Father Javier Avila is a Jesuit Father who lives in the Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico, since 1975 and continues to live to this day. Co-founder of the Commission for Solidarity and Defence of Human Rights, A.C.Promoted and assisted in the integration of a horizontal dialogue table of the Inter-Institutional Program of Attention to the Indigenous (PIAI), the only one in the country; where civil society and the federal and state governments established a dialogue to address issues related to the interests of the indigenous peoples of Chihuahua.
In 1989 he founded with Bishop José Alberto Llaguno, the Commission for Solidarity and Defence of Human Rights, A.C. (COSYDDHAC), the first institution of its kind in the country, whose trajectory and work in favor of the defence, education and dissemination of human rights is widely recognised zed in Mexico and abroad. He has been a person sensitive to inequality and the need that exists in the Sierra, but at the same time he has known the Raramuri culture in depth, which has allowed him to understand its worldview.
"The problem, not only here in Mexico but in the world, is that we impose a neoliberal economic project to a humanitarian project" Padre Javier Avila
Javier Avila is part of the Documentary 'In Defence of Our Lands about land and environmental rights campaigners in Latin America.