, what a dreadful reception he'd get! And I couldn't bear my father to be rejected by that old hag. My father was humble, poor, as I was. He came, not because he had any time to spare to visit me, but because he was left in the city without a single centavo in his pocket. He'd been to see about the business of our land. He said they'd sent him to Quetzaltenango, then to El Quiché, and then they'd asked to see him in the capital and the money he'd brought for the trip had run out. So he hadn't got a penny. When my father rang the bell, the other maid went to see who it was. He said who he was. She told him to wait a minute because she knew what her mistress was like. She told her: 'Rigoberta's father is here.' 'All right,' said the lady of the house and went out to see my father. She saw how poor he was, of course. He was all dirty. Well, he would be because he'd been traveling to many places. That's what it's like for the poor. She went out to look and came straight back. She told me; 'Go and see your father but don't bring him in here, please.' That's what she said and I had to see him outside. She told me plainly not even to bring him into the corridor. He had to stay out in the yard and I explained the situation to him. I said the mistress was very nasty and that it disgusted and horrified her to see my father and that he couldn't even come into the house. He understood very well. He was used to it because we' re rejected in so many different places. My father said: 'My child, I need money. I've nothing for anything to eat or to get home with.' But I still hadn't finished the two months that I owed and hadn't a penny to my name. I said; 'The mistress had to buy clothes for me and docked me two months' pay for it. I haven't earned a single centavo.' My father began to cry and said: 'It can't be true.' 'Yes,' I said, 'everything I'm wearing the mistress bought for me.' So I went to the other maid and told her my father had no money and I didn't know what to do; I couldn't ask the mistress for money as I couldn't speak Spanish. Then she spoke to the mistress for me and said: 'Her father hasn't got a single centavo and needs money.' The girl was very tough and would stand up to anyone and anything. She was really angry with our mistress and said: 'She needs money and must be given some money for her father.' Then the mistress started saying that we were trying to get all her money off her, trying to eat her money up, and we couldn't even do our jobs properly. All maids are the same. They've nothing to eat in their own homes, so they come and eat us out of ours. She opened her bag and took out ten quetzals and threw them into my face. I took the ten quetzals and told my father that I thought she'd take another month's pay. It will be another debt, but this is what I can give you. So my father went home with ten quetzals. But the other girl just couldn't stomach this. She was really hurt by it and she often said that if the mistress complained, she would stand up for me. She had a plan, because she was leaving anyway. She began a resistance campaign against the mistress.

I worked for more than four months, I think, and received no money. Then she paid me a little. She gave me twenty quetzals and I was very happy. I wanted to keep them for my father. But she told me that I had to buy shoes, because she was ashamed to have anyone in her house go barefoot. I had no shoes. But I said to myself: 'I'm not going to buy any. If she wants me to have some, let her buy them'....

December 25th arrived and I remember that they started to drink. They drank and drank. They got completely drunk. They sent me out at midnight on the 25th to get wine and guaro from the cantinas. I had to walk. I didn't go very far because I knew that they were all drunk inside but I didn't know what to do because if I went back, they'd throw me out. I was very worried. I went out but I didn't find anything. Everything round there was closed. I didn't go further afield; I just spent the time walking round the streets, thinking of my home. We might have had hard times because we had very little, but I'd never suffered like I was suffering in the house of those rich people. I went back and they said; 'Did you bring the guaro?' 'No I couldn't find any.' 'You never went. That girl has given you ideas. You used not to be like that, you weren't as badly behaved as most Indians are, not like the girl who left.' And they started discussing the Indians they had at home, saying: 'Indians are lazy, they don't work, that's why they're poor....

So the day passed. They slept all through the 26th. So who had to pick up the plates? Who had to clean the house? Who had to do everything? Me. If I didn't do it the old bag would throw me out. I got up early. I picked up all the plates, I picked up all the skins of the tamales that they'd thrown away, and I piled it all up in one place. This took almost to mid-day. I didn't know where to start: whether to wash up or clean the house? I didn't feel much like doing anything, because of all the work in front of me and just thinking of me having to do it all. The mistress got up and asked: 'Have you prepared lunch?' I said: 'I don't know what we're having to eat,' because I didn't know anything about it. 'Ah, you're not like Cande,' she said. (The other maid was called Candelaria). 'Cande had more initiative. You're just here to eat. You can't do anything. Go to the market and buy some meat.' I didn't know where the market was. 'Excuse me, Señora, but I don't know where the market is.' I could say straightforward things like that, but I couldn't say a lot of other things. 'Oh really? You Indian whore. You know how to make trouble, but you don't know how to do or say anything else.' She was very foulmouthed. I took no notice and didn't even stop. I went on working although she kept on talking all day long. Then she called a neighbor in to complain to. She said her maid was useless and robbed them blind. I knew I wasn't stealing their food but that I paid for my keep with my work. In the end, she could do nothing and had to send her neighbor to market to buy everything. They made their meal, I didn't make anything. I'd been suffering from not having eaten for about two or three days, because I hadn't even had one of the tamales we'd made with all that effort. I'd gone without sleep to make them. We'd take some out of the oven and put the next lot in, and so on. I told myself- I'll never forget this part of my life.

December passed. And I went on working. All the work from Christmas set me back by two weeks. All the new clothes and all the new china they'd got out just piled up. The house was dirty. I had to do everything. The mistress pretended she didn't notice. She'd get up and go out. She didn't even complain so much, because she knew she needed me to do it all. That's when I thought: 'I must get out of this house. I must go home to my parents.' She gave me two months' money. It was forty quetzals. With this and with what I'd already saved, I thought, I can go home to my parents satisfied. It wasn't very much, perhaps, but it would help them. I told the mistress: 'l'm leaving. I'm going home.' She said' 'No, how can you? We're so fond of you here. You must stay. I'll put your wages up, if you like. I'll give you a quetzal more.' 'No,' I said, 'I've made up my mind to go.' I was announcing my departure, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because a terrible thing happened: one of my brothers arrived and said: 'Papal is in prison.'

Excerpts from Chapter 15: CONFLICT WITH THE LANDOWNERS AND THE CREATION OF THE CUC

This was the first time my father went to prison. My brother said, 'We don't know what to do for him because the lawyers say Papá will be in jail for eighteen years. We need money to get educated people to help us.' In Guatemala this is what happens with the poor, especially Indians, because they can't speak Spanish. The Indian can't speak up for what he wants. When they put my father in jail, the landowners gave large amounts of money to the judge there. The judge in El Quiché, that is. There are several levels of authority. First, there is the Military Commissioner. He sometimes lives in the villages or is based in the town, and he tries to impose his own law. Then there is what we call the Mayor who represents the authorities which administer justice when they say someone has broken the law. Next come the Governors who govern the whole region, each province. And finally, there are the Deputies-God knows who they are! To get to see the Military Commissioner, you first have to give him a mordida, that's what we call a bribe in Guatemala. To see the Mayor, you have to get witnesses, sign papers and then give him a mordida so he will support your case. To see the Governor you need not only witnesses from the village, and money, but also lawyers or other intermediaries to talk for you. The Governor is a ladino and doesn't understand the language of the people. He'll only believe something if a lawyer or educated person says it. He won't accept anything from an Indian. The Mayor is a ladino too. But he's a ladino who's come from our people. The Military Commissioner is also a ladino although this varies a bit, because in some places the commissioners are Indians who have done military service and lived in the barracks. There comes a time when they return to their village, brutalized men, criminals.

My father fought for twenty-two years, waging a heroic struggle against the landowners who wanted to take our land and our neighbors' land. After many years of hard work, when our small bit of land began yielding harvests and our people had a large area under cultivation, the big landowners appeared: the Brols. It's said there that they were even more renowned criminals than the Martinez and García families, who owned a finca there before the Brols arrived. The Brols were a large family, a whole gang of brothers. Five of them lived on a finca they had taken over by forcibly throwing the Indians of the region off their land. That was what happened to us. We lived in a small village. We cultivated maize, beans, potatoes and all sorts of vegetables. Then the Garcías arrived and started measuring the land in our village. They brought inspectors, engineers and Heaven knows who else; people they said were from the Government. In Guatemala if it's to do with the Government, there's no way we can defend ourselves. So they came and started measuring our land. My father went round collecting signatures in the village, and they held meetings. Then he went to the capital, to the INTA, Institute Nacional de Transformaci6n Agraria de Guatemala: Guatemalan National Institute for Agrarian Transformation. But the landowners and the Government had made a deal to take the peasants' land away from them. When my father went to protest about the way the landowners were forcing us off our land, the people in the INTA asked the landowners for money to be allowed to go on measuring. On the other hand, they gave the peasants a piece of paper which, according to them, said they didn't have to leave their land. It was a double-sided game. They called my father in. Papá used to be... well, I don't mean foolish exactly because it's the thieves who steal our land who are foolish .... Well, they asked my father to sign a paper but he didn't know what it said because he'd never learned to read or write. In fact, the paper said that the peasants confirmed, once again, that they would leave their land. This gave the landowners power, since he, the community's representative, had signed the paper. My father went back again to protest, this time through some lawyers. The INTA people and the lawyers started getting fat off us. Many lawyers wanted to help us and offered us different sorts of help. They said we were doing the right thing. The peasants trusted them but realized afterwards that they made them pay through the nose, even for a simple signature. My father dedicated himself entirely to our community's problems. The INTA told my father: 'You must get engineers to measure the land and then you'll be the owners of the land you live on. Don't worry, grow what you want. Don't worry, go ahead and clear the undergrowth because the land is yours.' With this encouragement, my father went home and called meetings in the village....

The Government says the land belongs to the nation. It owns the land and gives it to us to cultivate. But when we've cleared and cultivated the land, that's when the landowners appear. However, the landowners don't just appear on their own - they have connections with the different authorities that allow them to maneuver like that. Because of this, we faced the Martínez family, the Garcías, and then the Brols arrived. This meant we could either stay and work as peónes or leave our land. There was no other solution. So my father traveled all over the place seeking advice. We didn't realize then that going to the Government authorities was the same as going to the landowners. They are the same. My father was tireless in his efforts to seek help. He went to other sectors, like the workers' unions. He asked them to help because we were already being thrown off our land.

The first time they threw us out of our homes was, if I remember rightly, in 1967. They turned us out of our houses, and out of the village. The Garcías' henchmen set to work with ferocity. They were Indians too, soldiers of the finca. First they went into the houses without permission and got all the people out. Then they went in and threw out all our things. I remember that my mother had her silver necklaces, precious keepsakes from my grandmother, but we never saw them again after that. They stole them all. They threw out our cooking utensils, our earthenware cooking pots. We don't use those sort of... special utensils, we have our own earthenware pots. They hurled them into the air, and, Oh God! they hit the ground and broke into pieces. All our plates, cups, pots. They threw them out and they all broke. That was the vengeance of the landowner on the peasants because we wouldn't give up our land. All the maize cobs they found in the tapanco, they threw away. Afterwards all the peasants had to work together to collect them up. We did it together and put them in another place. I remember it was pouring with rain, and we had nothing to protect ourselves from the rain. It took us two days to make a roughly built hut out of leaves. We only had those nylon sheets the peasants use to cover themselves in the rain. The first night we spent in the fields with streams of water running along the ground. It wasn't raining then but the ground was sodden.

Those few days confirmed my hatred for those people. I saw why we said that ladinos were thieves, criminals and liars. It was as our parents had told us. We could see that they were doing the same to us. They killed our animals. They killed many of our dogs. To us, killing an animal is like killing a person. We care for all the things of the natural world very much and killing our dogs wounded us very deeply. We spent more than forty days in the fields. Then the community held a meeting and said, 'If they throw us out again, we will die of hunger.' We had no utensils for cooking our tortillas, and no grinding stones. They'd been thrown away into the undergrowth. We organized ourselves, all of us, and said 'Let's collect our things together.' We went looking for any of our things that were still more or less all right. My father said, 'If they kill us they kill us, but we'll go back to our houses.' Our people looked on my father as their own father, and so we went back to our houses. There was another village quite near ours and they helped us. People brought cooking pots and plates so that we could cook our maize and eat. So we went back to our houses. And the landowners came back again for what they called 'collective negotiations.' They told us we should resign ourselves to working as pe6nes because the land belonged to them. We could stay in our houses, but the land was not ours. If we didn't agree, they would throw us off again. But my father said' 'We were the first families to come and cultivate this land and nobody can deceive us into thinking that this land is theirs. If they want to be the owners of more land, let them go and cultivate the mountains. There is more land but it is not land where things grow.' Who knows, perhaps if the community had been alone, we would have become peónes and our land would now be part of a big finca. But my father would have none of it. He said, 'Even if they kill us, we will do it.' Of course, in those days we didn't have enough political clarity to unite with others and protest about our land. What we did we did as an individual community. So we went back to our homes and did not accept the landowners' deal. They left us alone for a month or two. Then there was another raid. All our things were broken for a second time, all the things our neighbours in the other village had given us. We couldn't stand what they were doing to us any longer and decided to go to the finca, abandoning our land. But we couldn't live in the finca all the time. What were we going to do? What would happen to us if we went to the finca? That's when we united and said: 'We won't go !'...

Our life was now such that we couldn't go down to the finca because if we did our houses probably wouldn't be there when we got back. The community decided to eat plants or whatever they could find in the fields rather than go down to the finca. Or part of a family would go and the other part would stay and watch over the house. We became much more united. When the landowners came we'd unite so that they either had to throw us all off, kill us all or leave us alone. We began teaching the children to keep watch and tell us when the landowners were coming. We lived for quite a while like this-with all this tension. I kept on going down to the finca with my brothers and sisters. My mother always stayed in the house. Or my father was there. My father never went down to the fincas because the landowners would take advantage of this and go into the village. Then they started trying other things. We had maize and beans but we had to carry all our produce down from the village to the town which was a long way away. So the landowners set up a temporary market, a place to sell produce and tried to isolate us from the town even more, so that they could take over our land more easily.

Then the INTA came and told us that the problem was solved. They said: 'We're going to give you a title to the land for you to sign and the land will be yours. No one will bother you on your land. You can sow your crops, clear the undergrowth and go further into the mountains. This proposal comes from the Government.' We signed it. I remember even the children signed it. We can't sign with a pen or a pencil. We signed it in ink with our fingerprints on the paper. My father insisted they read the paper out even though we didn't understand it all. We did understand some. But they didn't want to read it. The INTA inspectors said we could rely on the paper, it was the title to the land. So we signed it.

They left us alone for two and a half years, I think it was, to let us calm down. Our people went on working. We hardly ever went down to the finca now so that we could cultivate more land. We tried to clear large areas of the undergrowth, into the mountains. We had a dream, a real dream. In five or eight years our land would yield its fruit. Two and a half years went by when we saw the engineers on our land again, shouting, measuring, with the landowners' guards. Now, not only the Martínez' and the Garcías, but the Brols were all measuring part of our land. This time the problem was more complicated because they brought with them the document we had signed, which said we had agreed to stay on the land and live off its produce for two years only; that when the two years were up, we had another place to go to and would leave the land. This wasn't true. We didn't know what it was we had signed. My father said, 'This is unjust, because we were deceived'....

When my father started going to the unions and getting their support, the landowners offered a great deal of money to the judge who dealt with land claims, and my father was arrested. They accused him of 'compromising the sovereignty of the state.' He was endangering the 'sovereignty and the well-being of the Guatemalans'! They put him in prison. I remember that I'd been working as a maid for a year. I'd saved a little money to take home as a surprise for my family, especially my mother. I'd saved it so that my mother wouldn't have to go to the finca for a couple of months. My brother told me: 'They're asking for money. We don't know what to do.' I decided to leave my job and go back to the finca. From the money I'd saved and my brothers' wages in the finca, we had to pay for witnesses, lawyers, documents, secretaries. There were so many things we had to pay for to be able to get to see the authorities. Since we didn't speak Spanish, we had to find an intermediary to translate my mother's statements. The lawyer was a ladino and didn't understand our language, so we had to get an intermediary to interpret for him. From the beginning the landowners paid the interpreter not to say what we said. The interpreter 'sold himself' to the landowners and, instead of our statements, he said something else. They played so many tricks on us. The result was that our lawyer had nothing to do because, according to the interpreter, we ourselves acknowledged that the land belonged to those landowners. They had paid us to cultivate the land. That wasn't true. We were very afraid that they would send my father to the state prison. As long as he was in the local prison, his case wasn't so serious, but once he got to the state prison, the one in El Quiché, we'd have no way of preventing him from having to carry out the sentence he'd been given. If he went to the criminals' prison, as the authorities in Quetzaltenango said, it meant he would be in jail for eighteen years or more....

In the end, we managed to get him out. Papá was in prison for a year and two months. His enemies were furious when he came out. He came out so happy and determined to fight. He said: 'Our ancestors were never cowardly. And prison doesn't eat people. Prison is a punishment for the poor, but it doesn't eat people. I must go home and go on fighting.' He didn't rest for a minute. That's how he maintained his contacts with the unions and gained their support.

We were very sad each time he said goodbye and went away. He said: 'Children, look after yourselves because if I don't come back, you have to continue my work. I don't do it alone: you are all part of it too. We'll never give the landowners satisfaction. I am very hopeful. We must go on fighting.' My father was away travelling for three months after he got out of prison. Then they kidnapped him and we said, 'They'll have finished him off.' In those days, they were criminals, but a different sort. The landowners' henchmen kidnapped my father near our house on the path going to town. One of my brothers was with him as we hardly ever let him go alone after they'd threatened so often to kill him. We were worried. So even if it meant less work, it was better for the community if someone went with him. He always went with a neighbour or one of his children. My brother escaped and immediately mobilized the whole village. They couldn't take him very far because we cut off the paths right away. We used weapons, our everyday weapons, for the first time. The people took machetes, sticks, hoes and stones to fight the guards. They would have beaten or killed any of them, they were so angry. Around midday we found my father. He'd been tortured and abandoned. There was no sign of the torturers but we knew they were the landowners' guards. My father was on the ground. They had torn off the hair on his head on one side. His skin was cut all over and they'd broken so many of his bones that he couldn't walk, lift himself or move a single finger. He looked as if he was dying. It was almost unbearable for us. The community made him one of those chairs the people use for carrying their wounded and we took him down to the town. He was almost cold. He was almost dead when we arrived at the Health Center but they wouldn't attend to him there because the landowners had got there before us and paid them not to look after my father. They'd given the doctors money so none of them would see my father. All the doctors were ladinos. So my mother had to call an ambulance from Santa Cruz del Quiché which took him to a hospital called San Juan de Dios in El Quiché. He arrived there half dead. They gave him serum and said he'd have to stay there for about nine months for some of the very badly damaged parts of his body to heal. They'd broken many of his bones and he was an old man so they wouldn't mend quickly. More bitterness for my mother. She had to go to El Quiché and look after my father. She worked there to pay for his medicine and some special care....

Later on we received another threat. A message came saying that they were going to kidnap my father from the hospital. The community was frightened and said it would be better for him to come home and be looked after here where they couldn't kidnap him. We told my mother straight away. One of my brothers went to El Quiché to warn her about the message we'd received. With the help of the priests and nuns, who gave us money, we put my father in a secret place where the landowners couldn't find him. He was in the hospital of San Juan de Dios for six months and in the other place for another five months. After that he came home but he was in so much pain that he was never his old self again. He couldn't carry things; he couldn't walk very well and it was a big effort for him to walk to the town. At night he couldn't sleep because his bones ached and all the parts where he'd been beaten hurt him.

He returned home with a greater hate for his enemies. If before they'd been enemies of the community, now they were even more the enemies of my father. We hated all those people. We weren't only angry with the landowners, but with all the ladinos. To us, all the ladinos in that region were evil. In the hospital my father had talked to many people and found that we had many things in common with the Indians in other areas. This gave us a different view; another way of seeing things. After this my father went on working with the help of the unions. When he couldn't go to the capital, the unions looked after his affairs there. Whatever my father was organizing was done by one of the unions helping us.

Then in 1977, my father was put in prison again. They wouldn't leave us in peace. After my father came out of hospital and returned home, they kept on threatening him because they knew as long as the community was united they couldn't send their engineers to the villages. We would use machetes or stones. So they went on threatening my father and said they were going to catch him on the road again and kill him. But my father said: 'They are cowards, they just talk, they never do it.' But it worried us a lot because it would be very difficult for us if they did. That was when my father started advising us not to put our trust in him alone but in the whole community. 'I'm your father now,' he said, 'but afterwards the community will be your father.' He went on traveling and refused to keep quiet. He went on doing his work. It was in 1977 that they arrested him again and sent him to prison....

When my father was arrested the second time, they considered him a political prisoner. The case against him was much worse this time. Now that he was a political prisoner, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was a communist, a subversive, they said. The same Military Commissioners as the first time came and got him from our house with clubs and took him to prison. They beat him and tied him up. He was a political prisoner. This was much worse for him. But by now the community was more aware of all these things. They had their own means of self-defense against the landowners. My brothers now spoke a bit of Spanish and my mother had also learned something from all the suffering, all the knocks, all the responsibility she'd had. We also had the support of the priests, the nuns, the unions and our community. It wasn't just my father now, it was a whole people behind him. My father was well-known and well-loved in many places so there was a big protest against my father's arrest. The unions especially pressed for his release. They still wanted witnesses, lawyers and all those things of course, but my father was soon out of prison. They started threatening him again even before he was out. They said if he continued his work, he would be assassinated and this time if they couldn't kill him they'd kill one of his children. This was his death sentence from the authorities. Of course, the authorities didn't exactly say that they would kill him, but they said the landowners would take care of it....

It was very sad for us that he couldn't live with us at home. He came at night and left at night. Or he spent several days at home but didn't go out. Our community suffered a great deal because they loved him as if he were their own father. Everything in our life is like a film. Constant suffering. We began thinking, with the help of other friends, other compañeros, that our enemies were not only the landowners who lived near us, and above all not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger, poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership of land. The best land was not in our hands. It belonged to the big landowners. Every time they see that we have new land, they try to throw us off it or steal it from us in other ways.

Excerpts from Chapter 25: RIGOBERTA’S FATHER DIES IN THE OCCUPATION OF THE SPANISH EMBASSY

In November of that same year, 1979,1 saw my father quite by chance. I’d gone to El Quiché for a meeting. It was a meeting of leaders of the Committee from many different areas. I’d been invited. When I saw my father, I was delighted. And in front of all the compañeros, he said: ‘This badly brought up daughter has always been a good daughter,’ and he asked them to be a father to me, to all of us, if one day he was killed. The meeting lasted a long time and a lot of things happened with regard to our work. After the meeting I was able to talk to my father for two days. We talked about our experiences in our work. He was pleased and said that as our people became able to organize by themselves, as new compañeros were coming up to lead the struggle, he was ready to take up arms. Because he said: ‘I am a Christian and the duty of a Christian is to fight all the injustices committed against our people. It is not right that our people give their blood, their pure lives, for the few who are in power.’ His views were as clear as any theoretician, as if he’d studied and all that. All his concepts were clear. Then he gave me some encouragement for us to go on with our work. ‘We may not see each other for a long time but remember that, alive or not, I will always help you in whatever way I can.’ Then he told us to look after my mother. He said we should look for her and find her so that she shouldn’t put her life in such danger because— ‘Some people give their blood and some people give their strength. So while we can, we must give our strength. In this hour of need, we must look after our little lives very well so that they provide a source of strength for our people.’ And he said clearly; ‘We want no more dead, we want no more martyrs, because we already have too many in our land, in our fields, through too many massacres. What we must do is protect our lives as much as we can and carry on with our struggle....’

Then I said goodbye to my father. He recommended I be in the capital in January because there was going to be some action calling on the government to do something about the situation. The situation would only improve if many of us were willing to risk our lives. It was going to be another demonstration with students, workers, unions, peasants, Christians, all protesting about the repression in El Quiche. Soldiers were kidnapping people all the time in El Quiche. We’d hear news of ten, fifteen people who’d disappeared somewhere but they never said who they were. We’d get news like that every day.

The march on the capital was organized to demand that the army leave El Quiche. They brought many orphaned children with them as proof of the repression. They took over several radio stations to tell people about our plight. At the same time, they thought they should make it known internationally by occupying an embassy where the Ambassadors would be spokesmen. Unfortunately most of us were too poor to think of going on a tour of other countries. We were very poor and our organization didn’t have the resources to fight the army. The people wanted arms to defend themselves. And so first they occupied the Swiss embassy in Guatemala. Others took over radio stations. The peasants came from many different areas. From the South coast, from the East, but most of them were from El Quiché because that’s where the repression was concentrated. Almost all the leaders in the struggle were peasants. My father was, so were many other compañeros who died that day. The last action was to occupy the Spanish embassy...

They were all burned to death. The only thing left was their ashes. This was a tremendous blow for us. For me, it wasn’t mourning my father so much. It was easy for me to concede that my father had died, because he had been forced to lead the same brutal, criminal, life that we all had. My father was prepared, it was clear that he had to give his life. So for me it wasn’t painful accepting my father’s death, I was happy because I knew he hadn’t suffered as I imagined he would have suffered if he’d fallen into the enemy’s hands alive. That was what I dreaded. No, what hurt me very, very much was the lives of so many compañeros, fine compañeros, who weren’t ambitious for power in the least. All they wanted was enough to live on, enough to meet their people’s needs. This reinforced my decision to fight...

The burned bodies were buried. It was something extraordinary for the whole of Guatemala. Never in all its history had the people been so militant, on every level. Thousands of people buried the compañeros who died. The people were moved by resistance to and hatred of the government. People at all levels—poor, middle class, professional—all risked their lives by going to the funeral of the compañeros from the Spanish embassy...

Some of the versions they gave out were, that the peasants were armed, that they burned themselves, etc. Neither we nor any of our compañeros can say what the real truth is because no one from the Spanish embassy siege survived. All of them, every single one died; the compañeros who coordinated the action and the compañeros who were keeping watch. Some were gunned down in other places after the embassy events. The G2 and the police stormed the embassy. There were a lot of journalists there, in fact, because of the solidarity work of other compañeros. They say that the police threw bombs, or I don’t know what, at the embassy and it started to burn. The only clues we had were that the bodies were stiff, rigid and all twisted. From the study made by our compañeros afterwards and the opinion of other people who know about explosives and bombs that kill people, they could have used sulphur bombs so that they only had to breath in the smoke to become stiff straight away. But it is incredible, because my father had five bullet holes in the head and one in the heart, and he was very stiff. It’s thought that the grenades thrown into the embassy were what punctured the bodies.

Endless versions have been offered. But, in fact, one of our compañeros, Gregorio Yuja Xona, was still alive among the bodies. We managed to rescue him and take him to a private hospital for medical attention. He was the only one who might have told what really happened. But later he was kidnapped from the hospital by armed men, men in uniform who just calmly took him away. The next day he was left in front of San Carlos University: tortured, with bullet wounds, dead. So the government itself had not allowed this compañero to live. We weren’t able to talk to him because he was dying. The real truth is that we know the peasants couldn’t have had firearms. They’d have had weapons like machetes and stones with them. That was all they ever used in the places they took over. However, as I said to someone who asked me for specific details of what happened in the Spanish embassy, I can’t invent my own personal version from my imagination. None of our compañeros can know exactly. This event marked my life personally as much as it did the lives of many of my compañeros. We moved on to a new stage of the struggle.