A Light in the Latin Darkness

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, 48, is a quiet, slightly built Argentine whose shy smile and modest appearance belie an iron resolve: he is a dedicated champion of Latin America's poor and oppressed, and, by proxy, of Argentina's 6,000 desaparecidos--"those who disappeared," most either kidnaped or liquidated in the Argentine military's harsh, four-year-long antiterrorism drive. As such, Perez Esquivel is an avowed nonviolent foe of the ruling junta in Buenos Aires. As a result of last week's Nobel honors, he is now, irony of ironies, on the payroll of a government he has long opposed. Under an obscure law passed in 1977, probably in the belief that the country's greatest author, Jorge Luis Borges, might win the Nobel Prize for Literature, any living Argentine laureate receives the salary of a supreme court justice, or about $5,000 a month, in addition to the cash award given by the Nobel Foundation. Last week, to the public displeasure of the junta, Perez Esquivel was named the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Peace.

The Peace Prize committee chose Perez Esquivel from a record list of 71 nominees. Although virtually unknown outside human rights circles, he edged out such candidates as President Jimmy Carter (for his Camp David efforts), British Foreign Minister Lord Carrington and Zimbabwe Prime Minister Robert Mugabe (for their successful endeavor to end the war in Rhodesia), Swedish Disarmament Activist Alva Myrdal and Pope John Paul II. Perez Esquivel, said 1976 Peace Laureate Betty Williams of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement, is "the greatest living radical pacifist leader." Noted the Nobel committee: "He is among those Argentines who have shone a light in the darkness. He champions a solution that dispenses with the use of violence. The views he represents carry a vital message to many other countries, not least in Latin America."

The message Perez Esquivel preaches is simple. A devout Roman Catholic, a sculptor and onetime professor of art and art history, he gave up his academic career in 1974 to found and head Argentina's Servicio Pazy Justicia (Peace and Justice Service). The group is dedicated to human rights throughout Latin America and to what Pe>ez Esquivel describes as "both spiritual and moral support, and practical aid for those who suffer." Specifically, that means organizing help for the needy in the continent's sprawling slums and its impoverished countryside. A disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, Perez Esquivel also formed groups dedicated to nonviolent social change. The distinction was too subtle for the military government in Argentina. In 1977 he was arrested, tortured and held in custody for 14 months without ever being charged.

Though Perez Esquivel is only the second Argentine ever to win the Peace Prize (the first was Foreign Minister Saavedra Lamas in 1936 for having settled the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay), the reaction of the junta was singularly graceless. Claiming that the award had "taken the country by surprise," the military leadership charged that Perez Esquivel's activities "were effectively used, regardless of his intentions, to make the movement of various terrorist organizations easier."

Perez Esquivel emulated last year's Peace Prize winner, India's Mother Teresa, by declaring that he was accepting only on behalf of "the people of Latin America, particularly the most poor, the most humble, the Indians, peasants and workers." Asked whether his award would affect the way in which his country is ruled, he replied: "I don't know." Others were less pessimistic. "It will restrain those who brutalize, and end indifference," said Jose Westerkamp, a fellow Argentine civil rights activist. Added Robert Cox, the British-born former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, who is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard: "Here is an ordinary person showing that one man can do an enormous amount. It's like David being equipped with armor, not just a slingshot. This is one of the few cases of the meek inheriting the earth."

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