Francisco Soberón

Francisco Soberon, over the past two decades, has worked to expand the public understanding and definition of human rights to include social and economic rights, as well as to broaden the number of organizations with interest in human rights. He is now using art and cultural activities to mobilize the population of Peru, especially young people, to become protagonists in defense of human rights.

Since the beginning of the past decade, Francisco Soberon has been one of the most important activists in Peru in the fight for human rights. In the early 1980s, when political violence erupted in full force due to the rise of the Shining Path movement, Francisco played an important role in the fight against systematic violations of human rights and in defense of international humanitarian law. When he began his human rights work, he focused on political violence and political and civil rights. As the country's political situation has changed, Francisco is now broadening the human rights agenda and expanding the definition of human rights to include economic and social rights. He has proposed and developed themes crucial to the country's full pacification: the rights to truth, information, and justice. He sees a need to educate the country about the role of the state and its mechanisms in political violence, to overcome the culture of impunity, and seek reconciliation based on a recognition of past events.

Human rights organizations are often stereotyped, by those they call to accountability, as rabble-rousers linked to leftist violence, in efforts to undermine the very goals they are promoting. Francisco is working to break these stereotypes by drawing in new actors and generating interest in human rights issues among those not directly affected by rights violations, especially urban youth and the business sector. Yet these same sectors need to be educated about the abuses of the past in order to prevent their reappearance in the future. While other organizations have had little success in attracting the younger generation, Francisco is getting youth involved in rights issues by drawing on music, art, and popular culture to make them compelling and relevant, incorporating cultural creation to generate consciousness and memory of human rights abuses. By attracting young people Francisco presents an integrated vision, defending and promoting rights to prevent abuses before they occur. Through the creation of a cultural center for human rights education and the use of artistic exhibits, Francisco hopes to reach out to sectors not directly affected by abuses, who have no previous experience in human rights activity.

During the past 15 years of political violence in Peru, more than 30,000 people have died and more than 5,000 disappeared. 1.5 million were displaced from their homes and an indeterminate number left Peru forever in the hope of finding peace in other countries. Since 1990 more than 6,000 innocent prisoners have been incarcerated and approximately 5,000 more unfairly questioned and detained, even if they had been out of the country during the years of political violence. Indirectly, even greater numbers have been victims of human rights abuses as the whole of society has lived through years of anxiety, fear, and violence. Amnesty laws passed in 1995 have legalized this impunity by releasing state agents from all responsibility. Citizens have access only to information which often obscures or downplays official abuse and violence. The challenge for citizens of Peru is to promulgate an objective truth about the past, based on realities experienced by victims. Without popular access to unbiased information and truth, a culture of blatant impunity and lack of respect for the most basic rights will only grow.

The majority of victims of human rights violations are among the most vulnerable and historically marginalized socio-economic and ethnic populations. Their notions of rights are weak because their experience has always been that of exclusion. Most supporters of human rights movements are the direct victims of human rights violations, the families of the disappeared, victims of war and political violence. This constituency needs to be broadened. The younger generation is not overly concerned with issues of human rights, nor do existing rights organizations reach out to the populations not directly affected by violations. Society and political organizations promote an attitude of forgetting the past to avoid painful facts and memories, but Francisco argues that a true historical memory is necessary to achieve justice and prevent human rights violations in the future. According to a recent summit on peace in Colombia, the process of pacification in Latin America is incomplete because national reconciliation is being promoted with the condition that the past simply be forgotten. Future generations must be made aware of past violence to achieve true reconciliation and lasting peace, and to ensure that human rights violations don't occur in the future. Through his cultural center on human rights, Francisco hopes to incorporate and change the apathetic attitude of this younger generation and to overcome social exclusion through respect for cultural diversity.

In 1982, Francisco founded APRODEH, the Association for Human Rights, to fight against social injustices, a pioneer organization in human rights in Peru. Main tasks included presenting denunciations at the national level, legal defense, formulation of the first denunciations of disappearances before the United Nations Working Group on Forced and Involuntary Disappearance, coordination with rural organizations for

improved organizational strength, and international informational campaigns on the abuses of Shining Path. In 1985, Francisco founded the National Coordination on Human Rights, a space to bring together all the human rights initiatives in Peru. APRODEH began to receive international recognition for its efforts and began collaborative efforts with various international organizations, including the World Organization Against Torture and the International Human Rights Federation. Francisco assisted with the elaboration of standards for communicating and denouncing human rights violations as part of the Human Rights Documentation System. APRODEH has achieved its most significant successes in the defense of victims of violations of civil and political rights.

Today, as political violence is diminishing in Peru, the organization has prioritized attention to the consequences of political violence and the construction of an integrated culture of rights in the country. The thematic expansion of APRODEH has grown to include social, economic, and cultural rights. This new area of rights includes rights to a decent salary and to negotiate before economic interests to safeguard natural resources, recognition of various religions and ethnic groups and their incorporation into national policy and educational curriculum, and rights for effective political participation for traditionally marginalized sectors. Beyond guaranteeing legally-recognized rights, Francisco is working to win respect for various economic and social groups in a culturally diverse country. To this end APRODEH is part of such groups as the Working Group on the Impact of Hydrocarbon Exploitation in the Amazons, and the Round-Table for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Francisco continues to work with the IMF and World Bank to convince them to consider the social impacts of economic adjustment, while building networks at the national and international level focusing on this new area of rights. To promote the rights of access to information and truth, APRODEH forms part of the Peruvian Committee to Restore Historical Archives, and the Peruvian Scientific Network. To fight against impunity and seek reconciliation with past violence, Francisco has created the Civic Community Against Impunity.

Francisco is slowly turning over APRODEH responsibilities to other staff members, in order to dedicate more time to his newest idea. As his awareness of the need to strengthen cultural initiatives and youth awareness of human rights has grown, he has begun to center his ideas on creating a Cultural Center for Youth. Along these lines, in 1994 he founded the Initial Group in Defense of Life and Culture. With 2 friends, he has donated a property to create a youth cultural and human rights center. During the next few years, he hopes to consolidate this model cultural center for human rights, and then replicate it in other parts of the country. The center opens a space for youth to come together to discuss human rights issues, organizes exhibits for the general public, and provides access to electronic mail services and historical archives.


Through his many years of experience in human rights work, Francisco has come to understand that unless young people and the masses are touched in some way that they can personally relate to, the meaning of Peru’s painful political history will slowly slip away. He has created coordinating committees of artists, musicians, and representatives from university and youth groups to organize concerts, events, and activities that combine entertainment with messages about the different types of human rights and their abuses. Francisco has already used art shows to demonstrate the impact of disappearances on those not directly affected. A recent art show on the disappeared, entitled "In Defense of Life and Culture," included the works of 300 artists, musicians, and poets and summoned more than 10,000 public over a 3-week period.

A rock music concert called "Never Forget" attracted 5,000 youth, with the intention of reminding the younger generations of the importance of a state structure which allows for basic rights, where injustices do not go unpunished and encouraging them to include human rights among their own basic values and convictions. A national newspaper described the event as "more than a concert, it is a civic workday in which we hope to create a consciousness to make a stand against the excesses of formal justice, laws like the one on amnesty and other errors which should be revised and corrected." The youth participants are forming a Truth Commission in favor of reparations to victims of human rights abuses and for the annulment of the law granting amnesty to perpetrators of violence. After protesting the unfair dismissal of 3 Constitutional Tribunal magistrates, youth together planned a festival in defense of democracy. According to event participants, they are using art as an instrument to express their political rights. At the festival the young people presented a proposal for the integration of all races and political ideologies through art.

To support his belief in the right to information, each cultural center will house space for access to the Internet and electronic mail services. As founder of the Peruvian Scientific Network, the first civil association which provides Internet service in low-income communities, Francisco is working to democratize access to information and promote exchange at the national and international levels on human rights issues. The network today has more than 3,000 affiliated members and 35,000 beneficiaries. Francisco is using his links with businesses to construct 400 public Internet cabins across Peru, Bolivia, and El Salvador. He will take advantage of contacts with the business community to set up advisory boards for funding and public relations purposes with progressive businesspeople interested in a new model of human rights promotion. He has already had extensive talks with the American Chamber of Commerce to solicit the support of businesses in the fight for human rights and incorporation of youth activists.

From a very young age, Francisco learned to appreciate his country's cultural manifestations and deplore its injustices. During his student days, he made contact with people from other countries and various cultural and religious backgrounds, and his family taught him to respect diverse opinions. While studying in the university, he participated in student brigades to help those affected by earthquakes and the control of mining companies. He witnessed situations of extreme injustice, exclusion of rural sectors, and misery stemming from poverty and low pay. During the years of agrarian reform, neither democratic mechanisms nor technical support were offered to agricultural workers so Francisco helped them to organize themselves into cooperatives. In the 1970s he was linked to solidarity movements with communities resisting dictatorship in the Southern Cone, supporting hundreds of refugees who either fled to Peru or were in transit to other countries. In the 1980s he found himself supporting the same type of movements in Central America.

At the same time, during the height of Peru’s political violence, Francisco received threats from the Shining Path movement and was the victim of a state campaign against false accusations. He witnessed the death of friends and collaborators, yet continued on his crusade in the fight for human rights. Although Francisco has already made many advances in the field of human rights, and is recognized as one of the most important figures in human rights in Latin America, his ideas continue to grow to incorporate an expanded conception of rights and extended base of support. In recognition for his commitment to the struggle for human rights, he was elected Vice-President of the International Human Rights Federation in two successive elections. In 1995 Human Rights Watch honored him as one of the 10 distinguished human rights activists in the world.