Hunting dictators and helping prisoners: Human rights award winners reflect on the sources of their passion
It was a tale of two galas Tuesday night, of causes and consequences:
At the Mayflower Renaissance Hotel, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts celebrated artists and media-makers for telling immigrant stories and making Latinos visible in the culture. Just a few blocks away, at the Carnegie Institution, the Institute for Policy Studies saluted the crusade to track and prosecute the war criminals whose barbarities in Central and South America helped drive the tide of immigrants to the United States — especially to Washington — in recent decades.
Singled out to represent the crusaders was a slight woman with a voice hoarse from emotion alternating with indignation: Almudena Bernabeu received an international Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award along with the organization where she’s a lawyer, the San Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability. That she is neither Latin American nor North American — she grew up in Spain — gave her a perspective to bridge cultural divides in an international movement where the slow and frustrating pace of progress puts Martin Luther King’s famous phrase to the test: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
“I’m a prosecutor at heart, I’m a judgmental person by birth,” she said before the awards ceremony attended by a few hundred people. “Perhaps that is why it is so important to me to expose” wrongdoers.
Peering into her own soul, she identifies something that she speaks of almost as a character flaw — but not really. It’s just a clear-eyed view of the varying roles necessary in human rights work. There are the healers, and there are the hunters.
“I don’t want to take care of the poor or those who have been tortured or those who have been abused,” she said. “I want this stupid world to stop abusing people….I want to help the person whose child was disappeared — of course. But my strongest sense of who I am, if I want to be super-honest, is, how can I fight and tell the world that this [expletive] was actually ordering these disappearances and getting rid of these 18-year-old students?”
Most recently, the work of Bernabeu and her colleagues at the justice center contributed to the deportation this year from Florida to El Salvador of Carlos Vides Casanova, a former defense minister implicated in “extrajudicial killing and torture” during the Salvadoran civil war of 1980-1992, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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