Compassion & Choices Latino Leadership Council members reached millions of Spanish speakers through interviews broadcast on Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States.

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, an Emmy-award-winning journalist dubbed the “Latino Walter Cronkite” and voice of more than 11.6 million Latino people in the U.S., interviewed Reverend Dr. Ignacio Castuera for Al Punto (To the Point) to discuss the importance of medical aid in dying among Latino and Hispanic communities.

Rev. Castuera spoke about medical aid in dying, the compassionate end-of-life option for terminally ill adults who want to die peacefully, not painfully.

“The person’s desire to die with dignity is key to that act, and then the doctors simply help the person to facilitate that step.” Reflecting on his experience as a religious leader, he explained, “God made us in his image and likeness; that means he gave us the authority to make decisions and to accept the result of those decisions. When one sees the unnecessary suffering of so many people, as I have through these 50 years of ministry, one wonders, ‘Does God really want these people to be suffering?’”*

Journalists from Univision’s primetime show Aqui y Ahora‘ (Here and Now) also interviewed Latino Leadership Council members Nilsa Centeno and Irisaida ‘Isa’ Méndez, as well as Compassion & Choices Senior National Latino Media Director Patricia A. González-Portillo.

Centeno recalled the tragic death of her only son, 35-year-old Miguel Carrasquillo. Miguel was realizing his dream working as a chef in Chicago, Illinois, when doctors diagnosed him with an aggressive and deadly brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme. He underwent agonizingly painful treatments to try to cure the cancer, but it continued to spread throughout his body. As a result, he moved back to his native Puerto Rico so Centeno could help provide him with end-of-life care.

“It was really painful to watch how his life was fading progressively without energy, not even to laugh. He was forgetting everything; all of these things affect you. It’s painful daily to see this deterioration on a 35-year-old man,”* she said.

Miguel died on June 5, 2016, but not the way he so desperately wanted: peacefully and without suffering. In the Aqui y Ahora interview, Centeno shared how this experience with her son led her to become an advocate for medical aid in dying:

“I have a really tough internal fight, really tough, because medical aid in dying was something new for me, and I have to tell you that Miguel taught me … that everything was progressing every day, and he told me that he didn’t want for me to be consumed like this, that I would be gone as well, and I told him if that’s your will, then let’s really be the voice, to create conscience about what really is to die with complete dignity, because that’s what this is about.”*

Fellow Latino Leadership Council member Isa Mendez spoke about living with Stage 4 uterine cancer and the difficulty of discussing medical aid in dying with her husband, a physician in Florida.

“He had a lot of conflicts when we were talking about medical aid in dying because his instinct is to save your life, and eventually he understood that being bedridden, tied to five machines, the only thing left is suffering, and that’s not quality of life,” she said. “The first time I heard that there was an organization that fought for these rights, what I said was, ‘finally someone is making sense with what I have on my mind and what I thought.’”*

The interview also included a conversation with Patricia A. González-Portillo, who helped explain the mission of Compassion & Choices.

“We want medical aid in dying to be an option in the whole country so people are not forced to think, ‘I have to move to another location to access it’,” said González-Portillo. “These individuals are really fragile … at the end of their days, and they do not have time … or the physical strength to move.”*

We are very grateful to all of our Latino Leadership Council members for participating in these Univision interviews and raising awareness about the full range of options at the end of life.

*Translated from Spanish to English

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