Vera grave the lion heart

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Vera Grabe Loewenherz (born 1951 in Bogotá ) is a Colombian politician , political scientist  and human rights activist . She was one of the founders of Movimiento 19 de Abril , a left-wing guerrilla organization that transformed into a political party in 1990 .

From 1991 to 1994 she was Senator of Colombia, then human rights attaché at the embassy of her country in Spain.

life and work

Vera Grabe Loewenherz is the oldest child of Werner Grabe and Thea Löwenherz, who came to Bogotá from Hamburg at the end of 1950. She has a sister, Helga, who is two years younger than her. Her father worked as a carpenter, her mother later worked at the German embassy in Bogotá. In 1970 Vera Grabe Löwenherz went to Hamburg for a year to study German. It was only during her stay in Germany that she found out that her grandfather, the musician Konrad Löwenherz (1896–1943), had been deported to Auschwitz as a Jew and murdered by the Nazi regime. She returned to Colombia, studied anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and was socially involved in the barrios .

On April 19, 1970 there was a scandal following suspected election fraud. Allegedly the candidate of the left-wing Alianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO) in the presidential election, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla , was manipulated to steal his election victory. It was not until June 1971 that ANAPO officially became a party, and in 1974 Rojas Pinilla became a senator. A split from ANAPO, however, became radicalized, declared the democratic path to have failed and founded the guerrilla group M-19. Vera Loewenherz was one of the founders of the M-19, alongside the leader Jaime Bateman Cayón, an ex- FARC member. Grabe Löwenherz was in a relationship with Batmen Cayón until his death in a plane crash in 1983. The first spectacular action by Group M-19 was the robbery of Simón Bolívar's sword from a museum in Bogotá .

In 1976 she took over her first own command in the M-19, the corrupt unionist José Raquel Mercado was kidnapped, after the government did not respond to the demands of the M-19, he was sentenced to death and killed. In 1978 she did her exam in anthropology while working for the M-19.

Vera Loewenherz went underground and worked in the field of propaganda in particular, was arrested and was imprisoned for a year. Then she went abroad and became a kind of ambassador for the M-19 for their goals in Mexico and Panama. She then returned to the mountains of Colombia, after all, was the only woman in the military high command of the M-19, as Commandante Catalina. In the mid-1980s, she was involved in the first, albeit failed, peace negotiations.

1985 M-19 occupied the Palace of Justice; More than 100 people, including all 35 guerrillas and eleven judges, were shot dead by the military during this action. The M-19 lost popular support and agreed to ceasefire negotiations.

In 1986 their daughter Juanita was born prematurely and was placed in an incubator . Lionheart was only occasionally able to visit the child in disguise. Eventually she gave her daughter into the care of friends. Vera Grabe Loewenherz was significantly involved in the mediation that assured the M-19 members from impunity and enabled them to return from the underground. The peace treaty was signed on March 9, 1990 and the weapons were handed in. Two days later parliamentary elections took place and the now democratic alliance M-19 ran. Vera Grabe Loewenherz was elected as a member of the House of Representatives, as the first and then only female member of parliament in the history of Colombia. She became a member of the Constituent Assembly and was involved in the drafting of Colombia's new constitution, in which the principle of the social rule of law was enshrined and human rights were given central priority. Grabe Loewenherz was a member of parliament for one year, then a senator for three years. She was sent to the Colombian Embassy in Spain as a human rights attachée and during these three years worked on her dissertation Peace as Revolution , in which she dealt with the history of the M-19. In 1998 and 1999 she was director of the NGO Observatorio para la Paz [peace watchers] in Bogotá. Since then she has worked as a lecturer, publicist and peace activist. In 2002, she ran in the presidential elections alongside Luis Eduardo Garzon , who later became mayor of Bogotá, as vice-president. Vera Grabe Loewenherz lives in Bogotá.

She advocates a culture of peace, a new way of thinking and acting. She works at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Her autobiography is entitled The Silence of My Cellos , because, having learned to play the cello from an early age , she could not take the instrument underground with her.

Quote

“Basically, violence is simple: I humiliate you, I deny you or I defeat you, of course that's easy. Recognizing the other, seeing the other is much more complicated. But that is the way we have to go because violence and wars have caused too much damage, especially human damage .... That is no longer the way, that is no longer the way that destroys us ourselves, destroys the world, destroys the environment, destroys other people ... This is not just a task for Colombia ... "

- Vera Grabe Loewenherz : Images of People, March 2020

Fonts

  • Razones de vida. El silencio de mi cello [On the silence of my cello], biography, 2000, 2010
  • Paz en la historia. Colombia 1980-1990. Uniandes, Bogotá 2010. (Thesis, Master of History, Universidad de los Andes , 2010.
  • La paz es más revolucionaria que la guerra M-19. Propuestas de paz y de país. Universida de Granada, Granada 2015. (Dissertation, Universidad de Granada); Digitized ; PDF; 10.72 MB). - Book trade edition: La paz como revolución M-19. Colombia Tallar de Edición Rocca, Bogotá 2017, ISBN 978-958-56157-4-8 .

Contributor:

  • Mauricio García Durán, Vera Grabe Loewenherz, Otty Patiño Hormaza: M-19's journey from armed struggle to democratic politics. Striving to keep the revolution connected to the people. Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-927783-87-4 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yad Vashem has two entries on the person, both accessed on March 29, 2020:
    * CONRAD ISRAEL LOEWENHERZ , based on the Auschwitz death books,
    * CONRAD LOEWENHERZ , based on a message from Irene Wielpütz (Jerusalem), a great niece, from the year 1989.
  2. ↑ Images of man : Peace is more than the silence of weapons - Vera Grabe Loewenherz, former guerrilla fighter and peace activist , interview with Sandra Kreisler , March 29, 2020
  3. ↑ Cultural Broadcasting Archive: SDG 16: PEACE, JUSTICE AND STRONG INSTITUTIONS , Global Dialogues - Women on Air, Orange 94.0 , December 14, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Dig Loewenherz, Vera
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Loewenherz, Vera (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Colombian revolutionary, politician and human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Bogotá