By THERESA HOGUE
Gazette-Times reporter | Posted: Saturday, February 23, 2008 12:00 am
1980 Peace Prize recipient is at OSU's PeaceJam for the weekend
Adolfo Perez Esquivel has spent most of his life fighting for a just and nonviolent world.
On Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Argentina was in Corvallis to share the story of his quest with young people attending the fourth annual PeaceJam at Oregon State University. The three-day event, an international education program that pairs Nobel Prize laureates with youth interested in social justice issues, attracted students from across California, Oregon and Washington, who attended workshops, worked with mentors, and attended special sessions with Perez Esquivel.
Perez Esquivel told of how he learned the tenents of nonviolence at the knee of his indigenous grandmother, and eventually abandoned a career in architecture to devote himself to promoting nonviolence in Latin America. In 1974, Perez Esquivel established "Servicio Paz y Justicia," an organization bringing together many groups focused on nonviolence and human rights in Latin America. Eventually, he helped persuade the United Nations to establish a Human Rights Commission.
His work eventually led to his imprisonment for a year in Ecuador - and in 1980 that work also led to his Nobel Peace Prize.
Perez Esquivel has been involved with PeaceJam for a decade, and spoke through his translator, Beverly Keene, about his frustration with modern technology and his hopes for the future.
"PeaceJam is a program that has to do with developing in young people a sense of consciousness, a sense of values and principles and a real commitment to community," Perez Esquivel said, "so it's an opportunity to share with other peace laureates in this commitment building."
Teaching young people about peace is important in a time when youth and apathy are linked in the minds of many, and when nonviolence is associated with weakness.
"We can't confuse peace with passiveness. It has nothing to do with being passive. It has to do with developing a culture of understanding of others and one's self," he said. "That's what is the importance of the PeaceJam program - it works with youth to develop this understanding of a culture of peace."
Perez Esquivel said children should receive an education in peace from their families, but too often society and schools have to fulfill that role.
"Humanity is at a very important juncture," he said. "We are at a time and a place where we need to be developing a new social contract, and at the heart of that has to be the sense of peace."
Perez Esquivel's grandmother first inspired him to think of the world in a nonviolent way because of the way she sought out and embraced people who were in trouble.
Although religion has sometimes served to divide people, he said peace work has a strong spiritual component.
"Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were very deeply spiritual people but certainly not fundamentalists, not dogmatic," he said. "They had a kind of spirituality, and we need a spirituality, that is open to different understandings and ways of looking and understanding the world. I believe when human beings lose that spirituality, when they lose their sense of transcendence, that's when we become violent, and become trapped in the kind of violence that exists in our world."
Perez Esquivel said be believes technology is becoming an isolating, not a uniting, force in our world. He said too many people are depending on digital sources of entertainment and interaction, rather than relating on a human level.
"Young people seem to be more connected to the keyboard than to other people. We have immense technological capacity to communicate, but are we as people really deepening our capacity to understand others and see and respond to what they need?"
He said he sees hope in the number of groups organizing for change around the world, from indigenous groups to women's groups, all working toward creating a more just society. He also believes that there has been a reawakening of participation in the American political process.
Perez Esquivel will be spending the weekend at OSU inspiring young people from around the Pacific Northwest to work toward a more peaceful future.
"The struggle we abandon is the struggle we lose. We have to have hope," he said. "Participate, get involved and be active in society and cultural life and spiritual and political life. And resist injustice wherever you see it and in whatever form you see it. That's how we build hope and that's how we build peace."
To hear reporter Theresa Hogue talk with 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, click on the image above.