Indigenous Guatemalans bid farewell to Nobel writer who defended them

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Indigenous Guatemalans burned incense and made offerings at an ancestral site on Saturday to bid farewell to Nobel laureate Miguel Angel ...

GUATEMALA CITY: Indigenous Guatemalans burned incense and made offerings at an ancestral site on Saturday to bid farewell to Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, whose ashes were returned to his homeland from France half a century after his death.

The lawyer, writer and diplomat, known for denouncing dictators and defending Indigenous people, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967. He lived in Paris and died in Spain in 1974, aged 74, during the final years of the Franco dictatorship.

A dark green urn holding his remains, shaped like a kernel of corn in a nod to his 1949 novel “Men of Maize”, was brought to Guatemala on Thursday by his son, Miguel Angel Asturias Amado.

Saturday’s ceremony was held at Kaminaljuyu, a Mayan archaeological site west of Guatemala City. Surrounded by white flowers, the urn was placed on a small wooden table before a round stone altar, where Indigenous people left offerings and burned incense.

“Today we are celebrating something extraordinary,” said Rigoberta Menchu, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. “Not just his eternal presence in Guatemala but his eternal presence in the world because he was a universal man.”

Government officials and Asturias’s son attended the ceremony. “I am choked up with the emotion of this very important moment for my family,” said Asturias Amado, 85.

The ashes will be interred on Sunday at a cultural center that bears the writer’s name.

Asturias Amado told AFP on Thursday that the family decided to bring his father home after Bernardo Arevalo, a social democrat, became president in 2024.

“It was very difficult for me, as a son, to take the decision for my father to return to his homeland,” he said, as it meant leaving France, “a country he loved so much”. “He might be a unifying factor for Guatemala,” he added.

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