Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno

Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is CEO of RepresentUs. She is an advocate, author, and lawyer with two decades of experience globally and within the US on issues of corruption, authoritarianism, organized crime, and human rights. Maria has held multiple senior positions at Human Rights Watch and served as executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, at the helm of a team running groundbreaking state and national campaigns.

A Peruvian-American, Maria came of age in Peru at a time of internal armed conflict, economic crisis, and then corrupt autocracy. Early in her career, she contributed to the  extradition and trial on charges of corruption and crimes against humanity of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. Her narrative non-fiction book “There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia” (Bold Type Books, Feb. 2017), won the  2018 Juan E. Méndez Human Rights Book Award, and the Spanish translation is on its third  printing. Maria earned her law degree, magna cum laude, from New York University School of Law and served as a judicial clerk on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.