Salons

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke, Harvard-educated economist, environmental activist, author, hemp Farmer, grandmother, and a two-time former Green Party Vice President candidate with Ralph Nader. LaDuke specializes in rural development, economic, food, and energy sovereignty and environmental justice. Living and working on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, she co-founded Honor the Earth with The Indigo Girls 28 years ago, and has since founded Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute, Akiing, and Winona’s Hemp. These organizations develop and model cultural-based sustainable development strategies utilizing renewable energy and sustainable food systems.

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Jennifer Harbury

Jennifer K. Harbury is an activist, attorney and author, born on Oct. 27, 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Asian Studies in 1974, and the Harvard Law School with J.D. in 1978. After passing the Bar exam she then began to work as a staff attorney in the Migrant Farmworker Division of Texas Rural Legal Aid, Inc., near the Texas/Mexico border. Her priorities were labor rights and civil rights, including minimum wage violations, discrimination, denials of emergency medical care by public hospitals, and police brutality.

In 1985 and 1986 Mr. Harbury travelled to Guatemala to monitor and report on the ongoing and massive human rights violations being carried out by the Guatemalan military there, including a campaign of village-to-village massacres in the Mayan highlands.

In 1992 her husband, a Mayan resistance leader named Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was captured and secretly detained and tortured by the Guatemalan intelligence division. Ms. Harbury carried out three dangerous hunger strikes, two in Guatemala and one in Washington D.C. in an attempt to save his life. During her 1994 hungers strike of 32 days in Guatemala, Mike Wallace of “Sixty Minutes” disclosed that the Embassy had known from the beginning that the military had taken Mr. Bamaca alive and that he was being tortured for his information. After her hunger strike in D.C. in 1995 a United States Congressman confirmed that Mr. Bamaca had been tortured and extrajudicially executed by a number of intelligence officers, some of whom were paid CIA informants.

In 1998 the case of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez v. Guatemala went to a full civil international trial at the Inter American Court on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. The Court issued an iconic ruling against the State of Guatemala in the year 2000.

Since that time, Ms. Harbury has continued to work to promote human rights in Guatemala, and has also continued her work as a human rights lawyer at the Texas Mexico border. In 2018 she retired and formed the Angry Tias and Abuelas network, which is dedicated to the humanitarian assistance of migrants arriving in Tamaulipas, Mexico or now facing abuse in the United States, Publications: Bridge of Courage, Common Courage Press, 1993; Searching for Everardo, Warner Books,1997; Truth Torture and the American Way, Beacon Press 2005.