SOA

LeAnne Clausen's prison cell: Drawn by LeAnneI just received another set of letters from prison, written by LeAnne Clausen. (Actually, they are e-mails typed up by friends of hers, based on her correspondence from prison, and sent out via a group created on the social networking web site Facebook, but no matter!) LeAnne is one of the 11 peace and justice activists who were arrested last November for "crossing the line" at the School of the Americas Watch in Columbus, GA, at the annual protest there. (She also participated in FOR's December 2007 peace delegation to Iran, and has traveled to Iraq and other countries with groups like the Christian Peacemaker Teams.)

On April 4th, the anniversary of both Dr. King's 1967 "A Time to Break the Silence" speech and his assassination in Memphis one year later, 11 people reported to federal prison for actions taken in the spirit of Dr. King. Last November, in Columbus, Georgia -- a couple hours from the city of Atlanta where King's ministry was centered -- some 20,000 people gathered outside the walls of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation to call for the closure of this infamous facility, known better as the School of the Americas.

Luis Eduardo Guerra at SOA.
Photo by Linda Panetta.On February 21, 2005, eight members of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó were murdered by individuals alleged to be members of the Colombian Army. The group, which included two of the community's leaders, Peace Community co-founder Luis Eduardo Guerra and Alfonso Bolivar, and three children between the ages of 1 and 10, were brutally hacked to death. The brigade accused of killing these innocent civilians was led by a graduate of the U.S. School of the Americas, otherwise known as the Western Hempisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Their murders resonate today in a period of great uncertainty regarding U.S. policy towards Latin America. In a period where U.S. media coverage of the region is dominated by Fidel Castro's resignation as president of Cuba and Hugo Chavez's diatribes against the Bush administration, the anti-Communist paradigm still reigns. The only headline news from Colombia this month has been the mass demonstrations against the FARC leftist rebels, reinforcing that perspective.

A series of emails have come in this week from Fellowship of Reconciliation members across the country regarding various court trials of peace activists. Here follow three examples. First, this Monday, 11 nonviolent activists were sentenced in Georgia for their role in "crossing the line" at the School of the Americas protest last November. Le Anne Clausen -- a member of FOR's December 2007 peace delegation to Iran, and the director of Seminary Action based in Chicago -- was sentenced to 30 days in jail for her participation in the SOA action.

Please visit our SOA section for views and reflections from the annual vigil to close the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia.

The day before traveling to the School of the Americas protest in Ft. Benning, Georgia, I was at the copy shop to pick up the materials that I would take with me for Fellowship of Reconciliation's workshops and tabling efforts over the weekend. The guy behind the counter asked me what my name was. I answered, "Liza." And then he asked, "what does it mean?" After a pause, I said that it comes from the name Elizabeth, and that it was a historical name, and that... my explanation tailed off. He said, "ahhhh... no one knows the meaning of their name these days."

A few days later, after the workshops and tabling, after talking to people from many different parts of the country, after handing out hundreds of pieces of paper to those interested in FOR's work and campaigns, we spent the morning of Sunday, November 18th, hearing names. Name after name after name. Two hours of names. These were the names of those who had been killed in Latin America at the hands of SOA graduates. Thousands of names, spoken, sung and chanted. After every single name, we responded with the simple word in Spanish "presente."

Here are more photos from Sunday's march to close the School of the Americas.

Lerner Mckinney Bourgeois and Kucinich lead the march:

Sunday morning is appropriately more sober and reverential. An estimated 20,00 – 25,000 individuals carry small white crosses in a procession that spreads from the gate into Ft. Benning back to the public access road and forward again, five persons wide to accommodate hundreds of banners representing various groups here in large numbers.

As I enter from the public road, the police are confiscating crosses which don't strictly meet the 18" maximum for the vertical strut. These are later collected and displayed at the head of the road, just as thousands and thousands are inserted in the chain link fence at the gate to the Fort.

Each cross bears the name of a victim of violence in Latin America, derivative or directly related to training presented at the School of Americas (or 35 other U.S. bases where Latin American military leaders are trained). As the procession circulates in front of the main program platform, the names of the dead are intoned and the entire procession responds "Presente". Particularly powerful is the recitation, "unknown child, Choco" repeated perhaps a hundred times to represent a massacre of more than 130 persons.

Being in the midst of a large community of people in a new place leads to a cascade of images and impressions I would not likely experience in a place that was more familiar. This is my first visit to Ft. Benning for the School of Americas Watch Vigil and it is very rich in such images and impressions.

The gathering and demonstration area is a fenced street, Ft. Benning Blvd, about 100 tables long from the last intersection to the official gate of the Fort. It has orange barricades at the public end of the street, eight foot high chain-link fence along both sides of the street, with police men and women outside the fences in clusters and individually for much of its length, and then a layer of three gates and fencing at the entrance to the Fort. The construct is of a cattle shute.

The Puppetista group has been working on a puppet based pageant for the SOA Watch Vigil over the past week. The resulting drama celebrates the life of Companera Rufina Amaya, sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, who passed away this year, through a story of corn as the symbol of Life and Regeneration.