Jaime Prieto Mendez

Jaime Prieto Mendez (born 1 January 1954^[1]) is a Colombian human rights activist. The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights describes him as "internationally regarded as a founder of the modern Colombian human rights movement",^[2] and in 1998 awarded him its Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award along with fellow Colombian activists Berenice Celeyta, Gloria Florez, and Mario Calixto.^[3]

Prieto began his career as a teacher in a poor area of Bogotá. Feeling that lack of "human rights literacy" increased the abuses against the poor, he began a human rights education program for which authorities later imprisoned him. In 1976, he joined the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, and in 1990 he became its executive director, a position he held until 1998. He then took a teaching position at a university in Bogotá.^[2]