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Carlos Salinas has spent more than three decades fighting for people the world too often forgets.
Whether it be Indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon or Jesuit human rights defenders living in hiding, Salinas has touched these communities through his work and has impacted them for the better. And they, he’ll admit, did the same for him.
As the founder and Executive Director of Healing Bridges, a nonprofit working alongside the Kofan indigenous people of Putumayo, Colombia, Salinas brought his lifetime of experience to Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), speaking to our Master of Social Work (MSW) students in their first-year course, Integrating Human Rights and Justice in Practice, taught by GSS Associate Professor and BASW Program Director Gregory Acevedo, PhD.
“Existence Is an Act of Resistance”
Salinas opened his lecture with a discussion about hope.
He recounted a conversation with Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest he had met in Colombia in 1998, at a time when the priest was in hiding after compiling cases of human rights violations—an act the government considered punishable by death. Years later, the two reconnected, and the priest shared a realization: “Hope” as we know it isn’t necessarily equated with success. It changed Salinas’s thinking forever.
“What he came to was that hope is that which you have when you undertake the right action, with no expectation of success,” Salinas said. “That is what you should be doing.”
This reframing cut to the heart of Salinas’s work. For him, hope is not optimism. It is the insistence on taking the correct action regardless of the outcome. It’s showing up.
“The action has a goodness in and of itself,” he said. “And that’s why I think of just mere existence as hopeful.”
Existence itself can be a form of resistance, which ties to a hope for a better future, Salinas said. Even mere thoughts can be just as powerful.
“Just the insistence that, you know what, I’m not going to buy into this … just having that thought in and of itself is an act of resistance.”
Ten Years at Amnesty, and What Came After
Salinas spent a decade at Amnesty International USA, serving as the principal advocate for Latin America and the Caribbean. Those years gave him a recognized platform and a network to create change on Capitol Hill. They also taught him sobering lessons in the mechanics of power.
“Your credibility and advocacy are your only currency unless you’re playing the money game,” he said. “In which case, all these rules don’t apply.”
Salinas spoke about one of his signature achievements from that period: the Leahy Law, a landmark piece of legislation that bars U.S. military assistance to foreign military units implicated in human rights violations unless those responsible are meaningfully prosecuted.
“We cooked it up thinking about Colombia and other places,” he said.
The law came together through a combination of grassroots constituent pressure—Amnesty members showing up unannounced to a Georgia lawmaker’s town hall outside Savannah—and insider access to Senator Leahy’s office. The law was crafted in collaboration with Congressman Esteban Torres of California.
“And it all started because we said, ‘Hey, are you aware of that?’” Salinas said.
But Salinas was equally candid about the limits of insider access. Using the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a counterpoint, he reminded students that even the best relationships cannot guarantee outcomes when political will is absent.
“The insider game is not enough.”
“The Nice Bulldog”: A Framework for Advocacy
Salinas turned his advocacy philosophy into a memorable mnemonic: the nice bulldog briefly spoon feeds precisely.
Nice
Courtesy is a non-negotiable if you want to get things done.
“You never want to give somebody an excuse not to listen to you,” he said. “You don’t want to give someone a reason to slam their door. To publicly express anger is a major, major faux pas.”
Salinas illustrated the point with a story from 2006, when he expressed anger during a meeting with the Siona people in Colombia. The result: He ate his lunch on the floor alone. Nobody saved him a seat. The lesson stuck.
Bulldog
Persistence is everything. When you have an idea, no amount of rejection, uncertainty, or doubt from others should make you fold.
“When Phoebe writes her letter to AOC [U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] or whomever,” Salinas said, pointing out a student in the class, “she does not let go of her question. Never, ever lets go of the question.”
The bulldog is the only one who can decide when they let go.
Briefly
Decision-makers are time-crunched. You must get your point across quickly once you have them in the room.
Salinas recalled being scolded by Ambassador Harriet “Hattie” Babbitt for sending her a ten-page memo on human rights priorities in the Inter-American system.
“Carlos, that memo was way too long,” she’d said.
His advice for congressional advocacy comes from the sage words of a previous boss: one page, plenty of white space, no micro-font.
Spoon feeds
Clarity is kindness. Don’t make your audience search for the point. Guide them to it.
“You are making it obvious so they don’t have to think,” he said.
Precisely
Credibility is everything. Speak only facts that can be easily corroborated. If you don’t, people will begin to question you, and that hesitation will mar the moment.
Salinas also cautioned students to avoid what he called “slacktivism,” in which advocates avoid picking up the phone and having direct conversations in favor of messaging platforms designed to hide uncomfortable silences. Online petitions, he argued, have also been largely neutralized.
“Governments know that they get these things and, ‘Oh, okay. Bummer. Done,'” he said.
What still works, he said, is personal, traceable contact.
“A handwritten letter has so much more weight than some online petition,” he said.
Salinas noted that a letter to the editor in a local paper like the Kalamazoo Times can carry as much weight with a local congressional office as an editorial in the New York Times, perhaps more. Constituent voice, when specific and persistent, remains a form of power that policy offices cannot easily dismiss.
Healing Bridges and the Kofan People
After leaving Amnesty in 2001, Salinas founded Healing Bridges, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to work alongside the Kofan (A’i) indigenous people of Putumayo, Colombia.
The organization’s work is built around the traditional ceremonial life of the Kofan, including gatherings over multiple days in which the community’s curacas (shamans), spiritual leaders and Traditional Authorities, lead ceremonies and share their visions. Salinas then translates these reflections into concrete, targeted petitions to the Colombian government.
Healing Bridges then engages external actors, such as the United Nations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the U.S. government, to support those petitions.
Salinas said that the relationships he’d built during his time at Amnesty were instrumental to his early work at Healing Bridges. He mentioned reaching out to Tim Rieser of Senator Leahy’s office, and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the latter of whom called from the Iowa caucus on the night of the 2008 presidential primary (when she was helping run Barack Obama’s campaign) to reach the U.S. Ambassador in Colombia on the community’s behalf.
“Because of the relationship we had built, they knew I could be trusted,” Salinas said. “And they knew if I was calling and asking for help, it was because I really needed help.”
On Gratitude, Knowing Yourself, and Social Justice Advocacy
Throughout the talk, Salinas spoke about the importance of gratitude, tracing it to a ceremony years earlier when he was confronted with the limits of his own knowledge.
“Even if one knows nothing, the one thing that one can always do without error is be grateful,” he said.
Social workers often give much more than they take, and burnout can come quickly. To this, Salinas offered something more personal: advice about self-knowledge and pacing.
“I know that if I’m working at 10 p.m. and I start thinking about the macro, I’m gonna get bummed out real quick,” he said. “But in the morning, I can think cosmologically, and everything’s working out fine.”
Know your cycles, he said. “It’ll save you energy, it’ll save you time, it’ll save you grief.”
Salinas closed with this: A theology professor he knew had quoted an art critic’s vision of the future, that in the year 2300, someone looking back at the 20th century’s great artists might not remember Picasso, but might highlight Martin Luther King.
“Think of your advocacy like that,” Salinas told the room. “Your casework is that—transforming lives.”
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