Laura Salas, Senior Program Manager, Latin America & the Caribbean

Laura leads WITNESS’ work in Latin America and the Caribbean. Under this role over the past decade, she has helped implemented initiatives such as Voices of Women, Caravans of Free and Community Media, the School of Strategic Communication for Land Defense and the School of Communication and Free Technologies for the Collective Defense of Territory, among others. 

She has over twenty years of experience in communication work, especially on community, video and rights process. She has directed over a dozen audiovisual projects with social and human rights themes that have been screened at film festivals in Mexico and internationally. Previously, Laura served as Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Human Rights Commission of Mexico City. She has also worked with various human rights organizations, including the Mexican Commission of Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, the World Association of Community Radios (AMARC) and the Human Rights Center of the Mountain “Tlachinollan”. Laura coordinated the WITNESS and HIC AL (Habitat International Coalition – Latin America) video advocacy initiative in Mexico. She also serves on the Board of La Sandia Digital, a feminist training media and video collective she formally co-founded in 2011. She has been actively involved in several collectives. 

Laura holds a degree in Journalism, with a specialization in human rights and documentary filmmaking, and a Master’s Degree in human rights and democracy from FLACSO (Latin America Faculty of Social Sciences).