the Informer

The university recently welcomed Nobel Laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel as part of a conference held by PeaceJam, an international organization that works to bring youth into touch with Nobel Prize Laureates.

Pérez Esquivel was decorated with an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the university at the conference on Friday, March 26.
Provost Lynn Pasquerella commended Pérez Esquivel for his years of work, focusing on world peace.

“We consider ourselves to be a private university with a public purpose, and there is no better purpose that peace around the world,” she said.

Speaking in Spanish with the help of an interpreter, Pérez Esquivel addressed a crowd of 100 Hartford students, local high school students and others from the community.

The event brought Pérez Esquivel out to talk to PeaceJam volunteers, and others who are interested in the promotion of peace around the world, including one woman who was looking for people to sign a petition to end nuclear proliferation around the world, which she would be sending to President Barack Obama.
The efforts of promoting peace are not an easy task but it is a task that Pérez Esquivel has taken on for the majority of his career.

In 1974, Pérez Esquivel was the general coordinator of an activist group in his native Argentina. The Servicio Paz Y Justicia, or (Service for Peace and Justice) took a peaceful stand against the military dictatorship of Lt. Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla during the “Dirty War” that lasted from 1976 to 1883.

During the military crackdown on opposition activists Pérez Esquivel was arrested and spent 14 months in prison where he endured torture until his release in 1978. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980.

In his speech at the university Pérez Equivel focused on the need for people to communicate directly to each other and establish a culture of peace in the youth. “I work to develop many groups around the world that are helping to bring to young people an education and an awareness on a culture of peace in pursuit of freedom,” he said.

He is traveling with PeaceJam to bring awareness to the villages for peace program that he has established in Argentina. He is working in 15 different countries in Latin America, indigenous people and young people to build a culture of peace in those countries.

In his experience of promoting democracy in Armenia and Latin America Pérez Esquivel has learned that “democracy is not a gift, democracy is not something that is as simple as putting a ballot in a box and saying we live in a democratic country, this is not correct. Democracy is creating spaces to find equality among all people, for every single person. Not for some and not for others, but for each and every person,” Pérez Esquivel said.

He spoke on the need for civil rights around the world and said that civil rights means the right of everybody to receive health care, an education and freedom to life without discrimination. This is a major step in creating the rise of what he called a “new consciousness.”

He spoke to what he called the dangers imposed to the plant as a whole from science and technological advances, they have been important to civilization around the world, but he sees problems in the speed in which advances are made.

“Technology has begun to shape the life of human beings, and with the development of technology and advances of science has come an acceleration of time, and as we have moved alone with the acceleration of time we have lost the rhythm of nature,” he said.

“As a result of that everything in society is moving very fast. We need to learn a new way of living,” he said. He called for societies to regain a sense of equilibrium or balance with themselves, with each other, with our community, with Mother Nature, with the cosmos and with balance with God.

He said sees education as a crucial part of the process in the fight toward freedom. As an educator at the University of Buenos Aires he sees education as the means to teach women and men to develop the consciousness to attain freedom.

We need to find new paths and find new ways to communicate with each other in the quest for freedom. “Let’s keep in mind that a single drop of water in the ocean is the whole ocean, and the entire ocean is contained within that single drop,” he said.

He called for people to not take Mother Nature for granted and to think about the consequences of our actions in nature. He called for society to not put profits over the well being of the earth. The fundamental right of civil rights, he said, was for people to work saving the planet.

Pérez Esquivel’s speech was the opening presentation of a weekend-long PeaceJam program that included 250 high school students who came to the university to hear the Nobel Laureate talk about what inspires him.

They would also get a chance to express issues that interest them. The students would also take part in local service projects and workshops.

PeaceJam is an organization that was established to bring Nobel Laureates in touch with youth and teach issues of peace, conflict resolution and understanding amongst people. For more information about Peace Jam go to www.PeaceJam.org.