Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Spanish: [riɣoˈβeɾta menˈtʃu]; born 9 January 1959)[1] is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist,[2] and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Rigoberta Menchú was born to a poor Indigenous family of K'iche' Maya descent in Laj Chimel, a rural area in the north-central Guatemalan province of El Quiché.

[3] Her father, Vicente Menchú Perez, died in the 1980 Burning of the Spanish Embassy, which occurred after urban guerrillas took hostages and were attacked by government security forces.

[8] In January 2015, Pedro García Arredondo, a former police commander of the Guatemalan Army who later served as the chief of the now defunct National Police (Policía Nacional, PN),[9] was convicted of attempted murder and crimes against humanity for his role in the embassy attack;[8][10] Arrendondo was also previously convicted in 2012 of ordering the enforced disappearance of agronomy student Édgar Enrique Sáenz Calito during the country's long-running internal armed conflict.

They had a Catholic wedding in January 1998; at that time they also buried their son Tz'unun ("hummingbird" in K’iche’ Maya), who had died after being born prematurely in December.

She lives with her family in the municipality of San Pedro Jocopilas, Quiché Department, northwest of Guatemala City, in the heartland of the Kʼicheʼ people.

Following military coups that started with the CIA-orchestrated removal of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, the Cuban revolution of 1959, and the Che Guevara's commitment to create as many Vietnams as he could, the U.S. moved to condone and often support authoritarian rule in the name of national security.

[15] By 1981 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was reporting on the indiscriminate killing of civilians in rural areas, government soldiers being "forced to fire at anything that moved".

[15] In 1982 the CIA reported several villages being burned to the ground while Guatemalan commanding officers were "expected to give no quarter to combats and non-combats alike".

[17][7] Menchú often faced discrimination for wanting to join her male family members in the fight for justice, but she was inspired by her mother to continue making space for herself.

[17] After leaving school, Menchú worked as an activist campaigning against human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan Army during the country's civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.

[5] Menchú's work made her an international icon at the time of the ongoing conflict in Guatemala and brought attention to the suffering of Indigenous peoples under an oppressive government regime.

[28] On 12 February 2007, Menchú announced that she would form an Indigenous political party called Encuentro por Guatemala and that she would stand in the 2007 presidential election.

[4] At the peak of state counterinsurgency, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal: Session on Guatemala (PPT-SG), held in Madrid in 1983, was the first of its kind for Central America.

[34] The tribunal looked at evidence going back to the CIA-backed coup that ousted democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954; although its focus was on the massacres, scorched earth policies, forced disappearances, torture, and killings taking place at the time under General Efraín Ríos Montt.

[35] Guatemala became the first Latin America country to place a former president on trial for genocide, being charged for the killing and disappearance of 70,000 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands.

[39] Since 2003, Menchú has become involved in the Indigenous pharmaceutical industry as president of "Salud para Todos" ("Health for All") and the company "Farmacias Similares," with the goal of offering low-cost generic medicines.

[24][40] As president of this organization, Menchú has received pushback from large pharmaceutical companies due to her desire to shorten the patent life of certain AIDS and cancer drugs to increase their availability and affordability.

[63] Stoll acknowledged the violence against the Maya civilians in his book, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans, but believed the guerillas were responsible for the army's atrocities.

Some scholars have stated that, despite its factual and historical inaccuracies, Menchú's testimony remains relevant for the ways in which it depicts the life of an Indigenous Guatemalan during the civil war.

Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the committee, stated that Menchú's prize was awarded because of her advocacy and social justice work, not because of her testimony, and that she had committed no observable wrongdoing.