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Truth Demands Our Attention
Murder, intrigue, corporate greed, climate crisis — it’s all in this remarkable new book
Your young partner is found murdered, his bullet-riddled body abandoned in a Venezuelan cow field? You could be forgiven for falling apart, clamoring for answers and possibly seeking revenge . . . But after a few years, somehow putting your life back together and moving forward, the terrible darkness eventually receded into the past.
Not so Abby Reyes.
Abby was in her early 20s, just before the turn of the last century, when she met Terence Unity Freitas; both were deeply committed to environmental justice and to addressing the critical global crises that existed then and continue today. Terence was making a serious, complicated presentation on the day they met when he stopped, mid-sentence, and asked her for a date that night. Their love story underlies the larger story told in her new book, Truth Demands, and manages to make its unspeakable tragedies somehow more bearable to anyone who has ever loved.
In 1999 Terence was working in the Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia, listening to U’wa community needs and trying to help preserve the centuries-old ways of life that were being imperiled by multinational oil interests. As he and two companions, Ingrid Washinawatok…
