María del Pilar Callizo López Moreira - Paraguay
Linked with Transparency International TI.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
María del Pilar Callizo López Moreira–“Pili”–comes from a very traditional family from Paraguay. She had a happy childhood, without any kind of deprivation or needs. This situation, however, did not prevent her from feeling the need to contribute to the construction of a better country, championing the cause of women and encouraging them to take on a leading role … (1000PeaceWomen).
She says: “When I was 14 years old, I acquired the consciousness that no power should snatch from human beings their most valuable possession: freedom”.
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María del Pilar Callizo López Moreira - Paraguay
She works for Transparency International, Paraguay, (see also Transparency International TI).
“The fact that something or somebody out there felt superior and was denying me my freedom and my rights helped me to see the reality. From that moment on, I knew that, as a woman, my duty was to do something to change that state of affairs. I also realized that to achieve my goal, I would have to take down many barriers. It was a challenge, and I began at home”, remembers María Del Pilar Callizo López Moreira, Pili.
“The first thing I did was study. In 1978, I got my degree in Law. Later on, I specialized in arbitration and mediation, in Buenos Aires, Argentina”. The first step had been taken. The next step was to put into practice her new knowledge and make use of her ideas and observations.
She comes from a solid family nucleus. She grew up in a happy environment, absorbing the values of her family. She transformed those values into a need to collaborate to the promotion of human rights. She also championed women’s rights and worked to promote greater transparency and efficiency in public life.
In 1986, along with a group of women, she founded, in Asunción, the capital of the country, “Mujeres por la Democracia” (Women for Democracy), one of the first organizations to fight for the improvement of the situation of women in Paraguayan society. She worked to examine and revise the judicial framework that maintained her fellow countrywomen in an inferior position, without even the most basic human rights. “These were the times of one of the cruelest and longest dictatorships in Latin America, and it was not easy to talk about gender, when we could not even speak of human rights”.
Pilar remembers that the meetings where strategies were outlined were clandestine: “Once, during the Paraguayan dictatorship, public demonstrations were forbidden and the people, who dared to participate, were victims of repression, imprisonment, torture and, in the majority of cases, went on to swell the lists of the ‘missing’ or murdered people. We knew that we were under observation. In our phone calls, we used nicknames and diminutives. Some documents about legal revisions were kept under conditions of extreme secrecy, because they were the fruit of constant discussions with other similar groups. Those times before democracy were especially hard”.
