Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, chief counsel for strategic litigation at the National Movement for Victims of Multinational Corporations in Colombia, discusses the impacts of multinational corporations on Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and Campesino communities and the tactics employed by those communities to confront corporations. Jorge Alvis, a graduate student at CUNY Graduate Center’s Latin-American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Ph.D program, presides.

Ramirez is a labor and human rights lawyer and has led cases against various extractive and agro-industrial companies for committing crimes of war and crimes against humanity. These corporations are being tried in the United States and in the United Kingdom and after years of litigation will soon be tried under Universal Jurisdiction. He co-authored The Profits of Extermination: Big Mining in Colombia with Aviva Chomsky. Alvis is the co-chair of the Colombian Studies Group at CUNY Graduate Center which is a chartered organization that promotes interdisciplinary debates in the U.S. regarding Colombian-American affairs through cultural promotion, academic collaboration, and civic education.

The Sorensen Center’s “Critical Voices: From Local to Global” speaker series features extraordinary leaders from around the world discussing groundbreaking issues.

Co-sponsors for this discussion include: Environmental Justice Coalition, International Law Society, Labor Coalition, Latin American Law Students Association, Law Review, and National Lawyers Guild