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It is for me an honor to present this award that carries the name of Graciela Fernández Meijide, someone who is already part of the moral and ethical heritage of all Argentinians. What I'm gonna do here isn’t a reading of her biography, or her extensive trajectory through the public life of our country because everyone here knows her immense contribution, not only to the cause of human rights, but also to our democracy. Because Graciela has always been and is where her voice has been required, paying attention to the continuous transformations and calamities of this world.
¿Why has Graciela stood out from all of us? For so many things. Among others, for never having made instrumental use of the cause of human rights, for never having acted in their defense by putting any partisan vocation first, understanding that human rights transcend, and should transcend, the pettiness with which they are so often exploited.
Graciela hasn't folded in the face of any demand in a strident manner. She has, indeed, but always in a firm and emphatic way, which is something all along different, recognizing through every step that her truth isn’t the only one, but that the others, those others that don’t think like one does, also deserve to be heard.
Graciela has looked into the yesterday in which her life was covered by duskiness thinking of the possible ways of heeling the wounds, not only her own, but also the social wounds, appealing to ideas that, on so many occasions, came at a high cost to her for voicing them, among them, a critical and reasoned examination of what the violence of the 1970s meant, the violence that gave birth to that Leviathan that devoured the lives of thousands of citizens.
Graciela has poured herself into debates, into discussions, making of those instances truly pedagogical scenes where she has tried to enlighten so many topics. It’s there, in that gentle and kind way where she irradiates her best magister, the one that tries to make human rights a collective interest and not the property of only one group or a tribe.
Graciela is a bearer of the most beautiful civic virtues, those that embody the values of dialogue, justice, responsibility, tolerance and the relentless search for justice.
Finally, Graciela was born in the thirties, during the months that followed the first military coup that interrupted the democratic life in our country, and arrives, now almost a hundred years old, in the present day, still active and willing to take part in
the most pressing debates of the contemporary scene, with her eyes wide open during a time where what seemed inconceivable peeks around us with its charge of violence and resentment that unloads over the bodies of the dispossessed, the humble, over all those who resist, as best they can, being stripped away from their dignity.
For CADAL, it is truly an honor that this award carries her name because her name situates this recognition within the arc of a life , in this case, a life of someone, who destiny, God, chance, or whatever you want to call it, had the grace of placing, for our joy, close to us.
For all of this, thank you Graciela for everything that you do.
Thank you and a thousand times thank you, for the immensity of your legacy!
