Indigenous Guatemalans say goodbye to Nobel writer who defended them

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Indigenous Guatemalans say goodbye to Nobel writer who defended them

Indigenous Guatemalans burned incense and made offerings at an ancestral site to say goodbye Saturday 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 the Indigenous received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967.

He lived in Paris before he died in Spain aged 74 in 1974, during the last years of the Franco dictatorship.

A dark green urn with the novelist's remains shaped like a kernel of corn arrived Thursday by his son, Miguel Angel Asturias Amado. The shape is a nod to his 1949 work entitled "Men of Maize."

Saturday's ceremony was held in Kaminaljuyu, a Mayan archeological site west of Guatemala City.

Surrounded by white flowers, the urn was placed on a small wooden table before a sacred round, stone altar.

Indigenous people left offerings at the altar and burned incense to honor Asturias.

"Today we are celebrating something extraordinary," the 1992 Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu said of Asturias.

"Not just his eternal presence in Guatemala but his eternal presence in the world because he was a universal man," she said.

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