Minutes - January 29, 2009

January 29, 2009 - Student Ambassadors for Human Rights Meeting
Minutes recorded by Erinn

Dr. O’s welcome:
- UNESCO Chair regards us as a group of very special students

Student Visibility on campus:
- Abena, Hanna*, Jason, Erinn, Rafael and Pronoma expressed interest in having a subcommittee led by Dan that would focus on getting our name out there. The committee would email each other, possibly meet a few minutes earlier, etc.
-Possibly design a new poster to advertise SAHRs

Promises:
-look into showing it at the Dodd Center on a Thursday around 7:00 possibly during the last week in March and the first two weeks of April, the best week is probably the first in April
-everyone should watch the movie by next week’s meeting

New Meeting Times:
-meetings will now be 5:00-7:00pm every week with dinner

February 6th, 2009 Justice Albie Sachs of South Africa will be giving a presentation on The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa at 6:00pm in Cambridge at Harvard University- there will be a survey sent out to see who wants to go

Rafa’s Topic: “Two Sides of a Border: One Violent, One Peaceful.”
Article from The New York Times by James C. McKinley.Published: January 22, 2009. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/23elpaso.html?scp=1&sq=%93Two%20Sides%20of%20a%20Border:%20One%20Violent,%20One%20Peaceful%94%20&st=cse

-Drug trafficking violence is much stronger on the Mexican side of the border, most likely because Mexico is very militaristically trying to crack down on drug dealing
-There is a big power vacuum in Latin America about who is going to control the drug trafficking industry because the demand is still very high but there was a huge crack down on drug trafficking in Colombia and the Caribbean so a lot of drugs started being brought through Mexico.
-In the North it is like a war zone with innocent people dying. People trying to help, like aid workers from the Red Cross, are being attacked.
-Links between this situation and what’s happening in Afghanistan with opium – farmers switching from growing food crops to drugs. Rafa makes the point that what needs to be addressed is educating people in the U.S.A., Europe, etc. that the drugs they’re using have these other negative effects on the people that are being basically forced to supply the drug to them.