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Annual Martin Baro Essay Awards/Human Rights Lecture: "Confronting Impunity Through Transnational Justice"
Neris Gonzales, ECOVIDA
April 20, 2005
In the late 1970s, Neris Gonzales worked as a pastoral worker in community projects involving health and literacy in the Catholic Church of San Nicolas Lempa, San Vicente, El Salvador - a region lacking a school, doctor or health clinic. For her work in support of educating and providing services to her local community she was captured and tortured by National Guardsmen stationed in San Vicente from 1979-1980. While pregnant, she suffered humiliation and horrible torture, resulting in the death of her baby.
In 1997, she was invited to come to Chicago to receive counseling and treatment at the Marjorie Kovler Center for Survivors of Torture. In order to put her therapy into effect she, again, became involved in community work and founded a non-profit organization called Ecovida in the Pilsen neighborhood. Ecovida works in areas of public education and youth organizing, raising local awareness in ecology, the practice of permaculture and environmental issues more broadly. Gonzales' work with Ecovida has taken place in the communities of Pilsen, Back of the Yards, Little Village, as well as in public schools and other sites in Chicago. Ecovida receives assistance from volunteers from local universities and other organizations in projects that teach self-sufficiency and sustainability. Gonzales has received awards for community service from various organizations, including Heifer International and the Crossroads Fund. She has also been vocal member of the movement to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) or Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
In 2002, Gonzales and other plaintiffs filed a civil lawsuit in a U.S. court against two Salvadoran generals under the 1991 Torture Victims Protection Act, which gives U.S. citizens and non-citizens the right to bring claims for torture and extra-judicial killing committed in foreign countries. The retired generals Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who now reside in Miami, were found guilty of ignoring massacres and other acts of brutality during El Salvador's civil war by a federal jury in July 2002 which ruled a $54.6 million verdict against them. Most recently, at the end of February 2005, a federal appeals court in Atlanta overturned their decision, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired before the generals were sued for their actions or inaction in the 1980s.
Gonzales spoke about the process she and her lawyers have pursued to confront impunity in El Salvador through the U.S. court system and the old and new challenges they face. As part of the evening's presentation and discussion, prizes for the Martín Baró human rights essay competition were also awarded. The human rights essay prize honors the memory of Ignacio Martín Baró, a Jesuit priest from El Salvador who earned a Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Chicago. Martín Baró taught at the Universidad de Centro America (UCA) in El Salvador and was a leading scholar on social justice and human rights. In 1989, Martín Baró and seven others were assassinated by the Salvadoran army for their commitment to El Salvador's dispossessed. |
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