MENCH, RIGOBERTA

born 1959, Guatemala Rigoberta Mench, 1992. Guatemalan Indian-rights activist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. Mench was a Mayan Indian of the Quich group. Her father, a leader of a peasant organization opposed to Guatemala's military government, died in a fire while protesting human-rights abuses by the military. Her younger brother was kidnapped, tortured, and burned to death by a military death squad in 1979, and her mother was kidnapped, raped, mutilated, and murdered by soldiers the following year. Mench fled to Mexico in 1981 and was cared for there by members of a liberal Roman Catholic group. She soon joined international efforts to make the Guatemalan government cease its brutal counterinsurgency campaigns against Indian peasants, becoming a skilled public speaker and organizer in the course of her efforts. Mench gained international prominence in 1983 with her widely translated book I, Rigoberta Mench, in which she tells the story of her impoverished youth and recounts in horrifying detail the torture-murders of her brother and mother. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her continuing efforts to achieve social justice and mutual reconciliation in Guatemala.