Bogotá – On 8 September, Aid Workers’ Day was celebrated in Spain, an initiative promoted by Spanish Cooperation to recognize the work of professionals committed to promoting the rights and dignity of every person through development and humanitarian action projects in the world’s most vulnerable areas.
According to data from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation for 2025, more than 2,300 Spanish men and women are engaged in this sector outside the country. Among them is Manuel Gutiérrez Chaparro, a Caritas Spain aid worker in Colombia and Venezuela, who this year marks twenty years of service in international cooperation. His testimony was shared with Fides by Caritas Spain on the occasion of the Day.
Caritas aid workers work alongside local organizations and communities in contexts marked by poverty, conflict, displacement or emergencies. Their work combines project management with a presence in the field, listening and the strengthening of local capacities. The aim is not to replace those who are rooted in the local context, but to accompany processes in which communities themselves are the protagonists.
For Manuel, this understanding of cooperation began to take shape during his first experiences. After studying Pedagogy, he spent a period volunteering at a school in Nicaragua and, in 2005, began working with Caritas Spain. There, he gained experience in the development and management of cooperation projects, embarking on a journey that would subsequently take him to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Colombia.
It was Colombia that became a decisive point of reference in his journey. “I arrived almost by chance, for a two-year project, and discovered that this was my place in the world.” Since then, he has worked in areas marked by inequality, forced displacement and armed conflict, including Chocó, in the northern part of the Pacific region, one of the most difficult areas of the country to reach.
“For me, being an aid worker is not simply a profession: it is a way of being in the world,” he says. Working alongside displaced indigenous communities that have been able to return to their territories, he has encountered stories of people committed to building a dignified life despite adversity. “I have seen it also in women who, after years of silence, have taken the lead in community processes and become points of reference for change.”
These experiences have profoundly shaped his understanding of cooperation. Accompaniment, Manuel observes, must help communities become protagonists of their own processes, while avoiding the creation of dependency. The task of cooperation, he explains, “is to accompany them, strengthen their capacities and make resources and knowledge available to them”. It is not a question of replacing those who live in the territory: the people who inhabit it are the ones who know its needs and who will remain there even when a project comes to an end or the aid worker returns to his own country.
Today, his work may take him from a meeting in Bogotá with the teams of Caritas Colombia to a boat journey along the Pacific coast, or to Venezuela to meet local communities and teams. “Every context has its own history, its own suffering and also its own forms of resilience,” he explains. It is a job that requires caution, an understanding of each particular reality and close coordination with local organizations. In such situations, Manuel has often had to recognize how limited the possibilities for response can be in the face of such vast needs.
In Venezuela, he also experienced one of the most difficult moments of his career: the humanitarian response to the consequences of the earthquakes that struck the country in June 2026. He accompanied Caritas Venezuela and diocesan teams in addressing the most urgent needs related to food, water, health, shelter and protection.
And while an important part of his daily work is devoted to management, projects, coordination and institutional relations, all of this, he notes, would have no meaning without the people behind it. “What I like most is working with people,” he says. Listening, understanding and accompanying make it possible to discover, behind every intervention, the concrete stories of families and communities facing difficult circumstances.
After twenty years, he sums up much of what he has learned in one phrase: “Be close, listen before proposing, accompany without replacing.”
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