Mexico
Benjamín Santamaría Ochoa
Benjamín Santamaría Ochoa is an accomplished writer, poet, actor, teacher
and longstanding activist for the human rights of children. He fled Mexico
in the summer of 2002 after his lawyer was shot to death by assailants who
left a note behind which threatened some colleagues involved with her on
human rights issues. He published two books in Spanish aimed at raising
youth awareness of social justice issues: Don't Forget, Mexico 68, a short
novel on the massacre of students in Mexico, supported by the CIA, and
Colour your Rights (Only For Those Children by Heart), a friendly version of
the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 1997 he was appointed the
first Ombudsman for the children of Durango, north of Mexico.
Street kids gave him the name of The Monkey King while working for them in
Mexico City.
He had lead, presented and directed several Popular Theatre plays for children and youth in the USA and South America. In Canada he presented several versions of the play Acting for a Radical Childhood. He has presented The Sacred Training to Liberate all Desert Roses, a play on human trafficking, workshops, storytelling and lectures in colleges, cultural centres and universities.
Benjamín Santamaría has a youth novel called Tales of the Monkey King, published in Canada by Tundra Books. He is working on several manuscripts for children and young readers: The Forbidden Report of the Children of Durango (based on the report which prompted threats in Durango, turned into a realistic horror novel), The Colour of the Street (a poetic novel that tells the hidden history of the American Continent) and a new version of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, made with stories from all cultures, times and civilizations from around the world. He also wrote an adult poetry booklet called Zen Poetics, and a memoir of his experience as a refugee in Canada.
Currently he is the founder and Executive Director of a non-profit organization called Desert Roses, the aim of which is to raise awareness of human rights issues and to promote self realization among youth and children.
Ari Belathar
Ari Belathar (formerly known as Emma Ari Beltrán) is a Mexican poet and playwright in exile. Between 1994 and 2001 she facilitated creative writing and popular theatre workshops for indigenous women and children throughout Mexico and founded the first Mexican community radio station during the student strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1999. After being kidnapped and tortured by the Mexican National Army in 2001 due to her work as an independent journalist and human rights activist, she escaped to Canada. A participant in Artscape's Gibraltar Point International Artists Residency Program, she has published poetry in literary journals and anthologies around the world. Belathar served as Writer-in-Residence through PEN Canada's Writers in Exile Program at the University of Windsor in 2006, that same year she took part in the Wired Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2009, Brandon University appointed Belathar as the university's first Writer-in-Residence. As a result of this nine-month appointment, Belathar published her first collection of poetry in English, The Cities I Left Behind by Radish Press. In the summer of 2010 Scirocco Drama published The Taxi Project – a collective play about exile, originally produced by PEN Canada and ARC Collective, with Ari Belathar as lead-writer.
