9781422281376

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What Are Human Rights? R igoberta Menchú was born in 1959, in a small village where everyone was very poor. She is a member of the Qiche, an indigenous tribe from Guatemala in Central America. Her father and her brothers were laborers on coffee and cotton plantations. The work was hard—15 hours a day— and two of her brothers died. One was poisoned by pesticide sprays and the other died from hunger. Rigoberta started work, aged 8, picking cotton. She had no chance to go to school. The workers lived in crowded shacks, with no clean water or bathrooms. Often, all they had to eat was roots and leaves. Rigoberta’s mother worked as a midwife, helping women and their babies. Many of them died, too, from poor food or disease. Indigenous people made up two-thirds of the Guatemalan population, but they had no civil rights. The government and

In January 2011, thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand political reforms. The protests, which soon spread throughout Egypt, forced longtime leader Hosni Mubarak to resign from office and leave the country. Unfortunately, the subsequent governments of Egypt have failed to deliver on the promise of greater freedoms and human rights for all Egyptians.

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