Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, born in November 1931 (age 92) is an Argentine activist, community organizer, painter, writer, sculptor, and winner of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize. For twenty-five years, he was a professor of architecture and worked with variety of sculptural media. During the 1960s, he began working with popularly based Latin American Christian pacifist groups. In 1974, he was chosen as coordinator general for a network of Latin American communities promoting the liberation of the poor through non-violence. At this time, he also mounted an international campaign to denounce the atrocities committed by Argentina’s last civil-military dictator General Jorge Videla (1976–1983). In 1977, Perez Esquivel was detained, tortured, and held without trial for 14 months.
Two years later, in 1980, he was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in defense of human rights. In 1992, he created 15 Stations of the Cross to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the colonization of America. These stations were distributed in Europe and came to the attention of a Quaker of Presbyterian provenance, Alastair McIntosh (www.alastairmcintosh.com). McIntosh first encountered the Stations while serving on the management committee of the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund in the 1990s and saw the Stations as reflecting the Catholic Church’s “rich and challenging” teachings on social justice .
Through McIntosh’s kindness and diligence, Perez Esquivel’s Stations which originally appeared as 35 mm photographic slides, and then subsequently disappeared seemingly into oblivion, were digitized and presented on the worldwide web where we found them. McIntosh also wrote a commentary for each station based on original text from the agencies that first distributed the images. To see McIntosh’s full commentaries, please click here.