AMY GOODMAN: This is Free Speech Radio, as we break the sound barrier. I’m Amy Goodman.

While the world looks east to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, many atrocities in other places are being overlooked. In Mexico, internationally renowned human rights attorney Digna Ochoa y Plácido was assassinated in her office on Friday. Ochoa represented some of the most difficult and politically charged human rights cases in Mexico, many involving torture or murder by Mexico’s military and security forces. She represented the widows of the Aguas Blancas massacre, the campesino ecologists of Guerrero and, most recently, the Cerezo brothers, who are accused of setting bombs in front of Citibank offices. A co-worker discovered the body in her office with gunshots to her head.

We’re joined on the telephone now by Ariel Dorfman, who is a Chilean American writer, professor at Duke University and author of a number of books, plays, short stories, including Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark. His latest, Blake’s Therapy.

Welcome to The War and Peace Report.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Hello, Amy. I’m glad to be able to speak about Digna on this program.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Now, you — your play dealt with Digna. In fact, you incorporated her own words into it.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Exactly. I’m going to be reading from that just to explain to our listeners what this is. This is a play which is based upon interviews done by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who went around the world, you know, collecting these stories in the own words of the people. They were long, long interviews. I worked them over with some of the people, like Digna herself, and created a play out of this, which was opened at the Kennedy Center, where there were people such as Kevin Kline, John Malkovich, Sigourney Weaver, Alec Baldwin. And Alfre Woodard did the voice and the life of Digna Ochoa on stage. And this is, in fact — the play doesn’t quite open with her, but it’s the first long monologue, in which I sort of ground the whole idea of the defense of human rights in this very small, frail, incredibly energetic and courageous woman who had been threatened with death. I’m going to read this, and I think it’s the best possible introduction in homage to her, and then we can talk a bit more about my relationship with her and what this means in relation especially to Mexico and human rights everywhere.

So, she says, “My name is Digna Ochoa. I am a nun who started life as a lawyer. My father was a union leader in Veracruz, Mexico. In the sugar factory where he worked, he was involved in the struggles for running water, roads, and securing land certificates. I studied law because I was always hearing that my father and his friends needed more lawyers, and all the lawyers charged so much.

“My father was unjustly jailed for one year and 15 days. He was then disappeared, desaperecido, and tortured. The charges against him were fabricated. This led to my determination to do something for those suffering injustice, because I saw it in the flesh with my father.

“The first case I worked on was against judicial police officers who had been involved in the illegal detention and torture of several peasants. First, telephone messages came telling me to drop the case. Then, by mail, threats that if I didn’t drop it, I would die, or members of my family would be killed. I kept working, and we even publicly reported what was happening. Then I was disappeared and held incommunicado for eight days by the police.

“They wanted me to give them all the evidence against them. I had hidden the case file well, not in my office, not in my house and not where the victims lived, because I was afraid the police would steal it. Now I felt in the flesh what my father had felt, what other people had suffered.

“Later, when I managed to escape from the torture house where they were holding me, I started to work with Centro Pro. Since then, I’ve handled a lot of cases, people like my father and people like me.

“I’ve always felt anger at the suffering of others. For me, anger is energy. It’s a force. If an act of injustice doesn’t provoke anger in me, it could be seen as indifference, passivity. It’s injustice that motivates us to do something, to take risks. But if we don’t, things will remain the same.

“Anger has made us confront police and soldiers. Something that I discovered is that the police and soldiers are used to their superiors shouting at them, and used to being mistreated. So, when they run into a woman, otherwise seeming insignificant to them, who dresses monk-like and demands things of them and shouts at them in an authoritarian way, they are paralyzed.

“One time, we filed a habeas corpus on behalf of a man who had been disappeared for 20 days. The authorities denied having him in custody and denied us access to the state hospital, where we knew he was being held. I spent a whole morning studying the comings and goings at the hospital to see how I could get in. During a change in shifts, I slipped in. When I got to the door of the room where this person was, the nurse at the door told me I couldn’t go in. I told her that I would take care of myself. All I asked was that if they did something to me, she should call a certain number. I gave her my card.

“I took a deep breath, opened the door violently and yelled at the federal judicial police officers inside. I told them they had to leave immediately, because I was this person’s lawyer, I needed to speak with him. They didn’t know how to react, so they left.

“I had two minutes, but it was enough to explain who I was, that I had been in touch with his wife, and to get him to sign a piece of paper proving that he was in the hospital. He signed.

“By then, the police came back. Fierce, they were. They tried to grab me to get me out of there. They didn’t expect me to assume an attack position — the only position in karate I knew from movies, I suppose. Of course, I don’t really know karate, but they thought I was going to attack. Trembling inside, I said that if they laid a hand on me, they’d see what would happen. And they drew back, saying, ’You’re threatening us!’ And I said, 'Take it any way you want.'”

Now, that was Digna Ochoa.

AMY GOODMAN: Ariel Dorfman, reading from his play the words of Digna Ochoa, who was assassinated last Friday, a human rights activist in Mexico. In our last minutes, Ariel Dorfman, can you put her death in a larger picture, if this is possible, of what is taking place now in the war on Afghanistan or the attention that we’re not paying to what is south of the border and what is happening there, though fast track is certainly being pushed through quick enough?

ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, let’s — let’s very clearly look at the fact that the world of the last 10 to 15 years has been filled with all sorts of people with terrible, tremendous and absolutely justified grievances. These people rise up. They rise up against censorship. They rise up for freedom, for liberty, for all the things that supposedly we are defending around the world, but, in fact, very often we don’t. But that’s the crux of the matter. In Mexico, that has particularly been the case. There has been a real flowering, blossoming of human rights movements all over, all over Mexico and all over Latin America, everywhere.

Now, the central issue is: Who defends those people once they are repressed by the police? And it is generally lawyers or human rights defenders. And of that group, Digna Ochoa was the most prominent. She is perhaps one of the most prominent human rights lawyers in the whole world, not only in Mexico. So, when she is threatened, as she has been during the last few years, what we are seeing is an attempt to stop those who defend all those around the world who are looking for a more just society, who are, in fact, fighting the consequences of corporate globalization, as opposed to human and humanitarian globalization, which I certainly agree with, you know. And she’s part of that human rights movement, which is part of a global movement that addresses all of this.

So, I think, this is my impression, that one of the things that has happened is because the U.S. is in Afghanistan and it needs all its allies behind it, they are going to turn a blind eye to all the abuses of authority that are happening. One of the basic problems here is that the Fox government came in promising to stop these abuses, to investigate all these people. Instead, what has happened is the most prominent human rights lawyer of Mexico has been assassinated. And, of course, this is intimidating to everybody in Latin America and everybody in Mexico, as well. Therefore, it would seem to me to be a good moment in which President Bush could call his friend Vicente Fox and say, “I want the murderers of Digna Ochoa put on trial.”

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Ariel Dorfman, writer, playwright. Thank you. And that does it for today’s program. Democracy Now! in Exile produced by Kris Abrams, Brad Simpson, Miranda Kennedy. Anthony Sloan, our technical director. Errol Maitland at the helm at WBIX.org. At the top of the program, I reported that one of the board members, Pete Bramson, said the chair of the board, Bob Farrell, had called him to say that Bessie Wash, the executive director, had been fired. Now, apparently, another board member, the vice chair, has gone on WBAI’s air and said that Bessie Wash has not been fired. We are following the story, and we’ll keep you updated. We are broadcasting just blocks from the World Trade Center towers, where they once stood. In exile from the embattled studios of WBAI, from the studios of the banned and the fired, the studios of our listeners, I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.

[End of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From Ground Zero Radio, this is Democracy Now! in Exile.

FARID ESACK: And terrified as I am of Muslim fundamentalists, as a Muslim, I must also say that I’m equally terrified of the fundamentalism of the market.

AMY GOODMAN: Today on The War and Peace Report, an hour with Farid Esack, a leading Muslim liberation theologian. He’s from South Africa, a former fighter with the African National Congress.

All that and more, coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now! in Exile. This is The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The United Nations and humanitarian organizations are urging the U.S. to stop using the devastating anti-personnel cluster bombs it’s been dropping on the Afghan capital of Kabul. Taliban spokespeople say U.S. bombing killed at least 36 people in two villages near the western city of Herat. U.S. jets also hit a bus in Kandahar this morning, killing at least 10 civilians. The U.N. is estimating that a million people have fled their homes because of U.S. bombing, emptying major cities as refugees mass at the borders.

And the Bush administration is turning to the Advertising Council, a New York-based nonprofit that develops advertising strategies for national causes about crafting a public diplomacy campaign on the war in Afghanistan. Overseeing the talks are Charlotte Beers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and a former J. Walter Thompson advertising exec who started in the industry marketing Uncle Ben’s rice.

The Washington Post reports today a chemical additive in anthrax spores mailed to the Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle involves sophisticated technology thought to be available in only three countries, including the United States. Federal officials now appear to be looking more closely at the possibility that the attacks are the work of right-wing groups here in the United States.