From Global Development to Local Service:
Dana Martin ’84 Finds New Purpose Close to Home
For more than three decades, he has built a career spanning law, international development, and regional cooperation across Latin America and the Caribbean
Today, Martin’s work looks very different. Instead of negotiating international financing packages or helping structure regional energy markets, he spends much of his time helping to feed families in South Arlington, Virginia.
Martin’s path toward international development began early. At age 16, he spent a summer in Colombia working on a mass inoculation program, an experience volunteering which he said “totally changed my view of the world.”
He went on to study Latin American Studies and Spanish at the University of Colorado, including a year in Lima, Peru. Aſter additional graduate studies, Martin spent three years living in the highlands of Guatemala working with a Mam-language community in a nonformal adult education program. As the country’s civil war intensified, and Indigenous communities faced escalating repression, he came to believe that meaningful change required action at many levels.
“That’s when I decided to go to law school,” he said. “I wanted to acquire new tools to address at least some of the issues I had seen.”
Martin arrived at AUWCL in 1981 with a dean’s scholarship from then-Dean Thomas Buergenthal. At the same time, he worked at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), monitoring the human rights situation in Guatemala and briefing members of Congress and policymakers. Balancing law school, work, and family was demanding, but Martin found encouragement from faculty, including Buergenthal, and Professors Robert Goldman and Claudio Grossman.
Aſter graduating, Martin accepted a short-term contract with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). It unexpectedly turned into a 30-year career. One of his proudest achievements at the IDB was serving for a decade as legal counsel to the Central American Electrical Interconnection System (SIEPAC).
Top: Martin (second from leſt) and his wife, Leyda Fajardo (far leſt), help distribute food in the community. Bottom leſt: Martin in Guatemala working on the Mayan Writers Project in 1979.
While proud of large-scale projects like SIEPAC, where legal challenges required creative legal solutions and years of negotiations, Martin says the greatest lessons of his international career were oſten intangible. “When committed people from different cultural and professional backgrounds come together with mutual respect, positive outcomes can happen,” he said.
Aſter retiring from the IDB, Martin and his wife, Leyda Fajardo, dedicated more time to community service, beginning with food distribution during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Martin serves as vice president of the board of a volunteer-run food distribution program. Every other week, the program provides food to roughly 400 families. For Martin, the shiſt from global development work to neighborhood service has reinforced an important truth.
“Large-scale initiatives remain essential, but meaningful change can also begin in small, local ways,” he said. “AUWCL showed me how I could eventually do both.” — By Keith Pierce
tinyurl.com/Dana-Martin Read the Full Story
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON COLLEGE OF LAW 39
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