Interviews with Constâncio Pinto

When you are in jail, you begin to understand how difficult it is to be an activist fighting against a foreign occupation. I was kept in jail for only a week, but I felt myself as already there for years. Just to tell you that, give an impression how difficult it was while in jail.

Well, jail is not a paradise. As you know, I was tortured, of course, from the morning I was arrested. And I was arrested about nine o´clock in the morning and then tortured till one in the morning of the next day. And, well, I thought that that was it. That was my life. And during that time under duress, always maintain myself, protect my organization, protect my people, and take responsibility for what I did. So because for me, the resistance does not end with me. It will continue. It ends when Timor Leste became truly an independent country.

Well, first, they beat you, they punch you, they kick you. And do threaten you by killing yourself, killing your families, if you don’t give them information and so on. But some of the other people, they actually were subjected to worse treatment.

For example, electrocution, things like this. Or drowning in the water. There are all kind of things. Pulling out nails and toenails or fingernails. And all these things. Or burned with cigarette butts. I mean, this all is just to extract information.

Well, jail is not a paradise. As you know, I was tortured, of course, from the morning I was arrested. And I was arrested about nine o´clock in the morning and then tortured till one in the morning of the next day. And while I thought that that was it. That was my life. And during that time under duress, always maintain myself, protect my organization, protect my people, and take responsibility for what I did. So because for me, the resistance does not end with me. It will continue. It ends when Timor Leste became truly an independent country.

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.