Interviews with Constâncio Pinto

During that time, we were able to coordinate the protest. We had to organize a protest we had in 1991, which unfortunately took place at the cemetery. And followed by a massacre, which is horrible for me and for everyone else. We lost, at that time, more than 200 students, killed in cold blood.

But I think only that massacre that brought the attention of the international community. And that was because for the first time, a journalist who was there, there at the cemetery, filming the massacre, and was able to smuggle the tape abroad, the images aboard, and broadcasted it from U.K.

Then the international community became aware of the situation in Timor Leste, and became to understand that what the Indonesians had been telling them was not true. Yeah. And I think that was the beginning of the end of the Indonesian diplomacy. And, I should say also, the occupation.

Constâncio Pinto is the ambassador of East Timor to the United States. Still a child when the Indonesian military occupied the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, he fled to the mountains with his parents. The family remained in hiding for several years before returning to Dili, the capital, where Pinto attended high school and college. While still in school, Pinto became a leader of the underground movement for self-determination. In 1991 he was arrested, detained, and tortured for several days. The military authorities released him on the condition that he serve as an informant, but instead he escaped from Timor and eventually from Indonesia. After his escape, Ambassador Pinto studied at Brown University and served as the Timorese self-determination movement’s representative in the United States. He developed close working relationships with members of Congress and other U.S. human rights advocates and, when Timor achieved independence in 2002, he became a diplomat. He was appointed ambassador in 2009.