ARGENTINIAN WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Author: Associated Press

Date: Tuesday, October 14, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

The 48-year-old sculptor and architect was honored for having "shone a light in the darkness" of Argentina during a period of leftist terrorism and right-wing government repression, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

Perez Esquivel, who heads an organization called Peace and Justice Service, was chosen over 70 other nominees, including President Jimmy Carter, Pope John Paul II, and two of the negotiators of the Rhodesian peace - the British foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, and Zimbabwe Prime Minister Robert
Mugabe.

The prize carries a stipend of 880,000 Swedish kronor, equivalent to $212,000.

The winner told reporters in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that the prize "does not belong to one person" but to all in his Latin American rights movement. He said it would stimulate him to continue working in search of a "change in society that will allow man to live with more dignity."

Perez Esquivel described himself as a worker for "liberating evangelism" and nonviolent social change, adding he hoped the prize would "stimulate those working for these causes in Latin America."

"I haven't got over the surprise," Perez Esquivel said.

"There are many people more worthy of the peace prize. I accept it in the name of the poor, of the peasants and workers who suffer injustices and for the religious who work on their behalf. These are the winners of the prize."

It was the third time in six years that an individual or group devoted to human rights work had won the peace prize, one of five annual awards established by the will of the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel. The others were Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1975 and the prisoners-rights organization Amnesty International in 1977.

Last year's peace prize went to a Roman Catholic missionary, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, India.

Perez Esquivel was nominated by the 1976 peace prize winners, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams of the Peace People movement in Northern Ireland.

Another Peace People leader, Ciaran McKeown, described him yesterday as "a contemporary Gandhi or Martin Luther King - extremely uncompromising and nonviolent."

Perez Esquivel's activism was born in Argentina's mounting political violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was based on his own Roman Catholicism and on Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence.

In 1973, he founded the Ecumenical Movement of Peace and Justice, made up of Catholics, Protestants and others opposed to the violent confrontation between left- and right-wing political forces in Argentina. A year later, he became secretary general of the Peace and Justice Service, a Buenos Aires- based network of human rights activists throughout Latin America.

The right-wing military seized power in Argentina in 1976, sharply curtailed political activity and launched a campaign that eventually crushed the militant leftist opposition.

Human rights groups estimate that between 5000 and 15,000 Argentines vanished during the 1970s, and believe many of the missing were abducted and killed by military or police forces. Hundreds of political prisoners remain in Argentine prisons.

Perez Esquivel, in particular, took up the cause of the "desaparecidos," the disappeared, and their families. His organization also supported nonviolent demonstrations in Brazil, Paraguay, Ecuador and other military- ruled Latin American nations.

In April 1977, he approached Argentine authorities for a passport to attend a human rights conference in Europe and was arrested without charge. The arrest drew protests from Amnesty International and other supporters in Argentina and abroad, and he was released in June 1978, having spent much of his imprisonment in solitary confinement.

He remained under house arrest until last spring.

Prof. John Sannes, chairman of the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee, said Perez Esquivel "is among those Argentinians who have shone a light in the darkness.

"He champions a solution of Argentina's grievous problems that dispenses with the use of violence, and is the spokesman of a revival of respect for human rights," Sannes said, reading the formal committee announcement.

The committee noted that Perez Esquivel's organization works closely with Roman Catholic clergy who have become a major force for reform in Latin America. The organization has helped rural laborers to obtain land and trade unions to protect workers' rights, chiefly through legal assistance.

Perez Esquivel, whose sculptures have been widely displayed in Argentine museums and galleries, gave up his position as a professor of architecture in Buenos Aires to devote his energies fulltime to human rights work.

His wife is a musician and composer. They have three children.

He is the second Argentine to win the peace prize. The late Foreign Minister Carlos Saavedra Lamas won the 1936 prize for his efforts in ending a Paraguay-Bolivia war.

The 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded last Thursday to Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, a naturalized American citizen, and the prize in medicine-physiology was awarded Friday to three genetic scientists - Venezuelan-born Baruj Benacerraf and George D. Snell, both Americans, and Jean Dausset of France.

The chemistry and physics prizes will be announced today, and the prize for economics tomorrow.

Four of the prizes are awarded by Swedish academies, but Nobel stipulated in his will that the peace prize be presented by a committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The economics prize was established later by Sweden's central bank.

AA0686;10/13,18:44 CORCOR;10/15,13 B07982143