Martin Edwin Andersen

Martin Edwin "Mick" Andersen has a long history working with, advocating the rights of, and reporting on Native Americans in the United States and in Central and South America and Mexico. Andersen has worked under the direction of noted cultural anthropologist Henry Farmer Dobyns on tribal development issues on the Kaibab Paiute Indian reservation in Arizona (1975) and was a founding board member of the Amazon Alliance for Indigenous and Traditional Peoples (1993). He covered Indian issues as a reporter in Madison, Wisconsin, and from Washington, D.C., where his Op-Ed submissions have regularly appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times.

In 1981, he was one of the first non-Peruvian journalists to cover the Shining Path insurgency from their mountain stronghold in Ayacucho. Andersen consistently sought to bring indigenous rights issues to the fore at the New York-based human rights group, Freedom House, where he served as senior analyst on Latin America and the Caribbean from 1997 to 2006. He has also twice provided written testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives on indigenous rights issues. In 2009, he served as the lead consultant on native peoples in the Western Hemisphere to the Democracy Project for the Organization of American States (OAS).

As a professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working directly for Senate Majority Whip Alan M. Cranston (D.-Calif.), Andersen was the staff author of a bill, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, that required coverage of the rights of indigenous peoples in the annual State Department country reports on human rights. He has also worked with Indian groups in Guatemala as a consultant for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

In 1995 Andersen produced an on-site study as a consultant in La Paz, Bolivia, for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, which provided for the creation of a rural police force that incorporated that country's indigenous peoples on their own terms, offering them the means and authorities for their physical and juridical security while protecting their lands and natural resources.

Andersen is the author of several scholarly works on Indian issues, both in the United States and in Latin America, including "Chiapas, Indigenous Rights and the Coming Fourth World Revolution," The SAIS Review, (Summer-Fall 1994); "Derecho Consuetudinario Consolidado y Reivindicación Indígena en los Estados Unidos," presented at the Inter-American Development Bank's Foro Nacional de Justicia in Guatemala City, November 1996; "Failing States, Ungoverned Spaces and the Indigenous Challenge in Latin America," in the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies' Security and Defense Studies Review (August 2006), and "Indian Nationalism, Democracy and the Future of the Nation-State in Center and South America," in Richard Millett, et. al, (Eds.), Latin American Democracy: Emerging Reality or Endangered Species (Routledge, 2008).

Two books on Argentine history written by Andersen--La Policia: Pasado, Presente y Propuestas para el Futuro (Sudamericana, 2002) and Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War" (Westview, 1993), received critical acclaim, the latter praised by The New York Times as "a tour de force." During his time as director for Latin American and Caribbean programs at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and the founder of their Civil-Military Project, he was also the editor of Hacía una Nueva Relación: El papel de las Fuerzas Armadas en un Gobierno Democrático (1990), a book used as a civil-military relations primer in several countries in transition to democracy.

A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha, Andersen also holds an M.A. in American history from the Catholic University of America, where he is enrolled in the history department's Ph.D. program, with a proposed dissertation on the role of ethical dissent in U.S. foreign policy. He is a board member of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Ethnic Research (CER) and is vice president of the Midwest Association of Latin American Studies (MALAS).