Accuracy International Story
Edward
Accuracy International is a renowned name when it comes to precision rifles and sniper weapons. With decades of experience and a dedication to producing top-quality firearms, Accuracy International has become a trusted brand among military, law enforcement, and civilian shooters alike.
In this article, we will dive into 17 fascinating facts about Accuracy International, shedding light on their history, innovations, and the impact they have had on the world of long-range shooting. From their humble beginnings to their impressive line-up of cutting-edge rifles, we will explore the key aspects that make Accuracy International a force to be reckoned with in the industry.
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A: While Accuracy International rifles may come with a higher price tag compared to other rifles on the market, they are worth the investment for serious shooters who prioritize accuracy and performance. The exceptional build quality and long-range capabilities make them a valuable tool for those who demand the best.
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Fortunately, some Chajules were willing to help me. Among them was an elder named Domingo. Now that he had related the town's sufferings, I was asking about other incidents in human rights reports, to see if he could corroborate them. Suddenly Domingo was giving me a puzzled look. One of my questions had caught him off guard. The army burned prisoners alive in the town plaza? Not here, he said. Yet this is what I had read in I, Rigoberta Mench, the life story of the young K'iche' Maya woman who, a few years later, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Domingo and I were on the main street, looking toward the old colonial church that towers over the plaza. It was the plaza where, according to the book that made Rigoberta famous, soldiers lined up twenty-three prisoners including her younger brother Petrocinio. The captives were disfigured from weeks of torture, their bodies were swollen like bladders, and pus oozed from their wounds. Methodically, the soldiers scissored off the prisoners' clothes, to show their families how each injury had been inflicted by a different instrument of torture. Following an anticommunist harangue, the soldiers soaked the captives in gasoline and set them afire. With her own eyes, Rigoberta had watched her brother writhe to death. This was the climactic passage of her book, reprinted in magazines and read aloud at conferences, with the hall darkened except for a spotlight on the narrator. Yet the army had never burned prisoners alive in the town plaza, Domingo said, and he was the first of seven townsmen who told me the same.
Quich Department, where Chajul is located and Rigoberta was born, is inhabited by peasants with a seemingly unshakable dedication to growing maize. There is an epic quality to its mountains and valleys, and Quich strikes many visitors as beautiful. But up close the mountainsides are scarred by deforestation and erosion. Many of the corn patches are steep enough to lose your footing. They would not be worth cultivating unless you were short of land, which most of the population is. The terrain is so unpromising that after the Spanish conquered it in the sixteenth century, they turned elsewhere in their search for wealth. Instead of seizing estates for themselves, they handed the region over to Catholic missionaries. Only a century ago did boondock capitalism come to Quich, in the form of outsiders who used liquor to lure Indians into debt and march them off to plantations. By the 1970s the descendants of several heavily exploited generations were defending their rights more effectively than before. But if the worst had ended, there were still plenty of accumulated grievances.
The most widely read account of the Guatemalan violence came from a twenty-three-year-old woman who grew up in the nearby municipio of Uspantn. Rigoberta Mench was born in a peasant village where Spanish was a foreign language and nearly everyone was illiterate. Instead of reciting massacres and death counts at numbing length, Rigoberta told the story of her life into a tape recorder, in Spanish rather than her native language of K'iche' Maya, for a week in Paris in 1982. The interviewer, an anthropologist named Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, transcribed the results, put them into chronological order, and published them as a testimonio, or oral autobiography, running 247 pages in English.
Rigoberta's story includes warm memories of her childhood in an indigenous village living in harmony with itself and nature. But her parents are so poor that every year they and their children go to Guatemala's South Coast, to work for miserable wages harvesting coffee and cotton. Conditions are so appalling on the fincas (plantations) that two of her brothers die there. Back in the highlands Rigoberta's father, Vicente Mench, starts a settlement called Chimel at the edge of the forest north of Uspantn. The hero of his daughter's account, Vicente faces two enemies in his struggle for land. The first consists of nearby plantation owners, nonindigenous ladinos, who claim the land for themselves. On two occasions plantation thugs throw the Menchs and their neighbors out of their houses. Vicente is also thrown into prison twice and beaten so badly that he requires nearly a year of hospitalization.
Vicente's other enemy is the government's National Institute for Agrarian Transformation (INTA). In theory INTA helps peasants obtain title to public land, but according to Rigoberta what it really does is help landlords expand their estates. There ensues a purgatory of threats from surveyors, summons to the capital, and pressure to sign mysterious documents. To pay for the lawyers, secretaries, and witnesses needed to free Vicente from prison, the entire family submits to further wage exploitation. Rigoberta goes to Guatemala City to work for a wealthy family who feed their dog better than her. Her father becomes involved in peasant unions and, after 1977, is away much of the time, living in clandestinity and organizing other peasants facing the same threats. After years of persecution, he helps start the legendary Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC), a peasant organization that joins the guerrilla movement.
In the course of these events, the adolescent Rigoberta acquires a profound revolutionary consciousness. Like her father, she becomes a catechist (lay leader) for the Catholic Church. When the army raids villages, she teaches them to defend themselves by digging stake pits, manufacturing Molotov cocktails, even capturing stray soldiers. But self-defense fails to protect her family from being devoured by atrocities. First there is the kidnapping of her younger brother Petrocinio, who after weeks of torture is burned to death at Chajul. Then her father goes to the capital to lead protesters who, in a desperate bid for attention, occupy the Spanish embassy on January 31, 1980.
In a crime reported around the world, riot police assault the embassy. Vicente Mench and thirty-five other people die in the ensuing fire, which is widely blamed on an incendiary device launched by the police. International opinion is outraged. But that is no protection for Rigoberta's family. Next the army kidnaps her mother, who is raped and tortured to death. In homage to her martyred parents, Rigoberta becomes an organizer for the Committee for Campesino Unity. Never having had the chance to attend school, she learns to speak Spanish with the help of priests and nuns. As she becomes a leader in her own right, the security forces pick up her trail, and she escapes to Mexico.
Ten years after telling her story to Elisabeth Burgos, Rigoberta received the Nobel Peace Prize, as a representative of indigenous peoples on the 500th anniversary of the European colonization of the Americas. The Nobel Committee also wanted to encourage the stalled peace talks between the Guatemalan government and its guerrilla adversaries in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union (URNG). In theory Rigoberta's homeland had returned to democracy, but the army still imposed narrow parameters on what could be said and done. Perhaps international recognition for one of its victims would encourage the army to make concessions.
When I, Rigoberta Mench appeared in 1983, no one imagined that the narrator would become a Nobel laureate. Soon it was clear that this was one of the most powerful narratives to come out of Latin America in recent times. The book had quite an impact on readers, including many who know Guatemala well. Because it was effectively banned from Rigoberta's country during the 1980s, most readers were foreigners, who could pick up the book in any of eleven languages into which the original Spanish was translated. Rigoberta became a well-known figure on the human rights circuit in Europe and North America, served on UN commissions, and was showered with honorary doctorates. A few months before the Nobel, she was sorting through 260 international invitations, including one from the prime minister of Austria and another from the queen of England. Two years later she said there were more than seven thousand.
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