Mayas Guatemala

Lawyers for Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu on Thursday defended her attempt to have three former dictators tried in Spain for racial genocide against Guatemala's indigenous Maya population. Spain's High Court previously ruled that it had grounds to prosecute former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet and Argentina's ex-military leaders on similar charges, and Menchu said the same rules apply because genocide is a "universal crime."

Lawyers for Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu on Thursday defended her attempt to have three former dictators tried in Spain for racial genocide against Guatemala's indigenous Maya population. Spain's High Court previously ruled that it had grounds to prosecute former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet and Argentina's ex-military leaders on similar charges, and Menchu said the same rules apply because genocide is a "universal crime."

From the moment the diplomat and archeologist Edward H. Thompson hacked his way through the jungles of Yucatan in 1904 to discover the abandoned temples of Chichen Itza, the mysterious, exotic aura of the Maya has fascinated the American public. First they were known as the builders of a vanished empire, a dozen cities where pyramids rose from the rain forest.

From the moment the diplomat and archeologist Edward H. Thompson hacked his way through the jungles of Yucatan in 1904 to discover the abandoned temples of Chichen Itza, the mysterious, exotic aura of the Maya has fascinated the American public. First they were known as the builders of a vanished empire, a dozen cities where pyramids rose from the rain forest.

"For five centuries, we have listened only to the history of the winner," warns Ronald Wright in "Stolen Continents," a fiercely revisionist history of what we arrogantly call the New World. "It is time to hear the other side of the story."

Eleven communities nearly wiped out two decades ago will file today the first lawsuit in Central America accusing a sitting political figure of genocide. The lawsuit, by ethnic Mayas in Guatemala's northern and central mountains, charges that the current head of Congress, Efrain Rios Montt, presided over a brutal policy of racial extermination as the nation's dictator in the early 1980s.

"You want to see a chicken sacrifice?" asks 11-year-old Sebastian, one of Chichicastenango's few English-speaking residents and a young entrepreneur. "I'll take you. What'll you pay me?" Sebastian approaches me outside the heavy wooden doors of Santo Tomas Church holding the hand of his younger brother, a scrawny boy with a dirt-streaked face and Cheshire grin. Below, on the church's flight of wide, semicircular stone steps, an old man swings a hand-held burner oozing sweet, resinous incense.