El veintinueve de abril/April 29th

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¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Leopoldo López! (1971-      )

López in July of 2017 greeting supporters outside his house.
Photo from The New York Times. Click HERE.
A politician and activist in Venezuela currently under house arrest for "arson and conspiracy" related to the February 2014 protests he called for (opposition leaders say the charges are fabricated and politically motivated), he co-founded the political party Primero Justicia in 2000 and was elected mayor of the Chacao municipality of Caracas in July of that year. In 2009 he founded another political party, Voluntad Popular, for which he is the National Coordinator. He can be seen in this video from 2014 giving a rousing speech to his supporters, and saying goodbye to his wife, Lilian, before being taken away to Ramo Verde prison (the two have been married since 2007 and have three children together). International human rights  groups have called for his release, calling him a political prisoner. López, who attended The Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey, Kenyon College in Ohio, and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government after that, has won numerous awards from NGOs and other organizations for his activism. He is depicted as Venezuela's potential savior in this 2018 New York Times article, though this article in The Nation (from July 2015) casts doubt on that. López is from a prominent Venezuelan family, including the country's first president, Cristobál Mendoza. As he told the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin ten years ago, "I was born with a lot of privilege in a country with a lot of inequality" (click HERE for full profile). RELATED: See the video op-ed Fighting Venezuela's Repression With My Violin from The New York Times, HERE.

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.


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