Daniel Cooper Bermúdez, UPenn ('15), Founder of Hearts on Venezuela. "Breaking the Status Quo: The Role of Civil Society in Venezuela"

Please join us on November 30 from 4:30-6pm for a talk from Daniel Cooper Bermúdez, University of Pennsylvania ('15) on the role of civil society in Venezuela.

 

Daniel Cooper Bermúdez, a Venezuelan human rights defender, will join us on November 30th to provide unique on-the-ground perspectives on civil society strategies to break the tragic status quo in the country. Since 2016, Venezuela has gone through a complex humanitarian emergency overseen by an indolent authoritarian government. By 2021, poverty rates have risen to 94% and nearly six million people have left the country as migrants and refugees. In the past months, political negotiations between the Maduro government and opposition parties in Mexico have stalled and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced the opening of investigations of crimes against humanity committed in Venezuela. What are civil society's main challenges in 2022? How did Venezuelan civil society assume a more prominent role in the country's public sphere? Is there hope for change in Venezuela in the short-term, the long-term? Join us for this necessary conversation on one of the deepest on-going crises in the world.

 

Daniel Cooper Bermúdez, from Maracaibo, Venezuela, is a human rights defender whose work focuses on network and capacity-building within civil society, collaborating with a diverse ecosystem of human rights, humanitarian, environmentalist, and feminist organizations in the country. Daniel founded Hearts On Venezuela in 2019, an initiative to translate reports by Venezuelan organizations to English to address the lack of information on the situations affecting the population. Daniel studied Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania ('15).