Yesterday afternoon, Elizabeth Odio offered a passionate talk on human rights in Latin America, within the framework of the Heredia Ciudad Cultural III International Book Fair, which will last until March 19th.
One day, not so distant, she believed that if she changed the law, she would change the world. Then she realized that it wasn’t like that. She is now convinced that only education can produce that other kind of human being who lives and feels that we are all the same.
She did not read a speech or have a presentation. She spoke little of human rights in Latin America and she did not talk about human rights in general. The implacable judge of war crimes focused on her fight: women’s rights.
She made a quick review of her life and how everything started.
At first, as a lawyer, she said:
I realized that women did not have the same rights. It was a time when I believed that if we changed the law we would change the world.
As Minister of Justice, she added:
I got in touch with men and women deprived of their liberty. I had my first contact with women as victims of evil and perversity in Costa Rican prisons. At the same time, Argentine, Chilean, Uruguayan, Salvadoran, Guatemalan migrations started… they fled the horror of the dictatorship.
Then she referred to the work of the United Nations. She recalled how women, victims of violence, arrived without being invited to meetings and conferences to ask for support:
I never forget that contact with human pain. It is always there with me, because now I understand that it is not a question of changing the law. It’s about changing humans!
Another key moment in Elizabeth Odio’s life was the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993:
We already knew that the equality paradigm was not true for women. And they went to Vienna to tell us that they just survived atrocious sexual violence. Those women got so deep in my heart that I cannot just keep talking … I have to report it. I have to work for women , and I have tried to do my best.
she later exclaimed:
We cannot give up. We cannot stop fighting. We have to commit ourselves to creating that new human being that responds to the paradigm that all human beings are born equal.
She was received with applause.