52 years old, born in Colombia, resident of Colombia and Canada, physician and surgeon, spending ... more

52 years old, born in Colombia, resident of Colombia and Canada, physician and surgeon, spending most of my time with the Communication Network (Tejido de Comunicación) of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca. Also member of the advisory comité for the Hemispheric Social Alliance, Pueblos en Camino and Mingas-FTA. Elected member of the National Directorate of Polo Democrático Alternativo, a Left oposition democratic party in Colombia. Associate professor at Community Economic and Social Development at Algoma University in Ontario Canada, for the last 4 years. Courses on transnacional corporate power, propaganda and persuasion and the death of mother Earth and challenges for social movements and communities. Political activist since the early 70s. Joined youth leftist political organizations from highschool and later at the University. Simultaneously, lead cultural groups and Co-directed a Journal for 5 years as a medical student, dealing with politics, social issues and cultural expressions. Forced into exile un Canada four times, always returned to Colombia. Member of International democratic left Networks for public health and health education in the 1980s and 1990s, including the promotion of an indigenous health initiative for the Americas developed by indigenous elders from the Continent (SAPIA Initiative), tabled and turned resolution of the World Health Organization. Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign and other solidarity initiatives in support of social movements and organizations as subjects of social transformation and resistance. For the last 7 years, focused my efforts from within the indigenous movement in Cauca, Colombia, leading to the Minga (collective action) for resistance against the economic model of transnational capital and its strategies of terror, propaganda and policy, while helping to weave a popular agenda for a National peaceful uprising. Founding member of the Tejido de Comunicaciones y Relaciones Externas of ACIN, a Communications network recognized as the best alternative media in Colombia. I have joined efforts of Recalca, the National Network against free trade and the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Helped to established the Mingas-FTA network, a growing Group of academics, activists and leaders throughout Colombia, Canada and the US, facing the free trade model. Pueblos en Camino, a collective born out of the Canada-Colombia Solidarity Campaign mobilizes its resources and efforts facing the free trade model. Based on the strength of the indigenous movement in Northern Cauca and the Minga, or collective mobilization now in progress, my priority is to help weave National and Continental efforts to understand and confront free trade, mobilize and support alternative weaving within and between social movements and processes. In my perception the evolving economic crisis, the ecologic crisis and disaster and the crisis of social and natural reproduction, caused by Capital and its transnational corporate Project will lead to increased exclusión, dispossession and mobilization. Simultaneously, these crises have been pushing the dispossessed in Latin America to take back territories, develop alternative social relations, organizations and economies. In the case of indigenous peoples from Chiapas to Bolivia and Chile, an alternative paradigm based on ancestral principles is being transformed into practice. There is a displacement, an ongoing motion from within those expelled by the system, attempting to construct new societies, viable alternatives within a falling system. My expectation is to learn from different voices and experiences and contribute to the consolidation and weaving of these processes, that can and must replace capital with a multiplicity of weaved and diverse alternatives. less