UC Davis linguistics professor Almerindo Ojeda was inspired by fellow Peruvian and university professor Salomón Lerner to establish a center to study human rights issues in the Americas. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
Professor launches Americas center to engage university community in human rights issues
Although a man of words, linguistics professor Almerindo Ojeda was inspired to action a year ago after hearing Salomón Lerner, president of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
For here was a university professor, just like Ojeda, who was taking on civil responsibilities to help Peru and its victims heal from two decades of violence through a national consciousness raising.
A year later, Ojeda's inspiration has evolved into the fledgling Center for Human Rights in the Americas, housed in UC Davis' Hemispheric Institute on the Americas. Funded by a seed grant of $40,000 from the Office of Research, the interdisciplinary center is dedicated to scholarship and education about human rights in the Americas.
Ojeda says the new center's main emphasis will be the detainment camp on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, now home to prisoners of war collected from both Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Guantanamo is an area that has placed itself as outside the law — outside U.S. jurisdiction, not within Cuba's sovereignty, not subject to international law and with no single standard of legality for what is happening there, " he says.
With help from grant experts in the offices of Research and University Outreach and International Programs, he is busy preparing funding proposals to draw two scholars to UC Davis next academic year.
‘For me, human rights are a matter of principle. They are also an object of inquiry that our new center can shed light on.’
Center Director Almerindo Ojeda
Independence through grants
"I am understanding how to become independent through grant writing," Ojeda jokes.
The outside researchers — whether from law, political science, history or other disciplines — will be asked to give public lectures as well as to add scholarship on Guantanamo human rights issues.
It is likely that the new research will be added to the center's growing Web site. Ojeda and Native American studies graduate student Kerin Gould have built a site with dozens of reports and analyses from across the world on human rights abuses as well as international declarations and agreements for human rights.
Since he learned that his brainchild had matured into a real center in late spring, Ojeda has been scrambling to pull together resources, not only for the Web site but also for public outreach through art exhibitions and film festivals.
"This summer, I went home to Peru to make contacts with human rights organizations," Ojeda says. He found himself poring through collections of photos and drawings and came away with three gems of exhibitions that will arrive in Davis next spring as a way for the community to participate in a conversation about human rights.
The shows will deal with individual reactions to Peru's dark period of violence, between 1980 and 2000, when two guerrilla groups -- the larger being the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path -- set out to destroy existing Peruvian institutions and replace them with a revolutionary peasant regime.
Twenty years of violence
The Peruvian people endured two decades of terrorism, including kidnappings, assassinations, bombings and terrorist attacks across the country, as well as a ruthlessly violent reaction from the government.
Two of the center exhibits in the spring 2006 will be of photos. One will use newspaper photography to depict the violence of the guerrilla era, and the other is a collection of portraits of women involved in the violence, or their relatives.
A third exhibition will feature peasant drawings, encouraged through national art contests from 1984-96. Ojeda chose many works from untutored artists who used their art to comment on how people were abused by both the insurgency and the government.
Ojeda is also planning for a spring quarter 2006 film festival of new films and classics that deal with human rights in the Americas.
Ojeda said he was impressed that Lerner, a professor of philosophy, had take on the responsibility of exposing human rights violations through the Peruvian truth commission.
He was impressed with Lerner's even-handed approach that not only inspected human rights violations by the guerrilla insurgencies and government, but looked at unprincipled actions from universities and the Catholic Church. Ojeda also was impressed by the idea of involving young Peruvians as field workers. By gathering testimonies and information, the students had their own conscience raised about the horrific acts of violence against their people, Ojeda points out.
"His background in ethics helped Lerner cast the report in principled terms," he says.
Following Lerner's example, the UC Davis center will sponsor paid internships for interested UC Davis students. They are invited to contact Ojeda at humanrights@ucdavis.edu, for more information.
A Peruvian linguist
Born and raised in Peru, Ojeda is an anthropologist with a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Chicago.
Besides his enthusiasm for teaching undergraduates, Ojeda loves the solitary scholar's life. He has spent his career comfortably settled in his home office, surrounded by arcane treatises of logics and linguistics. There he constructs theories about the commonalities of language across vastly unconnected tongues, such as Breton, Arabic and Quechua.
While in many ways an unlikely administrator, given his background, Ojeda says he is looking forward to build a legacy program around one of the world's most troubling issues. He, in fact, greatly admires the administrative talents of others in his family, including his wife, Denise Beck, principal of César Chávez Elementary School in Davis.
They have a daughter, Alejandra, a UC Davis senior majoring in political science, and a son, Rodrigo, who is pursuing the arts as a freshman film major at California State University, Monterey Bay.
Connections to Latin American politics
Ojeda has long had personal and intellectual connections to Latin American politics, even before he left graduate school in Chicago for a career that included a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before he landed at UC Davis in 1987.
While at the University of Chicago, he made friends with "Nacho," a young Jesuit priest from El Salvador attending graduate school in psychology. That friend, also known as Ignacio Martí Baró, eventually became a vice rector at the Jesuit-run University of Central America in San Salvador, and was one of six priests and two women murdered by the El Salvadoran military in November 1989.
"I remember dancing in the streets with Nacho in Chicago. He was deliriously happy to graduate and return to El Salvador. And then he was killed," Ojeda says.
"I am reminded of Ignacio when I see that people are killed for political reasons or are accepting of torture as an effective way of gathering information. For me, human rights are a matter of principle. They are also an object of inquiry that our new center can shed light on."