Peru: Diana Avila
There is an elegance that impresses you immediately about this Peruvian woman - dashing sharp features, striking eyes, an engaging smile and a youthfulness that entices everyone she meets. Diana Avila looks back with a passion on more than thirty years of intense activism since finishing studies in journalism and then sociology in the early '70s. Her life has spanned a tumultuous period in Latin American history, and she has been at the centre of much of it, as a journalist and researcher, as a human rights activist, and as a leader in the internationalist NGO movement promoting rights, democracy and economic justice.
For much of Diana's life, Peru and many neighbouring countries, from Chile to Mexico, have endured brutal repression and civil war. Throughout this period, Diana has worked tirelessly at home and abroad in common cause with those most directly affected by this violence. In her own country she is recognized as an authority on the conditions of the internally displaced throughout the Andean highlands, and she is a friend recognized and acknowledged by people in the former uprooted communities in towns and villages throughout the highlands of Peru. She has been accompanying them for a long time.
However, her work is not limited to Peru. Indeed, she often shakes her head that she has not enough time for the work she loves best - that in her beloved Peru. As former Executive Director of the Project Counselling Service (PCS), and before that as an international human rights advocate, Diana has worked for many years with local organizations in Latin America to protect and support refugees, internally displaced people and others affected by internal conflicts, bringing material aid to stricken communities while supporting the struggle for rights and democracy. At the same time she has used her international standing to bring the perspectives of besieged communities to the attention of activists and politicians in Canada, the United States and in Europe.
In her work, Diana has formed enduring relationships with a broad range of activists - not only the highland indigenous women in Peru who have come to know her so well, but community animators in Chiapas, consumer activists in urban barrios in El Salvador, popular educators and health workers in Guatemala, and human rights defenders in Colombia. Diana sees building relationships with, and among, people as the heart of community organizing. In her work she has seen what happens when people are able to offer their experiences and perspectives to others in similar situations.
"For instance," she explains, "when indigenous women from the high Andes are able to meet on equal terms with women from other places in Latin America who have also faced discrimination, they realize that they are not alone, and they feel stronger and more capable. They see what they have to offer, and they discover what they can learn. And when the same women can meet with counterparts from as far away as Burma who have had similar refugee experiences, miracles can happen!"
In the same way, Diana tells us, she values her meetings with activists from other parts of the world, North and South; it is an invaluable opportunity to reflect and create new knowledge that she can apply in her work and share with others in the region.
"As internationalists, we have so much to learn from one another, so many ways we can help one another," she says, "For although at the end of the day my own place is where I can have the most effect, it is the whole world that has to change if our local efforts are going to be successful and permanent. For that to happen, we need to know each other, understand each other, and work together, locally and globally."
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| Reviewed July 29, 2009 |  |
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