Menchu in Fierce Guatemala Election
Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu was proclaimed presidential candidate during a national assembly, amid weekend murders of political activists.

In the meeting attended by some 4,000 delegates and guests, Menchu said she would create a new inclusive, plural, and multiethnic republic, based on security, economic development, a clear agricultural policy, and guarantees for workers.

Menchu proposed a new relation with nature and the use of its resources to benefit the population, which should take what is necessary to live and prevent others from plundering the country s natural resources.

She told Prensa Latina about her foreign policy and Latin America, and said she will boost close collaboration in issues as migration, anti-organized-crime struggle, and drug traffic.

During the campaign for the Guatemalan general elections in September, violence increased with the assassination over the weekend of Gabriel Morales, Guatemalan Republican Front supporter, and Liberaldo Granados, Ecuentro por Guatemala s Zacapa department secretary and municipal mayor candidate in that eastern city.