After being born and raised in a family with plenty of love and values, having an impeccable education, and being successful as an athlete, artist and later through an almost 40-year career in the Oil and Gas business until reaching a top senior executive position, Jorge Toledo lived an unimaginable experience of being taken as a hostage by a criminal State. The base case in this kind of situation is death or coming back to society as a burden, mentally and physically sick. Regardless, Toledo returned stronger than ever as a better man than before.
On October 1st, 2022, after his release and during the flight back home, Toledo felt like waking up from a terrible nightmare. Then, he asked himself the following question, “If I survived this brutal, extreme, and atrocious experience because of a reason, and I considered my reason as the mission to tell my story.”
After his release from captivity, Toledo is actively speaking in public to use his survival as a living experience to help and motivate others. Toledo is aiming to become a global professional speaker using his life experience to advocate for respect for the dignity of life and fundamental human rights, raising awareness and reaching a permanent solution about Hostage Diplomacy as a crime against humanity, as well as transforming challenges and adversity into growth opportunities by extracting the internal potential we have as humans.
From a broader perspective, the problem Toledo intends to solve is how to cope, survive adversity, and extract value from it. The value proposition of Toledo’s message is to approach change and challenges in life to transform them into opportunities.
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The Activist
After his release from captivity, Toledo is actively speaking in public to use his survival as a living experience to help and motivate others, advocate for hostages and political prisoners, as well as raise his voice to create awareness of a new threat to the civilized world, Hostage Diplomacy.
Hostage Diplomacy is the taking of hostages under the guise of law for use as foreign policy leverage and international coercion. A State perpetrates abductions using the State architecture (legal system, law enforcement institutions, prisons, media, attorneys, etc.) to commit the crime. Hostage Diplomacy follows a business model that operates in a “global-thinking-local-doing” fashion by autocratic and hostile regimes. It is myopic to expect that a reactive, short-term approach will deter Hostage Diplomacy; the only short-term solution is to prioritize life and bring the hostage home.
In 2023, Toledo met multiple times with members of the U.S. Congress, Department of State, Department of Justice, the White House, Non-Government Organizations, Hostage Organizations, and Media to advocate for Hostages and their Families and other Political Prisoners. Using his perspective as a victim of Hostage Diplomacy, Toledo is trying to promote a sustainable solution to deter hostile States from the Hostage-Taking practice.
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