Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

Biography

He got his first job at eleven, and had learned woodcarving even earlier, at a Spanish boarding school for boys in the Colegiales district.

Pérez Esquivel was born on 26 November 1931 in Buenos Aires, in the San Telmo district. His father, Cándido Pérez González, was a fisherman from Combarro in Galicia who had emigrated to Argentina; his mother died when the boy was three. The family broke up: the children had to be placed elsewhere, their father returned to Spain, and part of Adolfo’s childhood was spent in a boarding school. For a time he lived with his grandmother Eugenia in Haedo. She spoke Guaraní and hardly any Spanish, and from her, as he told it, he learned much about the history and traditions of the native peoples of America. He finished primary school with the Franciscans. Later he read Gandhi, Saint Augustine and Thomas Merton.

He studied at the Manuel Belgrano National School of Fine Arts, then at the National University of La Plata, where he trained as a painter and sculptor. A scholarship from the National Endowment for the Arts helped pay for his studies. He had known his future wife, the pianist Amanda Guerreño, since youth; they married in 1956.

For twenty-five years he taught, from primary school to university: at the faculty of architecture of the University of La Plata, at the Belgrano school and at schools in the town of Azul. As a sculptor he worked in a variety of materials and turned to motifs from pre-Columbian America. He received the National Arts Prize.

From the 1960s he took part in Christian pacifist groups close to liberation theology. In 1970 he went on a hunger strike of almost two months in protest against political terror. In 1972 or 1973 he founded the magazine “Paz y Justicia” (Peace and Justice). In 1974 he was chosen coordinator of a network of Latin American communities working for the liberation of the poor by nonviolent means, and for this work he gave up teaching. The network’s headquarters moved from Montevideo to Buenos Aires. In 1975 he was detained by the Brazilian military police, and in 1976 he was arrested in Ecuador together with bishops.

After the military coup of March 1976, the Service for Peace and Justice (Servicio Paz y Justicia), which he co-founded, helped the families of victims of repression and ran an international campaign to make the crimes of the military dictatorship known. He took part in founding the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights and the Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights, and later supported organizations of relatives of the disappeared, among them the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Service’s headquarters was soon wrecked. In 1977 (in April or August, the sources differ) he was arrested in Buenos Aires. He spent 14 months in prison without charge or trial and was tortured, then remained under surveillance for some months more. While in custody he was awarded the Pope John XXIII Peace Memorial. Amnesty International and the American president Jimmy Carter called for his release.

He received the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize on the nomination of the 1976 laureates Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams. In his speech he said that he accepted it in the name of the poorest and smallest of his brothers and sisters. He gave a large part of the money to charity. Later he supported the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the defence of indigenous peoples and environmental campaigns, and spoke out against austerity policies and the Free Trade Area of the Americas project. Since 1998 he has taught at the University of Buenos Aires, where he leads the course “Culture for Peace and Human Rights”, and in 2006 he received an honorary doctorate there.

He did not give up sculpture and painting. In 1992, for the 500th anniversary of the conquest of America, he made the Latin American Via Crucis, fifteen stations with a Lenten cloth, “A New Sky and a New Land”. His works include the Monument to Refugees at the headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Switzerland; the mural “Latin American Peoples” in the cathedral of Riobamba in Ecuador, dedicated to Monsignor Proaño and the indigenous peoples; and a bronze statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Gandhi Square in Barcelona. In Combarro he opened a Memory Park built around a sculpture of his own. His works are in Argentine museums, among them the Castagnino Museum in Rosario and the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited in Latin America, Europe and Canada.