Andrés (Drew) McKinley is a U.S. citizen raised in the picturesque and comfortable New England town of Hingham, Massachusetts. After four years of teaching school in the jungles of northern Liberia, he spent over forty years in Central America working for a variety of international and local organizations on issues related to human rights, social justice and sustainable development. He has resided in El Salvador since 1980 and currently works as an advisor on public policy advocacy and environment at the Jesuit-run Central American University, José Simeón Cañas (UCA).
Charlie is a human rights activist and public health physician. As president of Physicians for Human Rights he attended both the treaty signing in Ottawa and the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies a week later in Oslo for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He has served as executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was an adjunct lecturer in public policy, and a faculty member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Early in his career, Charlie worked as a physician in rural villages during the civil war in El Salvador, an experience recounted in Witness to War (Bantam, 1985). He is cofounder of the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund and Pax Americas, a political action committee. In 1992, he was a special guest at the signing of the peace accords that ended the Salvadoran Civil War. He is currently Professor and Clinical Coordinator of the Joint Physician Assistant and Public Health Program at Touro University California.
Andrés McKinley has penned a beautiful, moving love story - a stunning tribute to his family and country of birth and to his family and country of re-birth. Read it also as a tribute to a generation whose best and brightest members seized the opportunity to be a part of the social justice movements that were unfolding around the world. Theirs was not a journey for fame or for fortune. Baby-boomers, read this book to remember; others, read this to understand not only the sacrifices made but, more importantly, the fulfillment gained. May others follow Andres's path to love, wherever it may take take them. -- Robin Broad (Guggenheim Fellow) and John Cavanagh (director, Institute for Policy Studies), coauthors of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press, 2021). The voice is simple, authentic, articulate, and consistent and coherent throughout. Given the unique and dramatic personal story that Andrés tells, it is actually understated and quiet--restrained intensity is how I might describe it. What really sets it apart, though, is the intimacy, care and respect with which he describes and tells the stories of the Salvadorans with whom he shared life and struggle throughout these years (and for that matter the villagers in Liberia in his early Peace Corps years). ... It is a work of great humility, even as it tells a heroic tale without flinching, and in great detail. Nor is he romantic about the course that the struggle has taken; he is unflinching in that as well, and so leaves history open-ended but blessed with the grace of those who struggle. -- Brian K. Murphy, writer and organizer, former policy analyst at Inter Pares, who writes at MurphysLog.caThis is a very impressive book which tells a truly remarkable personal story, without the story becoming purely personal. In fact, there is a great deal of political history in the book, which I can confirm as I also studied as well as lived through some of the Salvadorean civil war. The truly incredible Salvadorean peasants who stayed in the war zones despite army incursions and US backed aerial bombing, are just as he describes them. They led me also to a lasting respect and love for them, even with- out the long term depth of experience of the author. The way the author brings us so many personal stories is very powerful. We get to know the friends he makes and then to feel as he did, when they lost their loved ones in this horrendous violence un- leashed on the Salvadorean poor and their allies by the Salvadorean wealthy elites, their military and US backers. -- Jenny Pearce, Research Professor, Latin America and Caribbean Centre, London School of Economics.Andrés McKinley's book For the Love of the Struggle is a moving and personal account of his involvement in the fight for justice in El Salvador during the civil war of the 1980s. But more than the events he describes, with great detail and political insight, it is his love for the people of El Salvador that sets this book apart. From working with church related organizations, to joining the guerrillas in the liberated zones, to his work along the communities opposing metallic mining, it is his relation- ship with the people, particularly the humbler ones, which stands out.Most books that deal with the civil war in El Salvador end with the signing of the Peace Accords, which put an end to the armed conflict and laid the foundation for a more democratic and just El Salvador. As important as the Peace Agreements were, they did not solve all the problems and conflicts of the country. When several rural communities were threatened in the early 2000s by the efforts of trans- national gold mining interests, they rose in defense of their rights through social organization and peaceful opposition. In spite of the repression they suffered, after 17 years of struggle they finally prevailed, showing how people united, can bring about change.This belief is particularly important now, at a moment in which our democratic institutions are being threatened precisely by those who should be the first to protect them. It is the role of organized civil society to defend what we have conquered and McKinley's book is an excellent and timely reminder that this is something possible and necessary to achieve.-- Francisco Altschul is a former Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States.
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