Jaime Prieto Mendez

Jaime Prieto Mendez is a leading figure in the Colombian human rights movement. 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 he was later imprisoned.

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.