New York, New York (AP)

Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu says she wants to be president of her native Guatemala.

“Not right now,” she said during a visit to New York. “A little later on. But I would like to be the president of Guatemala.”

Menchu, who won the prize in 1992 for her work promoting Indigenous rights, has in recent years fought for an investigation into the thousands of disappearances and killings during Guatemala’s civil war, a 36-year conflict that ended with the signing of peace agreements in 1996.

One of Menchu’s brothers was killed by government security forces in Guatemala in the late 1970s, and her father, a major peasant leader, died in January 1980 after police burned down the Spanish Embassy that he and others had occupied.

Menchu filed a petition at Spain’s National Court in 1999 urging it to investigate crimes between 1978 and 1986 in Guatemala. The tribunal rejected the case a year later, saying the crimes could be dealt with adequately in Guatemalan courts.

Menchu then appealed to the country’s Supreme Court, which accepted her argument, but only for crimes committed against Spaniards. Spain’s highest court ruled last year that the country had jurisdiction to investigate crimes against all victims of the conflict in the eight-year period.

The National Court said earlier this year that it would apply the high court’s ruling and begin an investigation.

“We have made progress,” Menchu said during May at an event hosted by New York University. “But we are still far from getting justice.”

Menchu, 47, was questioned about Evo Morales, the new president of Bolivia.

“He will be looked at with a bigger magnifying glass than anybody else because he is an Indian,” she said. “Many people think he won’t be able to do the job, they assume that he will fail.”

Seven years after winning the Nobel prize, Menchu conceded she used the testimony of other victims to construct her book I, Rigoberta Menchu, which had long been thought to be the autobiography of an Indian child whose family was caught in the horrors of the civil war.

A column on Menchu’s remarks in New York appeared in May 25 editions of the Daily News.