PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Dr. Jasmin Hristov
Dr. Jasmin Hristov
Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Guelph Institute of Development Studies (GIDS).
University of Guelph, 50 Stone Rd E Guelph, ON | N1G 2W1
[email protected] Canada Tel: +1 416-876 3997
(2019). Armed Actors, the Commodification of Women and the Destruction of Childhood: Understanding the Connections between Predatory Sexuality and the Violence of Capital in Colombia. In Cohn, S. and Blumberg, R. (Eds.), Gender and Development: Economic Basis of Women’s Power. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. https://www.sagepub.com/hi/nam/gender-and-development/book258472
Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of Capital Accumulation in Colombia and Beyond (Pluto Press 2014) https://www.plutobooks.com/9781786801050/paramilitarism-and-neoliberalism/
Blood and Capital: the Paramilitarization of Colombia (Ohio University Press 2009) https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Blood+and+Capital
COLLABORATORS
Dina Meza, Honduras
Dina Mesa is a Honduran journalist, human rights defender and a founder of the NGO Association for Democracy and Human Rights (ASOPODEHU) which supports and defends the rights of journalists, indigenous people, women, LGTBI people and other disenfranchised groups in Honduras. She is the creator of the alternative media outlet Paso de Animal Grande (http://www.pasosdeanimalgrande.com/index.php/en/ ) where news on human rights violations and attacks on freedom of expression are documented. Dina is the recipient of various journalism awards including Amnesty International’s Journalism Under Threat and Oxfam’s Freedom of Expression Award (2014). Presently Dina and Jasmin have formed a partnership to create a Human Rights Monitor of Honduras which will integrate academic and community research expertise to systematically document the prevalence, patterns, and impacts of human rights violations in Honduras.
Karina Guardado, El Salvador
Karina Guardado holds an MA in Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics and is presently a PhD Candidate in Education, at the National University of El Salvador. She is the Head of Information Technology and Communications and is also a Consultant for the Distance Education Project at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, in partnership with the Organization of Ibero-American States (OIS), Office of Human Rights Education.
DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER
Benjamin Cornejo
Benjamin Cornejo has more than 20 years of experience as Project Manager. In his early carrier, he was the IT Director at El Salvador’s Ministry of Finance for eight years. Later on, he coordinated international projects in Latin America and Canada related to information technology, education and, human rights. Benjamin also has significant experience in areas such as strategic and operative planning, marketing & commercialization, knowledge management, financial management for projects, report writing, business management, monitoring and evaluation and audiovisual production.
Benjamin has a B.A. in Electrical Engineering from El Salvador, graduate diplomas in Spatial Analysis and Geographical Information Systems from Ryerson University as well as Research Commercialization and Innovation diploma from George Brown College in Canada. He also studied film production. In November 2012 Benjamin was awarded two Peter Gerretsen awards for film editing from Ryerson. In March 2013 TVO selected one of his videos among the best five in the contest “Poverty in 5”, and in 2015 one of his short videos was finalist in the EXPO 2015 in Milano, Italy. He has produced more than 20 short documentaries focused on cultural and social issues.
From 2015 to 2019, he was coordinating the implementation of an On-line Public University education project in El Salvador.
More recently, Benjamin graduated in 2021 from a Master’s Degree in Youth Violence Prevention Policies and Peace Culture in El Salvador.
Hi currently works as a filmmaker and a research assistant for the project Violence and Land Dispossession in Central America and Mexico.
Email: [email protected]
RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
Paula Jimenez Argumosa, University of Toronto
Paula is an MA Candidate in Applied Sociology in the Complutense University in Madrid, Spain. She holds an Honours BA from the University of Toronto specializing in sociology and commerce.
Pursuing her passion in political sociology, social movements and feminism, she has worked with multiple grassroots initiatives, such as Visualizing Palestine, Feminicidio.net (the only organization in Spain that collects data on gender violence and femicides) and the Acampada Feminista Sol 2018 (a feminist camp in the center of Madrid that served as a platform for survivors of gender violence). In 2017 she did independent research in Mexico and established contact with a movement of forcibly displaced rural families in Chiapas, which subsequently formed part of the project Violence and Land Dispossession. Her contributions to this project have included academic and non-academic literature reviews, transcription of interviews, photography, as well as Spanish-English translation and subtitles for the documentary in progress.
Paula is also the project coordinator of the Human Rights Monitor of Honduras, headed by Jasmin Hristov (UBC) and Dina Meza of the Association for Democracy and Human Rights in Honduras (ASOPODEHU). This partnership integrates academic and community research expertise and employs participatory research methodology to compile a data base of human rights violations in Honduras from 2009-2019. Paula has been a co-leader in the creation of the database.
University of Toronto, email: [email protected]
Robert MacDonald, UBC Okanagan
Robert MacDonald is an International Relations student at the University of British Colombia, Okanagan Campus. His studies focus on International Development, Languages, and Technology. He has researched security and violence in Latin America and is a member of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS). His contribution to this project has been a hybrid-task of research assistance and website development.
email: [email protected]
Carlos Ogaz, CIESAS, Mexico
Carlos is a Mexican sociologist with an MA in Political Sociology from the Research Institute Dr. Jose Maria Luis Mora in Mexico City. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Southeast Branch, Mexico. Carlos specializes in the study social movements and organizations. His dissertation focuses on the intersection between violence and forced displacement in Chiapas.
Carlos’ responsibilities in the project involve interviewing, documentary photography and interview transcription.
CIESAS, Chiapas, Mexico, email: [email protected]
Jamie Arnett
Jamie is a MA student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program, Global Studies theme, under the supervision of Dr. Jasmin Hristov. She is interested in discourses surrounding the normalization and rationalization of human rights violations generated by resource extraction, land dispossession, and environmental degradation. For the project Violence and Land Dispossession, she compiled a data inventory of Canadian corporations implicated in human rights issues in Honduras. She has also assisted with documentary sub-titles and is currently the editing coordinator for the edited volume The Political Violence of Capital: Paramilitary Formations in Global Perspectives by Jasmin Hristov, Jeb Sprague and Aaron Tauss (forthcoming with Routledge)
Email: [email protected]
Natalia Peñuela, UBC Okanagan
Natalia is a Graduate Student in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies within the theme of Latin American & Iberian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and an International Development diploma from the Okanagan College. Her current research and thesis topic are centered in the situation of Social Leaders and Human Rights Defenders in the context of the Peace Accords in Colombia. Natalia’s research interests include intersectionality, global politics, social justice, development, human rights, transitional politics, historic memory, critical security, Colombia, Latin America, Canada, among others. Natalia’s contributions to the project include the documentation of human rights violations, Spanish/English/Spanish translation and editing, blog’s news monitoring, among other tasks.
Email: [email protected]