Puerto Rican-American Janelle Mendez Viera is a survivor of military sexual violence and founder of the Military Sexual Trauma Movement. Having worked in the elite financial banking system on Wall Street in New York, she has also crafted legislation to benefit veterans who survived military sexual violence and gender discrimination, and today fights modern-day enslavement by launching financial technologies, in a new sector she calls financial defence, to hold the banking system accountable.
“While living in the Dominican Republic and writing the book, ‘The Pathway Towards Peace: US Human Rights Manifesto,’ I started to link almost every human rights abuse I was researching back to American banks. I was able to link modern Haitian enslavement to a sugar plantation in the Dominican Republic owned by a very powerful family in New York,” she told the Stabroek Weekend in an interview from New York.
