Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
February 28, 2001
Nobel laureate encourages human rights work
Peace begins `in our own individual's hearts,' Adolfo Perez Esquivel tells youth
By Alwen Bledsoe
Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner, stood silent and smiling as 400 teenagers greeted him with a standing ovation and raucous cheers at Regis University Feb. 24.
Esquivel led the teens in a PeaceJam conference at the university over the weekend, addressing them on the subject of "Human Rights and Justice for All."
PeaceJam, an international organization founded in Denver in 1996 by Dawn Engel and Ivan Suvanjieff with input from the Dalai Lama, brings together high school students and Nobel Peace laureates to discuss and practice peacemaking skills. They apply the skills they acquire via community projects, which in the past have addressed issues such as AIDS, family violence and homelessness.
Originally a well-known sculptor and professor of architecture in Argentina, Adolfo Perez Esquivel was awarded the Nobel Prize for his human rights work during Argentina's "Dirty War," which lasted from 1976-1983. In 1974 Esquivel became secretary-general of the group Servicio Paz y Justicia (Service for Peace and Justice) which organized and consolidated the efforts of numerous non-violent human rights groups throughout Latin America. Arrested in 1977, Esquivel was imprisoned and tortured for 14 months before international pressure became so great that he was freed.
Esquivel's speech brought the global issues of peace and activism down to a personal level — he spoke of peace as a struggle won first in the human heart and mind.
Esquivel spoke in an expressive and rich voice, often using his hands to communicate while Beverly Keene, his co-worker from Servicio Paz y Justicia, translated his Spanish into English.
"When we speak from the heart, the language does not really matter. We can find a way of communicating," Esquivel said as he explained that he speaks limited English.
Even when people speak the same language they often don't understand each other "because we forget to love," Esquivel said. "We don't speak from our hearts."
Esquivel told the students not to look for peace somewhere outside themselves.
"We must begin by looking for peace in our innermost beings, in our own minds, in our own hearts, in our own spirits, in our own behavior," he said.
Speaking about the political situation in Argentina and other Latin American countries, Esquivel described Latin America as a "continent that lives between anguish and hope."
Between 1960 and 1980, nearly every country in Latin America was oppressed by a military government, Esquivel said, laying much of the blame for the suffering people experienced on the United States and the "National Security Doctrine," which American-run military academies, such as the School of the Americas in Panama, taught to 80,000 Latin American military personnel. According to Esquivel, the soldiers were taught "how to repress our people."
Military personnel were trained to re-organize their countries socially, economically, politically, and religiously. As they did so, Esquivel said, they destroyed the intellectual, cultural, and scientific resources of Latin America and debilitated it.
In Argentina, this took the form of the "Dirty War," in which human rights abuses included the kidnapping of children, who were then raised or given away by military personnel, and the disappearances and killings of an estimated 30,000 people by the government. The fates of many of those who disappeared during the war are still not known.
Despite the seeming hopelessness of this time, Esquivel said, many began to organize, including the "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo," who protested their children's disappearances every week. These were "women who were able to transform their own pain and suffering into a strength, into a force for resistance out of their own love," Esquivel said. That non-violent action eventually led to change.
"The only arms we had and used was the desire and dedication of our people to transform the situation in which they were living," Esquivel said. In 1983, democracy was restored to Argentina, but Esquivel called the changes it brought "relative," noting that many of those responsible for the Dirty War are still free and "walk the streets like anyone else." "It is impossible," Esquivel said, "to build a democracy on the basis of impunity, on the basis of the lack of justice." True democracy will not come, Esquivel said, without "the right of the people to have truth and justice— to know the truth about what happened to our people and to build justice on that." That, Esquivel said, is the foundation of peace. After the speech, students lined up, nearly to the back of the room, to ask questions. Many of them spoke Spanish, their first language, with Esquivel, then translated for the audience. When asked about the United States' international interventions, Esquivel called the bombing of Iraq "unjust and immoral." He also questioned U.S. military aid to Colombia, where the government has been fighting a war with Marxist rebels that has taken more than 35,000 lives since 1990. Those countries need resources, such as health care and education, rather than arms, Esquivel said.
