Aaron McCarroll Gallegos manages social media for the United Church of Canada and was a founding member of D.C. Barrios Unidos, a gang intervention group.
Posts By This Author
Wise, gentle, and tough as nails
Rev. Daughtry's reflections on his ministry to Tupac Shakur show us the patience and tolerance for ambiguity required in the task of ministering to those wrapped up in what some call the "thug life."
Sri Lankan Excommunicated
Catholic theologian and priest Tissa Balasuriya was excommunicated for heresy from the Roman Catholic Church in January.
Briefly Noted
Sue Bailey Thurman, 93, died on Christmas day 1996 in San Francisco.
Set the Captives Free
While many people of conscience in the United States are aware of the plight of political prisoners in countries around the world, Americans rarely hear about those locked up in
It's a Small World After All
The National Labor Committee, the group that linked Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing line with sweatshops, is now looking into Disney's production of children's clothing in a Burmese assembly plant.
Sister Dianna Ortiz
Dianna Ortiz, the Ursuline nun who vigiled and fasted in front of the White House for six weeks last spring to pressure the government to release the identity of her torturers...
Headwaters Forest Alliance
An interfaith alliance of religious activists—including Christians, Jews, and Buddhists—has joined other environmentalists...
Briefly Noted
Seventy-five years after its creation, a statue of suffragists Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton will at long last join the all-male statuary of the U.S. Capitol Rotunda...
Bernardin's Most Important Year
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, has announced that the cancer he was treated for in June 1995 has returned.
Manual for Horror
The Pentagon snuck out an admission that the students at the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, once used manuals advocating torture, assassination, and kidnapping as t
Beyond the Test Ban
Some are calling it "a pivotal moment." Others have labeled it "flawed and dangerous."
Stopping Genocide
If no man is an island, as the adage goes, then no nation is either. Even while Indonesia and most of the rest of the world remain in denial, books like Matthew Jardine's East Timor: Genocide in Paradise continue to connect the atrocities committed in that small corner of Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.
The dearth of media coverage in the 21 years since Indonesia invaded and occupied East Timor—during which time more than 200,000 East Timorese died—makes it necessary for activists continually to educate the public about the basics regarding the region. With less than 100 pages and an introduction by well-known intellectual Noam Chomsky, East Timor was written to be widely read and to keep the East Timorese struggle for survival from falling off the screen of peace and justice activists.
Jardine manages, in a few pages, to offer a fairly thorough history of East Timor (though perhaps skipping a little too quickly through the murky period between the end of Portuguese colonization and the Indonesian invasion, when competing political factions in East Timor fought a brief civil war). He stresses that the ongoing genocide of the East Timorese would not be possible without the acquiesence of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Australia, Japan, Canada, and Great Britain.
The United States provided Indonesia with 90 percent of the arms used in the initial invasion in 1975—the same weapons that killed 60,000 East Timorese in the first two months. In 1977, after two years of slaughter threatened to deplete Indonesia's arsenal, Jimmy Carter's "human rights" administration authorized a 2,000 percent increase in commercial U.S. arms sales to the country, allowing the killings to peak in 1978.
Democracy Efforts for China
Chinese pro-democracy activist Harry Wu led 1,000 protestors to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to kick off Amnesty International's Annual General Meeting in June.
International Human Rights Law Group Awards
British Parliament member John Hume received the International Human Rights Award this spring for his nonviolent reconciliation work in Northern Ireland. Awards were also gi
Peace and Dignity
Margarito and Maria Esquino, refugees in Washington, D.C., received death threats this spring that they suspect came from members of El Salvador’s ruling ARENA party.