Oscar Soria
| Oscar Soria | |
|---|---|
| Born | Santiago del Estero, Argentina |
| Residence | New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Campaigner, Avaaz Media director, WWF Various roles, Greenpeace News editor, El Liberal Founder and Executive Director, Salus Terrae |
| Employer | Avaaz |
| Board member of | Oxfam GB |
Oscar Soria (born 1974) is an Argentinian political activist, social journalist, and environmental and human rights campaigner, currently serving as senior campaigner in the international activist group Avaaz. Previously he was the global brand director of Greenpeace and afterwards the media director of WWF.
Soria is also part of the directorate of the British section of Oxfam and confidant and close adviser of progressive politicians, social leaders and NGO executives in South America and Asia.
Born in Santiago del Estero in a traditional political family and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he went back to his province in 1984 with his family, during the beginning of the democratic transition in the aftermath of the National Reorganization Process. He led many efforts to promote transitional justice, in particular over forced disappearances and the stolen children during the dictatorship in the country.
Soria started his journalism career in the newspaper El Liberal when he was 14, becoming the youngest journalist in the Argentine media, leading high profile investigative reports on social, environmental and human rights issues. He was known for shifting the rules of covering political campaigns, by refusing visibility to rallies or negative campaigning and organising instead local debates, community forums, off-line civic and open-source journalism formats, focusing the discussions in party platforms rather than candidates.
Since the age of 16, he was involved in neighborhood organizing, youth work in his community, and mass mobilizations against land grabbing.
In 1993 he founded the human rights and environmental justice movement Salus Terrae, which brought youth activists from rural areas and poor neighborhoods with university students and youth groups of the Catholic church. With this group, they campaigned for lands rights and water access, and successfully stopped deforestation and agribusiness plans, nuclear repositories and mass river engineering projects. The group were known by their high profile exposes, denouncing illegal toxic waste and deforestation. During his campaign against the channelization project called "Canal Federal", there were notorious public clashes between Soria and then the governor of Santiago del Estero, Carlos Juárez, the national environmental secretary María Julia Alsogaray and the president of Argentina, Carlos Menem.
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