Medea Benjamin, a powerful and charismatic force in human rights activism, has struggled for social justice in Asia, Africa and the Americas for over 20 years. She is the Founding Director of the human rights organization Global Exchange.
Benjamin is a leading activist in the peace movement in the United States and helped bring together the groups forming the coalition United for Peace and Justice. She is also the co-founder of Code Pink: Women for Peace, a women's group that has been organizing against the war in Iraq and pushing for a reorientation of budget priorities in the US to focus on heath care, education and housing, not war. In February 2003, Benjamin visited Iraq and met with weapon's inspectors, women's groups and ordinary Iraqi civilians.
In January of 2002, Benjamin accompanied four Americans who lost loved ones in the September 11th terrorist attacks on a trip to Afghanistan to meet people there who lost relatives during the US bombing. She also led a women's delegation to Afghanistan and Pakistan in November of 2001 to investigate the humanitarian situation among the refugee population, to assess the consequences of US bombing and to hear from Afghan women's groups.
Benjamin's previous work has focused on improving the labor and environmental practices of US multinational corporations, and the policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She also ran for the U.S. Senate on the Green Party ticket, mobilizing thousands of Californians around platform issues such as living wage, schools-not-prisons, and universal healthcare.
She is the author of numerous books. Prior to founding Global Exchange in 1988, Medea worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the Swedish International Development Agency, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy.
