Guillermo Gaviria Correa (November 27, 1962, Medellín – May 5, 2003) was the state governor of Antioquia, a province of over 6 million people in northwestern Colombia.
In 1994 Gaviria Correa accepted the invitation of Colombian President Ernesto Samper to lead the newly created Institute of National Roads.
[3] As part of his "Congruent Peace Plan", Guillermo Gaviria Correa took inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, and began deploying non-violent actions in the department.
From April 17 to 21, 2002, accompanied by Commissioner Echeverri, Gaviria Correa led a 120-kilometer (85-mile) non-violent march for reconciliation and solidarity with the municipality of Caicedo, a town in western Antioquia that had been besieged by guerrillas and paramilitaries since 1995.
[1] Weeks before his death, Gaviria Correa wrote these lines in his final letter to his father:[4][5] Our task, if we hope for a new Antioquia, is to open the doors to all the possibilities that nonviolence offers and to incorporate them in the different segments of community life – family, education, relationships among people, communities, and nations – overcoming poverty and inequalities to build a new nation based on human principles.
Specific accomplishments cited included extending health coverage to 1.6 million inhabitants, providing new or improved housing for 110,000 low-income families, building schools for 90,000 additional elementary and intermediate students, increasing access to potable water from 24 to 96 municipalities, and a reduction of over 60% in the murder rate during his term.
However, most Colombians attributed this improvement not to nonviolence, but to the opposite: namely, strong military offensives by President Álvaro Uribe against the FARC, paramilitary, and other narco-terrorist groups.
In nominating Gaviria Correa for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize,[8] for instance, nonviolence scholar Glenn D. Paige described him as "a nonviolent political leader whose legacy is no less significant than those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr."[9] According to Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire, "Governor Gaviria’s writings reveal a brave and deeply spiritual man, whose compassionate heart and fine mind were not corrupted by suffering, but deepened to an all-encompassing unconditional love of everyone, including his captors.