“Obscurity exists we can heal it with plants, with stones and with certain rituals also, where always the patient becomes involved, participating in his own way of healing.”

State University of Morelos

Dr. Ornelas is currently the assistant to the President of the State University of Morelos, Mexico (UAEM). His beginnings were not so auspicious, as he grew up as a semi-orphan on Mexico’s streets before being sponsored by a priest who ran a private school he had started. In the weeks leading up to the Mexico Olympics in 1968, students at universities in Mexico City, including a young Arturo Ornelas, gathered to protest conditions and to demand more say in the choice of the board of governors.
On the night of October 2, 1968, a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded, as Army and police forces seized surviving protesters and dragged them away.

Thirty years later, the Tlatelolco massacre has grown large in Mexican memory, and lingers still. It is Mexico’s Tiananmen Square, Mexico’s Kent State: when the pact between the government and the people began to come apart and Mexico’s extended political crisis began.

Arturo was forced to flee into exile, and after some years, found himself in Geneva, where he met and studied with Paolo Freire. Eventually he received a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters of Education, a Masters of Economics and a Ph.D. He gained his first field experience working for Freire in Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Sao Tome.

He returned to Mexico early in the 1980s and determined to re-Mexicanize himself by living with the campesinos in communities near Tepotzlan, Mexico and working on community development projects.

Arturo believes in linking the Ivory Tower to the realities of the community, and to this end has worked especially hard to make the Faculty of Nursing oriented towards community health. Through building connections to rural Mexico, the university students are able to learn about their own culture at the village level. They learn about alternative medicines and develop strong relationships with their clients.

As well, Arturo’s home, once relatively isolated on top of a hill in Cuernavaca, is now a learning classroom for approximately 200 people who come every weekend to learn to grow and prepare alternative medicines, under the tutelage of a curandero, or local healer. Participants can receive certification for their work, and the program teaches them to be scientific about the efficacy of these remedies, many of which have been passed down from the Aztecs.