‘Their Power Rests on Fear. Ours Rests on Each Other.’

This speech was delivered by Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, Executive Director of Unidos MN, while accepting IPS’s 2026 Domestic Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award on behalf of her organization. The speech, and the rest of the ceremony, can be viewed in full here. 

Gracias. Thank you to the Institute for Policy Studies, to the Letelier and Moffitt families, and to everyone who has carried this award for 50 years. To our compañeros y compañeras at La Liga: it is an honor to stand beside you tonight.

Fifty years ago, on a September morning in this city, a bomb went off at Sheridan Circle. It took Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt from their families and from their community.

In Minnesota, we know that grief. Last year our Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were assassinated in their home in an act of political violence. Political violence carries one message, in Santiago, in Washington, in Brooklyn Park. Sit down. Stay quiet. Stay home. We answered the same way this room has answered for 50 years: we stood up, we found each other, and we kept organizing.

Eleven days before Orlando died, the Pinochet dictatorship stripped him of his citizenship. He answered from a stage in New York: I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean, and I will die a Chilean.

I have carried that sentence all year. Because every tyrant learns the same lesson. The first thing they come for is our belonging. They send their armies to your front door. They follow you to school drop off. They park outside your church and photograph our communities. They want us to wake up in our own neighborhoods and feel like a stranger.

Orlando gave the answer for all of us. Belonging is ours. No matter who is in power, we — the people — declare it ourselves, we defend it together. And we defend it ruthlessly.

This year a new class of tyrants sent masked agents into the streets of the Twin Cities. And here is what they were counting on. The oldest lie in this country. The lie that says immigrants, refugees, and people of color are different. That their pain belongs to them alone. That if you keep your head down, this will pass over your house.

That lie had already done its work. Last session, undocumented adults in Minnesota were stripped out of healthcare. Across the country, immigration became radioactive for Democrats. The polls, the experts, and all their processed data said immigration was a losing issue anywhere and some leaders chose to hide.

But Minnesotans didn’t hide.

I want to be careful here, because I do not want to romanticize what happened. People were terrified. People are still grieving. The cost was real and it is not over. 

But something happened in those weeks that I have been trying to find words for, and the only word I keep coming back to is recognition. People recognized each other. Affluent grandmothers in Edina recognized themselves as immigrant mothers in St. Paul. Lutheran pastors recognized the face of Christ in undocumented teenagers. Union members recognized that the boot on their neighbor’s neck was the same boot that would come for them. Small business owners recognized that the Constitution was either for everyone or it was for no one, and they chose everyone. 

We put signs in our windows. We opened our homes for children, elders, and pets left behind. We said no to men with badges and guns, and we said it together, and we said it out loud.

Every raid awakened a neighbor. Every neighbor became a defender. They sent an army to tear Minnesota apart. Instead, they introduced Minnesota to itself.

Social movements have shown the world, and Minnesota confirms it. The power of the few rests on fear. The power of the many rests on each other.

Chile teaches one more thing, and this room knows it. The coup that brought Pinochet had help from this capital (DC). You see, migration is the return address of war and authoritarianism. People arrive at the door of the country whose policies moved them. The families in Unidos’s membership carry 50 years of this country’s foreign policy in their bodies. And they carry the same certainty Orlando carried. Immigrants and refugees belong here. And all of us belong to each other.

My faith teaches me that the divine thing in every human being is the power to decide. Authoritarianism is the theft of that power. Democracy is that same sacred power, practiced together, in public, on purpose.

And Minnesota taught us how a frightened person comes to use it. The capacity to look away and the capacity to stand live in the same person, on the same morning. What decides between them is what that person practiced, and who that person already knew.

Courage is an outcome of preparation and relationships.

So the path forward is plain, and it belongs to everyone in this room.

Know your neighbor before the crisis comes. The relationship you build on a quiet Tuesday is the one that answers the door on the hard Thursday. Prepare. Practice democracy on the mornings when nothing is at stake, so your hands know the way on the morning when everything is.

And build power that lasts. Mutual aid keeps us alive. Organized power keeps us free. Organized people and organized money, owned by the communities who need it most, sending leaders from our own kitchens into the halls where the decisions get made.

The few believed a bomb on Embassy Row would end a movement. Fifty years later, that anti-authoritarian movement is rebuilding its strength in every corner of the U.S. and Latin America. 

So tonight, we choose. We can have a quiet that forgets, or a democracy that remembers.

We choose the democracy that remembers. We say the names. And we keep organizing.

And just today, the President of the United States went online to insult my state again. I will tell you what I told my neighbors this afternoon. Let him post. We will organize. He has a phone. We have each other. Every time he tries to shame Minnesota, Minnesota answers the same way. We show up for each other, and we show up at the polls.

Orlando said it for himself. Let us say it for each other. We were born free. We are free. And together, we will stay free.

Their power rests on fear. Ours rests on each other. Ours is sacred. And ours endures.

Thank you.